Studying Language Variation

Studying Language Variation

• Practical sociolinguistics research involves observing communication in various real-world settings.
• Researchers may enter a speech community to participate in communication or create a controlled experimental environment to generate speech.

Approaches to Sociolinguistics (Chapters 17-20)

• Methodologies are provided to investigate language that is:
  • Already available (Chapter 17)
  • Needs to be elicited (Chapter 18)
  • Naturally occurring (Chapter 19)

Investigating Available Language

• The most ideal language to investigate appears in conversations instigated by speakers themselves.
• Language is based on speakers choosing when, how, and what to speak about without external intervention.
• Ideally, the researcher anonymously registers people in their most uninhibited moments of social interaction using a microphone, camera, and notepad.
• The outcome would be the language of negotiation and apology as well as the language of feelings like joy, anger, and grief, including the language used in diaries and even in the bedroom.
• Ethical issues arise from slipping into private or personal situations uninvited.

Example Methodologies

• Corpus Analysis
• Linguistic Geography
• Time Study
• Historical Sociolinguistics
• Researching Linguistic Landscapes

Corpus Analysis

• Language corpus is a systematically collected, naturally occurring set of texts.
• Language includes originally written texts and transcriptions of spoken language.
• An important goal of corpus research is gaining insight into the absolute and relative frequency of certain items.
• A larger corpus is better, and the more context known about those producing the material, the better.
• It analyses the actual patterns in natural texts,
• Uses many texts,
• Makes use of computer programmes for the analysis,
• Relies on both quantitative and qualitative research techniques.
• To use corpus analysis, researchers must find a corpus with language patterns that answer their research question; a corpus must be representative of the researched population to make generalizations.
• Once data is collected, it is analyzed via computer programs to count words and grammatical constructions.
• Researchers look for patterns, frequencies, and concordances.
• Examle area of study, COVID-related vocabulary, or whether men and women have different writing styles.

Linguistic Landscapes

• Linguistic Landscape refers to language use in public spaces.
• Any language encountered in streets or government buildings is part of the linguistic landscape.
• Commercial and official signs are the main topics of investigation, including shop and road signs, billboards, windows, price tags, and public notices.
• Labels and graffiti can also be studied, alongside mobile signs, pamphlets, flyers, stamps, tickets, bills, banknotes, restaurant menus, and t-shirts.
• Common categories for Linguistic Landscape items include top-down (public) and bottom-up (private) items.
• Linguistics Landscapes are usually interpreted through semiotics, focusing on syntax, semantics, pragmatics and language choice.
• Research interests extend to the material, visual, and spatial properties of objects containing language and the interaction of signs which affects their meaning.
• Gathering perspectives from those who design and encounter the signs helps understand publicly visible language.
• Garvin (2010) proposed steps for data collection in Linguistic Landscape research: selecting research sites and photographing signs.
• Codes are assigned to signs based on language count, type, branch, relationship between languages, dominance, and location domain. The ethnographic part involves participant selection and contacting for individual interviews.
• Field notes are transcribed and analyzed, with possible follow-up meetings to discuss motivations and perceptions using interview questions or Likert scales.
• An example is researching languages used on signs at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Thailand, where the number of signs increased from 401 in 2009 to 914 in 2021 and Chinese saw an increase in signage.

Investigating Elicited Language

• Elicited language helps study how people pronounce sounds, use language correctly, and employ expressions.
• Elicitation is used to study lingusitcally specific speech.
• Speakers should be urged to speak, and the ensuing language organized and studied.

Elicitation Techniques

• Intergenerational Proficiency Description
• Sociolinguistic Interview
• Conversation Analysis
• Discourse Analysis
• Rapid Anonymous Survey

Intergenerational Proficiency Description

• Language and dialect shifts can be tracked over time through generations.
• Minority languages are spoken less well and by fewer people, so dialects become less distinct.
• Declining proficiency can be shown through Intergenerational Proficiency Description
• Researchers find a local contact and native speaker who introduces them to other speakers.
• Speakers from several generations need to participate
• Language-inducing situations should be designed including, language tests, observations of native speakers and interviews.
• An example is the intergenerational transmission of language skill.
• One paper looked at parents' and children's language skills in the UK using the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS).
• The research question was how large are vocabulary gaps according to childhood socioeconomic circumstances, ethnic group, and other factors?
• The APU Vocabulary Test used multiple-choice questions to test vocabulary through synonym matching.
• Large vocabulary gaps exist between education and ethnic groups, but parental vocabulary in offspring is a powerful driver and mediator of vocabularly at 14.

Rapid Anonymous Survey

• The survey elicits short utterances of spontaneous, unmonitored language, reflecting speaker characteristics or the social setting.
• Labov (1966) completed Rapid Anonymous Surveys in New York City.
• This could be used to study social etiquettes or politeness norms in Bahrain by how people answer the phone.
• Rapid Anonymous Surveys elicit short spoken utterances as a reaction to a request.
• Researchers ask a question and know the literal answer.
• Contact with the participant should be quick and minimally intrusive.
• Speakers are unaware that they are being recorded for natural speech.
• Speaker characteristics are assessed by the investigator.
• The speech is uttered in public.
• Adjustments can be used to customize the investigation, such as different intonation patterns or questions with an accent.

Sociolinguistic Interview

• The interview systematically elicits speech in various social contexts to find stylistic patterns and the interviewee’s casual vernacular.
• Speakers' vernacular emerges when relaxed; spontaneous language reveals a local dialect.
• Controlling attention paid to speech helps overcome the Observer's Paradox.
• The interviewee stops producing their natural language when aware they are speaking.
• Language goes from casual to formal depending on degrees of attention paid.
• Four methods of speech elicitation include:
  • Regular interview for casual speech via personal questions
  • Reading passage for a less casual style
  • Reading a word list for a slightly formal style
  • Reading a list of minimal pairs for the most formal style

Conversation Analysis

• This analysis is a method of researching conversation structure and coherence.
• Social interaction involves fixed conversational steps, and a set of turn-taking actions.
• Conversations beyond everyday examples, like conversations between a doctor and a patient or a teacher and pupil, can be interesting.
• Unless recordings are available, researchers try to generate conversations, typically between two people, on a certain topic.
• The use of an audio recorder is typical, without the researchers present.
• The resulting conversations are often video-taped.
• Conversation should be written and interlocuters talks are indicated (with precise timing using a digital clock).
• Interaction patterns should be looked at, such as interruptions, word choice, intonation, codeswitches, silences, and loudness.
• Non-verbal cues are also researchable.
• Researchers can find two bilingual speakers in a bilingual community who tend code switch.
• Record speakers while they chat with each other about random topics for 30 minutes on separate devices.
• Act and talk naturally.
• Do not indicate you are interested in their language use.
• Write out the recording, indicating exactly when each speaker speaks.
• Indicate the moment when each speaker switches languages.
• Determine intonation patterns, silences, if they correlate the switches.
• Define meaningful categories of switches in coordination with someone else.
• Select one switch from each of the switch-type categories formed, present them to the speakers.

Investigating Naturally Occurring Communication

• Ethically and practically, naturally occurring language can be observed and produced, or researchers can immerse themselves in it and become paticipants.
• Language production is observed from a broader viewpoint, taking into account culture, communicative settings and relationships. The research techniques are Ethnographic Fieldwork, Computer-Mediated Communication, Street Use Survey, or Classroom Observation

Computer-Mediated Communication

• CMC, or Computer-Mediated Communication, is language used in digital media like texting, email, social networking, blogs, and gaming platforms.
• Danesi (2016) refers to e-sociolinguistics as having ethnographic features by not only studying linguistic data, but also circumstantial data.
• Another approach is a quantitative one, in which systematically collected facts about language and the circumstances in which it was produced are used.
• Data should be collected systematically, to draw reliable conclusions.
• The data should consist of information about the: author, time of writing, audience, participants, type of CMC, speech act type and typical users.
• Put forward a convincing argument that a certain pattern is taking place and support it with the various types of data and convincing examples.

Investigating Attitudes

• Language attitudes can be found by looking at speakers' behavior, asking them directly, or when they are expressing their opinion on something else.
• Methodological approaches to measure how people perceive and evaluate language variation are: Language Evaluation Test, Matched Guise Test, Identification Task, Questionnaire, Interview, or Folk Linguistics.

Language Evaluation Test

• Certain stereotyped, such as 'smart', 'dumb' etc, are associated with certain accents.
• The test generates reactions to language varieties by using a language stimulus and then expressing opinion through a Likert scale or interview-like questions.
• Evaluation scores need to be correlated with participant characteristics.
• An example could be recording three speakers, male or female, with similar voices in different accents, which are used for an online test.

Matched Guise Test

• The Matched Guise Test was introduced by Canadian psychologists, headed by William Lambert (Lambert et al. 1960).
• It discovers people’s attitudes towards different language varieties and languages in bilingual communities.
• Guise means ‘appearance’ or ‘assumed appearance’; the listener judges the speaker.
• Participants listen to a recording and are asked questions about the speaker's non-linguistic characteristics.
• Qualifications differing when the same person speaks different languages reflects attitudes to those languages.