Field Of Sociolinguistics Research Articles

Contextualizing The Corpus of Regional African American Language, D.C.:

Washington, D.C., has been home to a majority African American population since the late 1950s, with many in the United States considering D.C. an African American cultural center. At the same time, in the 1960s, it became a key site for foundational studies of African American Language (AAL), spearheaded by researchers from the Center for Applied Linguistics and Georgetown University, as the field of sociolinguistics was in its infancy. This article is composed of two main parts: first, it provides relevant sociocultural and demographic information on the history of African Americans in D.C.; second, this article provides an overview of the history of linguistic research on AAL in D.C. and surrounding areas. Research on D.C. AAL has proceeded steadily, if somewhat sporadically, since the 1950s, with some studies achieving wider circulation than others. This article thus provides relevant linguistic and sociohistorical contextual information for readers interested in learning about D.C. AAL in connection with the introduction of the Corpus of Regional African American Language, whose core component is centered on D.C. AAL.

ЕВОЛЮЦІЯ ЛІНГВОКУЛЬТУРНИХ КОНЦЕПТІВ У НОВОРІЧНИХ ВІТАННЯХ ФРАНЦУЗЬКИХ ПРЕЗИДЕНТІВ: НАЦІОНАЛЬНІ ЦІННОСТІ ЯК ІНСТРУМЕНТ МАНІПУЛЯЦІЙ

The article deals with the search of key linguo-cultural concepts of the French political culture, verbalized in the French Presidents’ of the Fifth Republic New Year’s eve addresses (les Voeux de Nouvel An) from 1960 to 2016. The author analyzes French politicians’ public speech as the mirror im- age of the French core national values. This research summarizes achievements in the field of cultural linguistics, pragmalinguistics and discourse analysis. Moreover, it provides leading modern scientists’ ideas about the genre of the congratulatory speech and its characteristics, highlighting major differ- ences between the congratulatory speech and other speeches. Much attention is given to the notion of “linguo-cultural concept”, defined as a core element of the French language and culture, and to its difference from the notion of “social representation” that is considered to be a basic unit in the field of French sociolinguistics. Applying linguo-cultural approach to the data, gained thanks to the use of the lexicometric software program Tropes, we defined five core linguo-cultural concepts in the New Year’s Eve addresses, namely la France, la Nation, la Liberté, l’Esprit cartésien and la Fraternité as objectively as possible. It is spoken in detail about verbal representations of the mentioned concepts. The author gives also the example of their use in the congratulatory speeches of Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarcozy and François Hollande. The article gives a detailed analysis of the linguo-cultural concept la Fra- ternité and its transformation into the concept la Solidarité. The perspectives of further research are discussed.

A gyermeknyelvkutatás aspektusai Magyarországon. Előszó A gyermeknyelv aspektusai szám elé

A magyarországi gyermeknyelkutatások többféle nyelvészeti és nem nyelvészeti területet érintenek. A Gyermeknevelés folyóirat A gyermeknyelv aspektusai különszáma a szinkrón kutatások közül mutat be néhányat annak jeléül, hogy érzékelhető legyen a problémakör széleskörű beágyazottsága. A folyóirat szerkezetének megfelelően a szám írásai három csoportba rendeződnek: 1. különféle szinkrón kutatásokat bemutató tanulmányok (elsősorban a szociolongvisztika, beszédkutatás, nyelvtanulás-nyelvvizsgáztatás és gyermekirodalom köré szervezve); 2. nyelvfejlesztést bemutató jó gyakorlatokat tartalmazó műhelymunkák (beszédfejlesztés és diszlexiakezelés) és 3. gyermeknyelvet szűkebb és tágabb felfogásban érintő kötetek ismertetései, illetve recenziója.

Youth, language and urban public space

AbstractThis paper presents an interdisciplinary study on the interface between young people, their language use, group belonging and urban space. Relevant literature from the fields of sociolinguistics and urban geography is reviewed and integrated, focusing on language, identity and place. The outcomes are based on on-site interviews and focus group meetings that were used to explore and explain the in-depth meanings of our assumption: language is a situated practice. Participants reported to adjust their language use to place ‘automatically’, indicating the awareness of unwritten norms. Furthermore, being in or out of place and adjustment of language use is merely a function of the presence of other people. It is concluded that the space where young people find themselves is crucial for physical and social distance between the self and others and, therefore, the way language is used.

Fluency in Second Language Testing: Insights From Different Disciplines

ABSTRACTThis article considers the construct of fluency in second language assessment and how it might be informed by research in applied linguistics. It briefly describes the way fluency is conceptualized in four language tests, as embodied in their respective assessment criteria, to show where the field is at present. The article then takes into account recent insights from applied linguistics, and from the fields of psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics. The article questions the current conceptualization of fluency in language testing, in which it is defined as a concept that should be sought in the ear of the beholder, and where disfluency is only seen as a deficit. Future research should focus on finding ways to ensure that the measures used in testing reflect the ability to talk fluently and efficiently, rather than measures that only reflect listeners’ impressions about such ability, and to show that these can be marked appropriately and reliably.

Methodological nationalism in Linguistics

In this article, I discuss methodological nationalism as a bias that has come into being on grounds of the tendency of social sciences, including sociolinguistics and linguistics, to assume national societies to be the ‘normal’ and natural way of human beings creating belonging. After an introduction to the concept of bias, to the concept of methodological nationalism, and to the debate on language as a discursive entity, I discuss various examples from the field of sociolinguistics that display this bias. I end the contribution by asking what the effects of the bias are, introducing examples of language use that do not fit into the framing of methodological nationalism. In the conclusion, I ask to what extent it is possible to overcome the bias.

A Comparative Study of the Kalenjin Dialects

Comparative linguistics is a study which mainly focuses on comparing languages with a view of establishing their relatedness. It is involved in the comparison and classification of languages. As a practice, languages are compared and thereafter grouped according to three different principles: genetic, areal and typological. This study focused on genetic classification of the Kalenjin dialects. The language family is the basic component of genetic classification. A language family therefore, is the set of languages for which it can be proved that they developed from a single ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. Comparative study of the Kalenjin dialects has not been done and this is deduced from existing literature. This necessitated the study to be undertaken to determine the genetic relatedness of the Kalenjin dialects. The study aimed at justifying the mutual intelligibility among the Kalenjin dialects. The proposed study was guided by three objectives: establish whether the Kalenjin dialects are genetically related, reconstruct the pre-history of the Kalenjin dialects and determine the lexical variations of the Kalenjin dialects. The study was guided by the concept of the genetic tree diagram. The study intended to employ qualitative method in which ethnographic design was applicable. The researcher intends to collect open-ended, emerging data with the intent of developing themes from the same. The sample in this study was selected from native speakers of five Kalenjin dialects, who form the target population. The sample size comprised of 150 respondents with each of the Kalenjin dialects represented by 10 subjects. Purposive sampling technique was used in the selection of subjects from each dialect. The main instrument of data collection in this study was tape recording. The comparative method then be involved in data analysis. This study would contribute new knowledge in the fields of sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. The study established that the Kalenjin dialects are genealogically related. This is due to the resemblances of majority of the cognate terms across the dialects which include vocabulary areas involving kinship terms, domestic animals, food stuffs, human anatomy, days of the week, verbs and different times of the day. Based on the study objectives, it was recommended that Study of the individual Kalenjin dialects and a comparative study of other related Kenyan languages should be done. The study suggested that a further study should be done on reconstruction of proto Kalenjin language and a study of language use and gender in the Kalenjin dialects should be done.

El español de América en el paisaje lingüístico genovés. El pretérito perfecto compuesto en las narraciones de estudiantes latinoamericanos

Abstract – The interest in the analysis of the Linguistic Landscape (LL) in the field of sociolinguistics has notably grown since the increase in migratory movements and globalization process. Although works on this subject usually analyze written signs found in urban environments (Franco-Rodriguez 2008, 2009, 2013; Pons Rodriguez 2012; Castillo Lluch, Saez Rivera 2013; Calvi 2015, 2016, 2017; Landone 2015a, 2015b; Uberti Bona 2016; Ariolfo 2017, etc.), in this case we will analyze the spoken use of language in the educational linguistic landscape, specifically addressing the use of the present perfect in interviews with first and second generation students from Latin America living in Genoa and enrolled in its university, thus leading to the emergence of some varieties of Spanish in which the use of past tenses has specific features of its own. This study analyses, on the one hand, the use of present perfect with innovative epistemic values, which have already been studied in certain linguistic contexts (Pfander, Palacios 2013; Palacios Alcaine 2005, 2006, 2007; Bustamante 1991; Henderson 2006; Caravedo, Klee 2012; Jara Yupanqui 2009; Araujo 2014, etc.), and that are not fully recognized in the Nueva Gramatica of the RAE: evidentially and validating values, semantic-pragmatic values (expressivity, emotional intensity or psychological relevance), narrative and discursive values (commentative-narrative, introduction-denouement, direct speech, etc.). On the other hand, this article focuses on in the aoristic use of the present perfect, which may be prompted, in some cases, by linguistic convergence towards their local language.

W is for Wasta: A Grounded Theory for the Relationship Between Language and Culture

In the field of sociolinguistics, the relationship between language and culture has been discussed briefly in larger hypotheses (i.e. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis); however, the relationship (whether language influences culture, culture influences language, or no connection) has never been properly suggested through linguistic research and evidence. This research aimed to develop various grounded theories regarding the relationship between language and culture by analyzing semantic shifts for the Arabic word “wasta” (واسطة) used by Emirates today within the United Arab Emirates. The method utilized an online survey completed in Arabic by fourteen Emirati, native Arabic speakers. Of the fourteen responses, eight showed signs of a semantic shift that was not influenced by culture. As a result, the final grounded theory stated that “language is constantly evolving, but language and culture are not connected and do not influence each other”. This study and its grounded theories are significant to the fields of sociolinguistics and semasiology as it provides a deeper insight into both how languages change over time and what factors do (or in this case, do not) influence them to change. Moving forward, further research should investigate the relationship between language and culture and replicate this study with larger samples and with words that have various meanings in other languages in order to compile more evidence to either support or oppose the final grounded theory.

A Literature Review of Theoretical Anchors and Empirical Studies

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of selected theoretical frameworks and some empirical studies that take up theories on identity, ideology, and language. The researcher attempts to highlight the most important theoretical frameworks on identity, ideologies, and language, and discusses key theoretical frameworks that have had an influence among recent scholars’ empirical work especially in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA), sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. This article has two objectives. First, with a focus on the relationship between language, identity, and investment, the researcher attempts to present a review of Norton’s foundational work dated between 1995 (Peirce, 1995) to a more recent scholarly work (Darvin & Norton, 2015). Next, she discusses identity and interaction from a sociocultural linguistic approach by drawing on Bucholtz and Hall’s framework (2004a, 2004b, 2005). Findings from this article highlight a paradigm shift in the ways the scholarly focus has changed from looking at language solely as an oral and written skill to looking at language from the sociocultural lens and studying how it is embedded in identity production through linguistics interaction. This article concludes with a recommendation for future research on identity and language to respond to the diversity of language practices and aim at connecting language ideologies and identity to enhance our understanding of today’s complex learning communities and globalized world.

Presença do Black English Vernacular na Literatura Afro-Americana

A presente pesquisa discute os aspectos sociolinguísticos do Black English Vernacular presentes na Literatura Africana de Língua Inglesa. Analisamos a variação linguística na língua inglesa e sua tradução para a língua portuguesa. A pesquisa está embasada nos estudos sociolinguísticos de Labov (1972) sobre a variante linguística do Black English Vernacular e nos estudos culturais de Hall (2002) e Bhabha (2007). Foram selecionadas algumas obras literárias a fim de identificarmos a variante linguística do Black English Vernacular. Os resultados apurados apontam para uma necessidade no estudo dessa variante a fim de contribuirmos para a ampliação da área da Sociolinguistica na literatura afro-americana.

Why some behaviors spread while others don’t: A laboratory simulation of dialect contact

The question of how behavioral variants compete and propagate is of primary importance to the study of cultural evolution; with respect to language, it is also an important focus of the field of sociolinguistics. Variant propagation can occur by neutral means—akin to drift in biological evolution—or through selection, whereby individuals are biased in what variants they adopt. An important bias concerns social meaning, and sociolinguistic theory distinguishes between variants that are primarily associated with a particular social group (such as working-class people or Texans) and variants primarily associated with a perceived trait of the group (such as toughness). In the former case, variants are hypothesized to propagate neutrally; in the latter case, provided the trait is socially relevant to adopters, variants are hypothesized to be subject to selection and to propagate more readily. To test this hypothesis we conducted an experimental study in which groups of four participants played a game that involved instant messaging in an artificial “alien language” with two dialects. Each player was assigned to one of two alien species, the weaker Wiwos or the tougher Burls. The social meaning of one feature of the Burl dialect was manipulated, and the results strongly supported the hypothesis: Variants from the Burl dialect were used by Wiwos in all conditions, but when associated primarily with “tougher aliens”, the rate of adoption was significantly greater than when they were associated primarily with “Burls”. When toughness was made irrelevant to the game, the effect of association disappeared, emphasizing the importance of social relevance in the propagation of behavioral variants.

Linguistic Planning and the Status of Official Languages in Kosova During the Years 1999-2009

The issue of linguistic planning, choice of variant for increasing in standard norm, the determination of official status of appropriate language in certain countries, has been a concern, as it was the orientation of different linguistic studies too. In this work we will try to treat the process of linguistic planning and of the official status of languages in Kosova during 1999- 2009. In this context we do not intend to exhaust of handling with this problem, but we will try to present some issues and problems in which languages in Kosova have passed through. This kind of thematic it is an interesting one and as such as it is represents a huge interest for further studies in sociolinguistic field in general and particularly in Albanian language. As such, these linguistic processes were analyzed and studied by Albanian and foreign scholars, like Rexhep Ismajli (Ismajli 2003), Victor A. Friedman (Friedman 2004:197-231), Bahri Beci (Beci 2000) , Gjovalin Shkurtaj( Shkurtaj 2003), JoshuaA. Fishman ( Fishman 2006) ,Tomor Osmani( Osmani& Haxhi 2010), Majlinda Bregasi ( Bregasi 2008) and other researchers, who in their views and evaluations have been very successful and have create opportunities, especially to young researchers, to advance even more these studies.

#JeSuisCharlie? Hashtags as narrative resources in contexts of ecstatic sharing

Uses of hashtags as storytelling devices have received little attention so far in the field of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. This article seeks to fill this gap by providing a narrative-discourse perspective on how hashtags are used as resources for sharing and story making (Androutsopoulos, 2014; Georgakopoulou, 2015a, 2015b, in press), foregrounding narrative asa circulatory drive on social media. The data for analysis are drawn from Twitter and the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the deadly attacks at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo offices on January 7th, 2015. The analysis looks at the emergence and circulation of hashtags #CharlieHebdo and #JeSuisCharlie in their polylingual instantiations. Its findings point to the hashtags’ metalinguistic, metadiscursive and metanarrative functions in relation to positions of narrative stancetaking made available to networked publics. It is argued that hashtag sharing in this case attests to a shift from modes of ecstatic global news reporting and spectatorships of suffering (Chouliaraki, 2006) to modes of ecstatic sharing on social media which create dividing lines of evaluative assessments of the events. The study contributes to the empirical study of hashtagging as social and discourse practice.

MARS OR VENUS? GENDER DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY ON LANGUAGE AND GENDER

The question of how men and women learn and produce a foreign language differently has been a striking area to examine in the fields of Sociolinguistics and ESL. Foreign language teaching should aim at helping both genders acquire and improve skills to produce language effectively rather than merely concentrating on learning target grammar structures and vocabulary. Learning strategies used by male and female learners identify and shape the way they learn and acquire real-life skills. This paper addresses the differences in strategies used by male and female English language learners. The research question I will be discussing and elaborating on will be: How can we help learners succeed language learning process by considering gender differences and how can we raise awareness of these differences in language acquisition in order to plan and design courses to better meet learner needs and interests? In this project, I will be looking at the popular stereotypes and the Women’s Movement starting in the 1970s together with the Feminist Linguistic Activism to reveal and clarify more effective ways to help learners improve language skills. I will also present and discuss Sexism in educational materials and language practices to explore the commonalities across speech communities and to minimize the effects of the differences in language teaching. My research is an empirical research which concentrates on the classroom applications. I hope to help instructors choose non-sexist alternatives to increase the effectiveness of teaching both genders and assist them in designing more effective courses.

New speakers: Challenges and opportunities for variationist sociolinguistics

AbstractWhile the field of variationist sociolinguistics has advanced rapidly since Labov (1966), it remains the case that a socially informed theory of language change continues to be influenced by only very few languages, typically English and a handful other dominant European languages. This article considers recent work on the emergence of new speakers in (severely) endangered or minority language communities, and what they might have to offer variationist theory. Although definitions can vary, it has become convention to describe new speakers as individuals ‘with little or no home or community exposure to a minority language but who instead acquire it through immersion or bilingual education programs, revitalization projects or as adult language learners’ (O'Rourke, Pujolar, & Ramallo, 2015: 1). There is now a wealth of literature available on new speakers in typologically dissimilar language contexts, though, so far, very little work has adopted the variationist paradigm. This article will argue that new speakers can figure prominently in variationist models of diffusion and change, taking the classic sociolinguistic factor of social networks as an example. The article ends by proposing a manifesto of potential research trajectories, based on current gaps in the literature.

What is language for sociolinguists? The variationist, ethnographic, and conversation-analytic ontologies of language

The present investigation explores the language definitions (i. e. the language ontologies) that have emerged in the field of sociolinguistics. In general, it examines three types of sociolin-guistic studies: Labovian sociolinguistics (Labov 1972), the Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz/Hymes 1964) and Conversation Analysis (Sacks 1992). Firstly, it offers an account on the ontology of language developed by Chomskyian linguistics (1986) which is used as a starting point to contrast the three sociolinguistics’ language ontologies. Then, the paper pre-sents Labov’s ontology of language (Labov 1977), the criticism that it has faced and examines proposals that aim to integrate social facts and linguistic structure. With regard to the Ethnog-raphy of Communication, accounts about its ontology of language (Hymes 1974, 1986) and its ontology of culture (Sapir 1921; Hymes 1972) are presented and a possible explanation about the relationship between language and culture is offered. With respect to Conversation Analysis, its ontology of language is presented (Ochs et al. 1996) as well as its analytic in-sight and an account about grammar as an interactional resource is given. The final section proposes that, for these three types of sociolinguistics, “language” is a social, functional and behavioural entity which is socially and behaviourally structured. “Language” transmits social meanings, reflects the social order and expresses the identity of its speakers.

‘Your care and concern are my burden!’

While the enactment of gendered identities has been a key focus in the field of sociolinguistics and im/politeness (e.g. Holmes, 1995; Lakoff, 1975; Mills, 2003), research specifically investigating females’ emic understanding in relation to im/politeness has not been paid much attention. Building on prior work on ‘attentiveness’ (Fukushima, 2004, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015; Fukushima & Haugh, 2014), this article aims to further examine the emic understandings and evaluations of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘empathy’ in relation to ‘im/politeness’ by female speakers of Mandarin Chinese. It is suggested that, although the concepts of attentiveness (zhoudao) and empathy (titie) are intrinsically polite, these two concepts are found to be discursively disputable through the emergence of the three folk notions, meddlesomeness (jipo), familiarity, and reciprocity in the course of metapragmatic interviews. These notions give rise to cultural nuances in the evaluations of im/politeness which are thus grounded in a particular language or culture.

Editorial

It is my pleasure to present the first issue of the third volume of Lifespans & Styles: Undergraduate Working Papers on Intraspeaker Variation . This issue includes five papers on topics about within-speaker variation that are largely under-researched in the field of variationist sociolinguistics.

Translanguaging in Translation: A Case Study of an English Translation of a Hindi Novel “Godaan”

Translanguaging in Translation: A Case Study of an English Translation of a Hindi Novel “Godaan” Eriko Sato, Aruna Sharma Abstract This paper brings together the field of sociolinguistics and the field of translation studies and examines translated texts through the concept of translanguaging. Although occurrences of linguistic features of the source language (SL) are not normally expected in translated texts, translators occasionally push and flout language boundaries for many communicative purposes such as to convey culture-specific pragmatic nuances, to create a new concept in the receiving culture, to implicitly voice their socio-political ideologies, to preserve rhetorical effectiveness, to experiment with new styles and so on. Such a risk-taking, but strategic language use taken right at a linguistic border by translators is doubtlessly translanguaging, and their translanguaging practices have been contributing to the evolution of languages and to the transformation of societies. The current paper examines one of the English translations of Godaan, Premchand’s masterpiece novel written in Hindi and published in 1936. The translation of Godaanby Anurag Yadav published in 2009 has numerous Hindi words scattered around within the English text without glossaries or footnotes. This research examines these Hindi words as well as the socio-cultural, socio-historical and socio-political backgrounds of the novelin order to explore the mechanism and implication of translanguaging in translation. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v5n2a14