SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Joshua A. Fishman
 SOCIOLINGUISTICS
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Joshua A. Fishman
Yeshiva University

NEWBURY HOUSE PUBLISHERS, ROWLEY, MASSACHUSETTS

 First Printing: June,i220—
Second Printing: August, 1971

{,r JOKN'5 COLLEGE. YORK

CLASS AOCEiSSON No.

Checked Date

ivC

Copyright by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Professor Fishman’s work is published as a
Newbury House Paperback by special arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,
which is issuing SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION, edited by Kurt
Back, in 1971.

Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 73-109101

ISBN; 912066-01-6.
 FOREWORD

The idea of systematic study of language as a social

phenomenon is not new. Long ago prominent social
psychologists like George Herbert Mead emphasized the
importance of language in social interaction, and in the early
years of the century prominent linguists like Antoine Meillet
tried to place language in its social setting and to combine
social analysis with the investigation of language change.
Linguistics has also traditionally had a place within anthro¬
pological research. But in spite of the recognition of language
as a social phenomenon and the connection between lin¬
guistics and anthropology, the methods and insights of the
social sciences and those of linguistics have generally gone
their separate ways. It is only within the last ten to fifteen
years that a number of scholars have combined concepts and
research techniques from sociology, social psychology, and
linguistics in the study of certain kinds of language behavior.
This new field of sociolinguistics, as it is called, is far from
unified in goals, techniques, or levels of analysis. Also, as
might be expected, its practitioners are often linguistic
scholars or social scientists whose primary research work is in
other fields but who are drawn to sociolinguistic problems
because of their relation to issues of theory in their respective
fields.
V
VI FOREWORD

The brief introduction to sociolinguistics which Joshua

Fishman has written manages to cover a great many different
trends of research, different levels of analysis, and quite
different theoretical concerns. Students generally report that
every introductory course in Sociolinguistics is unique, being
based on the particular research interests of the sociolinguist,
anthropologist, or linguist who happens to teach it. In this
introduction, however, Fishman has tried not only to
represent all the major streams of research but also to
integrate them as far as this can be done in the present state
of sociolinguistic theory. In doing so he has succeeded in
giving an unusually well balanced conspectus of the whole
field. One reason for his success is probably the fact that he is
one of the very small number of scholars for whom
sociolinguistic research and teaching are primary rather than
marginal or incidental to other work.
Professor Fishman’s interest in sociolinguistics, or the
sociology of language as he sometimes prefers to call it,
ranges from large questions of language use at the national or
international level to detailed investigations of personal
interaction, and in his publications the methods represented
have ranged from the interpretation of census data to
linguistic analysis of bilingual conversations. In fact, one of
the most characteristic features of Fishman’s work has been
his willingness to use methods of the most varied kinds to
achieve the results he wants. He has combined diachronic and
synchronic approaches, and techniques drawn from
sociology, psychology, and linguistics. In a series of studies of
the language behavior of ethnic groups in the United States
he has not only contributed to general questions such as the
study of bilingualism and the relation of language to
nationalism, but in his use of such concepts as language
maintenance and shift and domains of language use he has
taken important first steps toward the development of a
sociolinguistic theory of societal multilingualism. In addition
to his numerous articles and monographs. Professor Fishman
is the senior editor and major author of three substantial
 FOREWORD vii

books in sociolinguistics. Language Loyalty in the United

States, Language Problems of Developing Nations, and
Bilingualism in the Barrio, and he is undoubtedly one of the
best qualified people to prepare an introduction to the field.
Like any new interdisciplinary field, sociolinguistics is full
of the excitement of unexpected discoveries and the stimula¬
tion of finding connections between previously unrelated
theories or disciplines. It comes as a surprise to both the
linguist and the sociologist when William Labov shows that
linguistic variables are among the most precise and predict¬
able indicators of socioeconomic status in New York City.
The social psychologist is surprised by the great variety of
pronoun systems of address in the world’s languages, but the
linguist is even more surprised when Roger Brown shows that
much of this variation can be interpreted within a very
limited number of social dimensions. The psychologist who is
convinced of the disadvantages of bilingualism for the
individual is taken aback by the demonstrated prevalence of
bilingualism among the elites of many societies. And so it
goes, with surprises for political scientists, dialectologists, and
social scientists of all kinds who have paid little attention to
the functions of differing speech varieties in human com¬
munities. Fishman does not emphasize the exciting and
upsetting nature of much sociolinguistic research, but it
shows through his calm reporting sufficiently to communi¬
cate the attraction sociolinguistics has for many of its
proponents.
As often happens with a new field, the output of
publications in sociolinguistics is largely in specialized studies
rather than comprehensive handbooks or solid textbooks.
The handful of existing introductory textbooks on sociolin¬
guistics or the sociology of language tend to be poorly
balanced in coverage, superficial in treatment, and premature
in their generalizations and conclusions. The student who
wants some kind of overview must be content with
anthologies and collections of readings, and here the volumes
of Hymes, Bright, Hymes and Gumperz, and Fishman offer a
viii FOREWORD

rich selection of articles and extracts for him to study.

Several of the leading sociolinguists are known to be writing
introductory textbooks, and we can hope that in several
years’ time we will have adequate coverage of the field. For
the present, however, we have only such longish review essays
as those of Ervin-Tripp, Grimshaw, and Gumperz. For some
time to come the Fishman introduction, also originally
written as a kind of review essay, will provide the most useful
summary of the field for those who want to find out about
it.
Fishman has chosen to begin his presentation with a strong
dose of linguistics. We could imagine several motivations for
this choice. He may have wanted to frighten off the social
scientist who is interested but is unwilling to look at language
behavior in the careful, technical way sociolinguistic research
requires. Or he may have wanted to show that in this field a
non-linguist like himself deals with linguistic analysis just as a
linguist must deal with various kinds of social analysis.
Whatever his motivation, I think he made the right choice.
The student of social science who becomes interested in
language behavior has generally had little or no background
in linguistics and there is no other place he can turn for a
quick introduction designed to show people like him how
linguistics might be of use in following up his interest. On the
other hand, the linguist who becomes interested in the social
functions of language often has some social science back¬
ground in his education and is likely to be highly skeptical
about a sociolinguistic treatise which does not immediately
demonstrate some linguistic sophistication. The social
scientist will acquire a smattering of linguistics and perhaps a
little respect for it, and the linguist will be lured on to the
sociolinguistic theory and research methods which are more
fundamental to his own discipline than he realizes.
Finally, Fishman’s introduction differs from most of the
existing review articles and books in the field by having a
section on applied sociolinguistics. Most researchers in
sociolinguistics would take the position of many social
 FOREWORD IX

scientists that their findings are too fragmentary and have too
inadequate a theoretical framework to be available for
application to social problems. It is refreshing to have a
research scholar admit the inconclusiveness of the findings in
his field but consider them relevant to problems in society
and favor using them to the extent possible in attempting
solutions to the problems. But perhaps this is not surprising
when the scholar is the editor of the Journal of Social Issues.
It is my hope that this little book and its carefully selected
bibliography will introduce many students to the rapidly
developing field of sociolinguistics and in time will add
substantially to the number of people for whom sociolin-
guistic research and application offers an interesting and
rewarding career.

Addis Ababa Charles A. Ferguson

December 1969
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 PREFACE

The purpose of this brief introduction to sociolinguistics is to

familiarize the student of linguistics with the social context
of speech, and to familiarize the student of society with
language as a referent and dimension of social behavior. It
attempts to conceptually integrate the sociolinguistics litera¬
ture-emphasizing that which appeared m the mid and late
1950’s-so that micro-sociolinguistics, and macro-sociohn-
guistics, and applied sociolinguistics can be understood m
relation to each other, rather than as disparate levels or topics

The material here presented to the reader has been tried

out on students at several universities. It stresses the need to
take seriously both linguistic and societal analysis, @ving
priority to neither, adopting methods from all “f J"®
behavioral sciences, interrelating theories and methods that
have too often been isolated from each other, and setting
aside as unfounded those that claim to be self-sufficient for
all problems whatsoever.
Sociolinguistics is a relatively new interdisciplinary field. It
will change rapidly in the years immediately ahead. This

XI
xii preface

introduction, it is hoped, will contribute to the ultimate

shape of the field by stimulating rather than restricting its
continued growth.

New York City Joshua A. Fishman

January, 1970
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For their many helpful comments and corrections I am

greatly indebted to Robert Cooper (Yeshiva), Charles
Ferguson (Stanford), Richard Howell (Richmond College,
City University of New York), Bjorn Jernudd (Monash), and
Joan Rubin (George Washington), each of whom was kind
enough to read a preliminary draft of this material.
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 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

SECTION I
LINGUISTICS: THE SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION
5
. . . AND MORE
1.1 Descriptive Linguistics 6
1.2 Other Branches of Linguistics 13

SECTION II
SOME BASIC SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONCEPTS 21

2.1 Language-Dialect-Variety 21
2.2 Major Types of Attitude and Behavior
24
Toward Language
28
2.3 Speech Community

SECTION III
INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS; MICRO
37
AND MACRO
3.1 How Should Talk Be Contextually Described 41
3.2 Microlevel Analysis in Sociolinguistics 43
44
3.3 Role Relationships
"v 3.4 The Situation: Congruent and Incongruent 47
3.5 The Transition to Marco-sociolinguistics 51
3.6 Sociolinguistics: Multilevel and Multimethod 54

XV
xvi CONTENTS

SECTION IV
SOCIETAL DIFFERENTIATION AND REPERTOIRE
RANGE 57
4.1 The Significance of Pervasive Linguistic
Discontinuity 61
4.2 More Marginal Systematic Discontinuity 63
4.3 Nonproletarians of All Regions, Unite! 67
4.4 Diversification vs. Massification 69

SECTION V
SOCIETAL BILINGUALISM: STABLE AND
TRANSITIONAL 73
-^5.1 Diglossia 73
5.2 Speech Communities Characterized by
Both Diglossia and Bilingualism 75
5.3 Diglossia Without Bilingualism 81
5.4 Bilingualism Without Diglossia 83
5.5 Neither Diglossia Nor Bilingualism 88
5.6 Conclusions 89

SECTION VI
SOCIOCULTURAL ORGANIZATION: LANGUAGE
CONSTRAINTS AND LANGUAGE REFLECTIONS 91
6.1 Grammatical Structure Constrains
Cognition 92
6.2 Lexical Structure Constrains Cognition 96
6.3 Lexical Structure Reflects Social
Organization 102

SECTION VII
APPLIED SOCIOLINGUISTICS 107
7.1 The Formulation of Language Policy 108
7.2 The Implementation of Language Policy 109
7.3 Language Planning 109
7.4 Educational Applications 110
7.5 The Rationalization of Language Decisions 111

DR. FERGUSON'S REFERENCES 113

BIBLIOGRAPHY 115
 INTRODUCTION

Newspaper headlines with all their stridency may serve to

remind us of a truism that is too frequently overlooked by
too many Americans, namely, that language is not merely a
means of interpersonal communication and influence. It is
not merely a carrier of content, whether latent or manifest.
Language itself is content, a referent for loyalties and ani¬
mosities, an indicator of social statuses and personal relation¬
ships, a marker of situations and topics as well as of the
societal goals and the large-scale value-laden arenas of interac¬
tion that typify every speech community.
Any speech community of even moderate complexity re¬
veals several varieties of language, all of which are func¬
tionally differentiated from each other. In some cases the
varieties may represent different occupational or interest
specializations (“shop talk,” “hippie talk, etc.) and, there¬
fore, contain vocabulary, pronunciations, and phraseology
which are not generally used or even known throughout the
broader speech community. As a result, the speakers of
specialized varieties may not always employ them. Not only
must they switch to other varieties of language when they
interact in less specialized (or differently specialized) net¬
works within the broader speech community of which they

1
2 INTRODUCTION

are a part, but most of them do not even use their specialized
varieties all of the time with one another. On some occasions,
interlocutors who can speak a particular specialized variety to
one another nevertheless do not do so, but instead switch to
a different variety of language which is either in wider use or
which is indicative of quite a different set of interests and
relationships than is associated with their specialized variety.
This type of switching represents the raw data of sociolinguis¬
tics, the discipline that seeks to determine (among other
things) who speaks what variety of what language to whom,
when, and concerning what.
The varieties of language that exist within a speech com¬
munity need not all represent occupational or interest
specializations. Some varieties may represent social-class
(economic, educational, ethnic) distinctions within coterri¬
torial populations. “Brooklynese” and “Cockney” English
within New York and London, respectively, do not connote
foreignness or even a particular section oj the city so much as
lower-class status in terms of income, education, or ethnicity.
Nevertheless, many individuals who have left lower-class
status behind can and do switch back and forth between
Brooklynese and more regionally standard New York English
when speaking to each other, depending on their feelings
toward each other, the topic under discussion, where they
happen to be when they are conversing, and several other
factors, all of which can exhibit variation and, as a result, can
be signaled by switching from one variety of English to
another.
A speech community that has available to it several va¬
rieties of language may be said to possess a verbal repertoiret'I
Such repertoires may not only consist of different specialized
varieties and different social-class varieties, but may also re¬
veal different regional varieties (Boston English, Southern
English, Midwestern English, and other widely, and roughly,
designated dialects of American English are regional va¬
rieties), if the speech community is sufficiently large so that
enclaves come to arise within it on a geographic basis alone.
 INTRODUCTION 3

Furthermore, multilingual speech communities may employ,

for the purposes of intragroup communication, all of the
above types or varieties of language within each of the codes
that the community recognizes as “distinct” languages (e.g.,
within Yiddish and Hebrew, among most pre-World War II
Eastern European Jews; within English and Hindi, among
many upper-class individuals in India today, etc.).
Regardless of the nature of the language varieties involved
in the verbal repertoire of a speech community (occupa¬
tional, social class, regional, etc.) and regardless of the inter¬
action between them (for initially regional dialects may come
to represent social varieties as well, and vice versa) sociolin¬
guistics seeks to describe their linguistic and functional
characteristics. However, sociolinguistics also seeks to do
much more. It seeks to determine how much of the entire
speech community’s verbal repertoire is available to various
smaller interaction networks within that community, since
the entire verbal repertoire of a speech community may be
more extensive than the verbal repertoire controlled by sub¬
groups within that community. Sociolinguigtics-seeks. to^rac^
the lingui^ic influences of_nxe3ariedes on each other. It
I^Tto determinejiow changes in Jhe fortunes and interac-
tionTofnelwoTks of speakers alter the ranges (complexity) of
their verbal repertoires. All in all, sociolinguistics seeks to
discover the societal rules or norms that explain and con¬
strain language "behavior and the behavior toward language in
speech communities^ - ■
" . Sociolinguistics also seeks to determine the symbolic value
of language varieties for their speakers^fThat language va¬
rieties come to have symbolic or symptomatic value, in and
of themselves, is an inevitable consequence of their func¬
tional differentiation. If certain varieties are indicative of cer¬
tain interests, of certain backgrounds, or of certain origins,
they come to represent the ties and aspirations, the limita-
‘ tions and the opportunities with which these interests, back¬
grounds, and origins, in turn, are associated. Language va¬
rieties rise and fall in symbolic value as the status of their
4 INTRODUCTION

most characteristic or marked functions rises and falls. Va¬

rieties come to represent intimacy and equality if they are
most typically learned and employed in interactions that
stress such bonds between interlocutors. Other varieties come
to represent educated status or national identification as a
result of the attainments associated with their use and their
users and as a result of their utilization in situations and
relationships that pertain to formal learning or to particular
ideologiesTj However, these functions are capable of change
(and of being consciously changed), just as the linguistic
features of the varieties themselves may change (and may be
consciously changed), and just as the demographic distribu¬
tion of users of a variety within a particular speech com¬
munity may change.
Sociolinguistics is the study of the characteristics of lan¬
guage varieties, the characteristics of their functions, and the
characteristics of their speakers as these three constantly in¬
teract, change, and change one another within a speech com¬
munity.
 Section I

LINGUISTICS:
THE SCIENCE OF CODE
DESCRIPTION . . . AND MORE

If one part of sociolinguistics comprises the “study of the

characteristics of language varieties” then we must turn to
that science that has specialized in the systematic description
of language: hnguistics. To attempt to describe and analyze
language data, in this day and age, without a knowledge of
linguistic concepts and methods is to be as primitive as to try
to describe and analyze human behavior more generally (or
the functions of language varieties and the characteristics of
their speakers) without knowledge of psychological and
sociological concepts and methods.
It is no more possible to provide an adequate introduction
to linguistics “in one easy lesson” than to provide one for
sociology or psychology. Nevertheless, it may be possible to
briefly sketch some of the major concerns and methods of
linguistics that bear upon sociolinguistics. The purpose of the
next few pages, therefore, is to bring about “linguistics
appreciation,” and of a very selective sort at that, rather than
to present a full-fledged introduction to a very technical and
complicated science which intersects the humanities, the
social sciences, and the natural sciences in its various sub¬
divisions. The specialist knows full well that “music apprecia¬
tion” is not the same as music mastery. Similarly, “linguistics

5
 6 LINGUISTICS: THE SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION
\

appreciation” is not the same as linguistics mastery. Never¬

theless, it is a beginning.
' As a formal discipline, particularly in so far as the Ameri-
^^an academic scene is concerned, linguistics is a very recent
field of specialization. The Linguistic Society of America was
founded only in 1924. (The oldest linguistic society in the
world, that of Paris, was founded in 1864.) Even today, when
the number of linguists and linguistics programs in American
universities is greater than ever before, there are only some
twoscore graduate linguistics departments in the United
States. Nevertheless, this discipline has not only come to be
of prime interest to a growing band of dedicated scholars and
practitioners within linguistics per se, but it has also in very
recent years forcefully come to the attention of all other
disciplines that recognize the centrality of verbal interaction
in human affairs. Interdisciplinary contacts between linguis¬
tics and anthropology have been well established since the
very appearance of linguistics in American universities. The
anthropological linguist is a well-recognized and highly re¬
garded specialist among linguists and anthropologists alike.
Indeed, linguistics is recognized as a “branch” of anthropol¬
ogy in many textbooks and training programs. Of more re¬
cent vintage is psycholinguistics. Most recent of all is sociolin¬
guistics, an interdisciplinary field which is just now beginning
to train specialists that can bridge linguistics and sociology-
social psychology in such a manner as to expand the horizons
of both.

1.1 DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS

[jThe basic field in which most (if not all) linguists have been
trained is that which is known as descriptive or synchronic
linguistics. As its names imply, this field focuses upon the
systematic description of a given language in a given time and
place. It is not historical; it is not comparative; it is not
prescriptive. Its emphasis is definitely on spoken language,
 DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS 7

the assumption being that written language is both derivative

and different from natural language or speech.
It is common for the uninitiated to think of a language as
being well represented by an unabridged dictionary. This
view implies that the way to describe a language is to con¬
sider its components to be words. Any careful or consistent
and exhaustive presentation and definition of the words of a
language (which may be exactly what dictionaries attempt to
do) would, therefore, from this point of view, be considered
a description of that language. For most linguists, however,
there are two other kinds of systematic presentations which
are considered even more basic to their goal of describing
language: the sound system of a language and the grammati¬
cal system of that language.
^The branch of linguistics that is concerned with the
systematic description of the sounds (phones) of a language is
phonology^ Some of the more general subspecialties within
phonology are articulatory phonetics (how tongue, lips,
teeth, vocal chords, velum, nasal passage, and other speech
organs produce the sounds of language) and acoustic
phonetics (the physical properties of the sound waves or
signals emitted by the speaker). Linguists have devised for
purposes of phonetic notation the International Phonetic
Alphabet, which is roughly adequate for the transcription of
speech in all languages, although minor adjustments or addi¬
tions to it are required in most individual cases.
On the foundation of these more general branches of
phonology linguistics has been able to establish the study of
phonemics, i.e., the study of those sounds that enter into
meaningful contrasts or combinations in a given language, as
compared to all of the physically differentiable sounds of a
language (which are of interest in phonetics). A skilled
phonetician differentiates far more fine shades of language
sounds than do the native speakers of any particular lan-
guage£Phonetic analysis is now sufficiently refined to demon¬
strate that no two speakers of a given language pronounce
their words in exactly the same way. Indeed, the degree of
8 LINGUISTICS: THE SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION

refinement available to phonetic analysis has gone so far that

it is possible to show that even an idiolect (the way of speak¬
ing that characterizes an individual) is not entirely consistent.
The same individual does not pronounce the same word in
the same way on all occasions of the same type^Into this
endless series of successively refined analysis of language
sound differences phonemics seeks to introduce the parsi¬
mony that derives from a knowledge of those sound dif¬
ferences that are meaningfully distinctive (i.e., that serve to
distinguish between linguistic signs and their meanings) for
the native speakers of a particular language. The following
brief example may illustrate the phonemic approach to
demonstrable phonetic differences.
CLet us consider the “b” sound in English, Arabic, and
Bengali. That each of these languages has some sound that
the American man in the street would unhesitatingly repre¬
sent by the letter b is, for linguistics, a nonstructural com¬
ment, and therefore one of no particular interest. It is of
interest, however, to point out that in English aba and apa
are differentiated, the voiced bilabial stop (“b”) in the first
being considered clearly different from the unvoiced bilabial
stop (“p”) in the second because the difference between b
and p is crucial to recognizing the difference in meaning
between “bit” and “pit,” “bet” and “pet,” and hundreds of
other meaningful contrasts. In Arabic, on the other hand, no
such meaningful substitutions of b and p are made. The native
speaker of Arabic says only aba and uses a p sound only
under special conditions, such as before s or t. Whatever
sound differences exist in the p-b range in Arabic are not dis¬
tinctive, i.e., they do not signal meaning differences, and are
therefore referred to as allophones.
Thus, it is not enough to say that both English and Arabic
have a b sound, for the sound functions far differently in the
two languages. In English b and p function as phonemically
different sounds (and, therefore, are notated /p/ and /b/);in
Arabic they do not.
 DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS 9

The absence or presence of a meaningful contrast between

b and p takes on even greater linguistic significance if Bengali
is examined. Not only are /b/ and /p/ differentiated by the
ordinary native speaker of Bengali, but in addition, an un¬
aspirated p (as in the English spin) is differentiated from an
aspirated p (as in the English pin). Similarly, an unaspirated b
is regularly differentiated from an aspirated b. J
Note that while English recognizes a phonemic (meaning-
related) difference between two sounds (one voiced and one
unvoiced) that represent only a meaningless difference in
Arabic, Bengali recognizes a further phonemic difference
between two pairs of sounds (each with an aspirated and an
unaspirated component) that represent only meaningless
phonetic differences in English. Furthermore, as the English
and Bengali languages change over time, changes in their “b”
sounds will presumably be correlated with changes in their
“p” sounds, precisely because these sounds are systematically
related to each other.
It is in this last respect—i.e., in terms of systematic inter¬
relationships—that descriptive linguistics is interested in the
sounds of a language. This is also why descriptive linguistics is
sometimes referred to as structural linguistics. It is not
merely the sounds of a language that are of interest to linguis¬
tics, nor even the meaningfully different sounds, but above
all, the systematic links that exist between the meaningfully
different sounds of a language. The phonemes of a language,
like all other features of a language at a given point in time,
are part of a system (a “structure”) that operates as a whole.
Changes in one part of the structure affect the other parts;
indeed, in true Gestalt fashion, any phonemic part can be
truly appreciated only in terms of the phonological whole.
Saussure (1916) emphasized that language is a system in which
every part has its interlinked place (“un systeme ou tout se
tient”) and this structural dictum has since come to char¬
acterize not only descriptive linguistics but other branches
as well.
10 LINGUISTICS; THE SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION
S

So basic is descriptive linguistics to linguistic science as a

whole that another example of its concerns, this time at the
level of grammatical analysis, is in order. Such an example is
particularly desirable because the grammatical structure of
language is completely interwoven with its sound structure,
so much so that some linguists claim that phonological
analysis depends on and must be part of an exhaustive gram¬
matical analysis (although most linguists consider phonology,
grammar, lexicon, and semantics as quite separate levels of
analysis).
Just as there is a minimal unit of meaningful sound
(actually, of substitutionally meaningful sound, since the
sounds in question are not meaningful per se), the phoneme,
so is there a minimal unit of meaningful grammatical (i.e., of
ordered or environmental) form, the morpheme. As a result,
one branch of grammatical study is known as morphology. It
studies the ordered relationships between small meaningful
segments such as occur within words. (Syntax, on the other
hand, studies the ordered relationships between units such as
words in a phrase or utterance.) Thus, many English verbs
form the past tense by adding a morpheme, which may be
represented as [d], to the present tense of the verb: I open—I
opened, [d] means past tense in English. Similarly, many
English nouns form their plural by adding a morpheme,
which may be represented as [z], to their singular: car—cars.
In both of these instances, however, the morphemes in ques¬
tion occur in several different forms that also differ somewhat
as to their sound. Functionally equivalent alternatives of the
same morpheme are referred to as allomorphs, precisely be¬
cause there is no functional difference between them, how¬
ever much they may differ in sound, just as sounds that
revealed no functional difference were referred to earlier as
allophones. The allomorphs of [d] for the common, produc¬
tive English verbs may sound like a d (as in opened), like a t
(as in laughed), or like ed (as in mended). However, these
allomorphs are not used at random. How would linguistics
 DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS 11

provide a rule to indicate when the native speaker of English

employs which? What would such a rule be like?
To begin with, linguists would list as many verbs as pos¬
sible that utilize each variant of the [d] morpheme. Such a
list might initially look like that shown in Table 1. After
inspecting the array of final sounds in each of the columns of
that table a linguist is able to do that which no ordinary
native speaker of English can do; formulate a very few rules
which summarize the systematic variation in the three
allomorphs of [d]. Such rules might proceed as follows;

TABLE 1. Allomorphs of in the Past Tense of Some Common,

Productive English Verbs.

ed t d

mend bank open

lift cook use
boot drop save
raid help bomb
kid walk mail
tend laugh try
sift shop play
hoot stamp radio
shade rank hinge
hand staff rig

1. If the verb stem ends in /t/ or /d/ the past tense ends in
ed, (with the exception of a small number of verbs that
retain the same form in past and present; cut, hit, put),
2. If the verb stem ends in a voiceless stop (other than /t/)
or in a voiceless spirant, the past tense ends in t,
3. Otherwise, the past tense ends in d.

The above three brief rules pertain to the phonological

conditioning of allomorphs. The allomorphs of [d] are
realized according to their phonological environment. Thus,
12 LINGUISTICS: THE SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION

variations in grammatical form and variations in phonological

form may and frequently do coincide. In general, linguistics
has traditionally pursued two kinds of structured variation:
variation relatable to change in meaning (such as the substitu¬
tional meaning that underlies phonemic analysis) and varia¬
tion relatable to change in environment (such as the posi¬
tional meaning that underlies morphemic analysis). Further
synchronic variation in language, i.e., variation that cannot be
identified either with change in meaning (i.e., change in
referent) or with change in linguistic environment, when
geographic area is held constant, has traditionally been
thought of as “free variation,” i.e., as variation (not to say
“irregularity”) due to factors outside of langue (the latent
structure underlying speech) and therefore outside of the
descriptive rules pertaining to langue. It is in some of the
kinds of free variation—in variations which may co-occur
with differences in a speaker’s alertness or emotional state,
with differences in topic, role relationship, communicational
setting, or interpersonal purpose—that sociolinguistics (and
other interdisciplinary studies of language usage) attempts to
discover additional regularity.
Linguistics has long been aware that “free variation”
might have a structure of its own. However, that structure
(when and if it obtains) has usually been considered as being
part of the structure of the speech event rather than part of
the structure of the speech code per se. Although descriptive
linguistics has emphasized the spoken language, the speech
act itself was long considered to be outside of the domain of
linguistics, for the speech act, just like the message content of
speech, was considered to be part of “communication” (long
considered by linguists to be an outer or surface phenome¬
non) rather than part and parcel of langue per se (the heart of
the matter). Many famous linguists have warned against con¬
fusing the two.
Thus, if it appeared that certain phonemic, morphological,
syntactic, or lexical regularities were not always as regular as
one would hope (time and place remaining constant), this
 OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS 13

was attributed to the irregularity of parole (speaking, be¬

havioral realization) as distinct from the systematic and
abstract purity of langue (language, underlying structure)
with which linguists should really be concerned. Parole is
subject to many factors that produce variation (among those
not previously mentioned; fatigue, anger, limitation in
memory span, interruptions, etc.). These are all factors of
“degree,” of “more or less,” of “sometimes.” It was thought
that the goal of linguistics was to cut through these psycho¬
logical and sociological sources of “static” and to concern
itself with matters that were clear-cut enough to be viewed as
all or none phenomena; the basic code which, at any given
time and place, might be considered to be one and the same
for all who employed it. Thus, not only were linguists warned
to distinguish sharply between parole and langue (de Saussure
1916), but they were also admonished to keep their distance
from psychological or sociological data and theories which
were viewed as inherently more concerned with the highly
variable and seemingly irregular processes of verbal interac¬
tion and communication (and, therefore, with the messy data
of parole) than with the pure code underlying these processes
(Bloomfield 1933). It is only in more recent days, when the
traditionally rigid distinction between langue and parole has
come to be re-examined and when the varying interaction
between them has come to be pursued that larger groups of
linguists and of social scientists have found things to say to
each other.

1.2 OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

Other branches of linguistics—some of them older than de¬

scriptive linguistics (even though the latter has come to be so
central to all linguistic pursuits)-have long been on friendher
terms with the social sciences. Historical (diachronic) linguis¬
tics, for example, in studying the changes that occur in a
given code over time (sound changes, grammatical changes.
14 LINGUISTICS: THE SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION

and word changes) has of necessity been interested in human

migrations, intergroup contacts (conquest, trade), and any
Other diversification within a speech community that leads
some of its members to interact with each other differentially
(rather than equally or randomly), or that leads some of its
members to interact with outsiders much more than do the
rest. Historical linguistics (also known as comparative linguis¬
tics) focuses on tracing how one, earlier, parent (“proto”)
code subsequently divided into several related but separate
(“sister” or “daughter”) codes or, alternatively, how several
codes were derived from one pre-existing code. Although
time is the crucial dimension in the development of families
of languages between which genetic relationships can be
shown to exist, as it is in the reconstruction of all common
ancestries, nevertheless historical linguists realize full well
that the language changes that occurred were due to differ¬
ential interaction and contact processes that happened as
time passed, rather than to the mere passing of time per se.
As a result, historical linguistics has interacted fruitfully with
history, archeology, and anthropology and with other dis¬
ciplines that can provide information concerning coterritorial
influences between populations. In recent years, the fluc¬
tuating interaction between langue and parole (e.g., how one
of the alternative systems of speaking available to a speech
community spreads through the entire speech community
and, increasingly displacing other alternatives, becomes an
unvarying part of its basic code) has been studied by linguists
working with social-science concepts and methods of data
collection and data analysis on what would once have been
considered a “purely” comparative problem (Labov 1963;
Haugen 1961). The ties between comparative linguistics and
the social sciences become stronger as the dynamics of lan¬
guage change come under increasing linguistic scrutiny, as
distinct from the static, step-wise contrasts between the writ¬
ten records of one century and those of another that for¬
merly dominated this field of study.
 OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS 15

Another branch of linguistics that has frequently main¬

tained close ties to the social sciences is dialectology (also
known as linguistic or dialect geography). In contrast to his¬
torical linguistics this branch is concerned with variation in
language on some dimension other than time. The achronic
dimension with which dialectologists have most commonly
been concerned has been geographic space or distance. Lan¬
guages that are employed over considerable expanses are
often spoken somewhat differently (or even quite dif¬
ferently) in different parts of their speech areas. These dif¬
ferences may be phonological, such as President Kennedy’s
“Cuber” (for Cuba) and “vigah” (for vigor), where a Phila¬
delphian would have said “Cubah” and “vigor,” while many a
Southerner would have said “Cubah” and “vigah.” Dialect
differences may also apply to the lexicon (milk shake vs.
frappe; soda vs. pop) and even to parts of the grammatical
system. Dialectologists have traditionally prepared linguistic
atlases to show the geographic distribution of the linguistic
features that have been of interest to them. Such atlases con¬
sist of maps on which are indicated the geographical limits
within which certain usages are current. These limits are
known as isoglosses (Weinreich, U. 1962; Herzog 1965).
However, dialectologists are well aware that the variations
that are of interest to them are not due to geographical
distance per se, but rather to the interactional consequences
of geographic and other kinds of “distance. Phonological,
lexical, and grammatical uniformity may obtain over large
geographic expanses when settlement is simultaneous and
when verbal interaction as well as common identification is
frequent. On the other hand, major language differences
(sometimes referred to as “social dialects or sociolects )
may arise and be maintained within relatively tiny geographic
areas (e.g., in many cities) where the above conditions do not
obtain. Considerations such as these have led many dialectol¬
ogists, particularly those who have been interested in urban
language situations, to be concerned with educational.
16 LINGUISTICS: THE SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION

occupational, religious, ethnic, and other social groups and

societal processes (although all or most of these groups may,
in part, be traceable to originally diverse geographic origins)
rather than with geographic distance per se. As a result, the
ties between dialectologists and social scientists (not to men¬
tion sociolinguists) have been many and strong, particularly
in recent years (Blanc 1964; Ferguson and Gumperz 1960),
when the entire speech act—rather than merely the code rules
abstracted from the speech act—has come to be of interest to
an increasing number of dialectologists (Hymes 1962).
Of late, many linguists have taken to examining the struc¬
ture of language-rather than the structure of particular lan¬
guages—and to doing so in order to discover the nature of
those fundamental human capacities which make for the
competence of native speakers. Native speakers possess a rare
gift which they themselves usually overlook: the ability to
generate sentences that are recognized as structurally accept¬
able in their speech communities, and what is more, to
generate only such sentences. Many linguists now believe that
a linguistic theory that can specify an adequate grammar (i.e.,
the rules that native speakers implicitly grasp and that consti¬
tute their native-speaker competence) will also specify the
language-acquiring and language-using nature of man. These
linguists say that only an adequate theory of human capacity
to acquire and use language will yield an adequate theory of
what language itself is (Chomsky 1957, 1965).
Sociolinguistics may ultimately serve similarly basic
purposes in the on-going quest of the social sciences to under¬
stand communicative competence as a fundamental aspect of
the social nature of man. The sociolinguistic theory that can
specify adequate communicative competence (i.e., the rules
that native members of speech communities imphcitly grasp
and that constitute their native member sociolinguistic be¬
havior) will also specify the nature of social man as an
acquirer and utilizer of a repertoire of verbal and behavioral
skills. Man does not acquire or use his communicative com¬
petence in a single-code or single-norm community. Indeed,
 OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS 17

pervasively homogeneous communities with respect to com¬

municative and other social behaviors do not exist except in
the simplified worlds of some theorists and experimenters.
Ultimately, sociolinguistics hopes to go beyond comfortably
simple theory concerning the nature of communicative com¬
petence in the conviction that only an adequate theory of
human capacity to acquire and to use a repertoire of inter¬
locking language varieties and their related behaviors will
yield an adequate theory of what communicative competence
in social man really is.
Just as there are branches of linguistics that seek to study
langue and langue alone (indeed, to study language at its
“deepest,” most abstract, and, therefore, at its socially most
uninvolved), so are there branches of linguistics that have
departed from a strict separation between langue and parole
(since parole too has its very definite structure, since parole
constantly influences langue, and since the individual’s mean¬
ingful differentiation must be referred to, even though these
are outside of langue per se, in order to establish a descrip¬
tion of phonemic and other distinctions). Similarly, some
branches of social psychology (and other social sciences as
well) have moved closer to linguistics. Many sociologists and
social psychologists now realize (whereas few did so a decade
ago) that the norms that apply to and that may be thought of
as generating human verbal interaction pertain not only to
the communicative content and context of that interaction
but to its linguistic form as well. As linguistics is developing
outward-in the hopes of some: to become an all-encom¬
passing science of language behavior—sociology and social
psychology are developing toward increasing technical com¬
petence in connection with language description and analysis.
Sociolinguistics is one of the by-products of these two
complementary developments. Let us, therefore, now venture
into sociolinguistics proper, referring to the work of linguists
as necessary, but attending also to those topics that are
essentially sociological and social psychological and to which
few linguists have, as yet, paid much attention.
18 LINGUISTICS: THE, SCIENCE OF CODE DESCRIPTION

READING LIST: INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

I. Popular Introductions and Overviews

1. Hall, Robert A., Jr. Linguistics and Your Language.

Doubleday, New York, 1960.
2. Ornstein, Jacob, and Wm. W. Gage. The ABC’s of Lan¬
guage and Linguistics. Chilton, Philadelphia, 1964.
3. Bolinger, Dwight. Aspects of Language. Harcourt,
Brace & World, New York, 1967.

II. Representative American Texts

1. Bloomfield, Leonard. Language. Holt, New York,

1933.
2. Gleason, H. A., Jr. An Introduction to Descriptive Lin¬
guistics (rev.). Holt, New York, 1961.
3. Hockett, Charles F. A Course in Modern Linguistics
(rev.). Macmillan, New York, 1963.
4. Sapir, Edward. Language. Harcourt, Brace, New York,
1921. (Paperback; Harvest Books, New York, 1955).

III. One Classic and Three Recent European Texts

1. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics

(translation of 1916 French original by Wade Baskin).
Philosophical Library, New York, 1959.
2. Martinet, Andre. Elements of General Linguistics
(translation of 1960 French original by Elisabeth
Palmer). University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964.
3. Halliday, M. A. K., Angus McIntosh, and Peter
Strevens. The Linguistics Sciences and Language Teach¬
ing. Longmans, Green, London, 1964.
4. Robins, Robert H. General Linguistics: An Introduc¬
tory Survey. Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
1966.
 READING LIST: INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS 19

IV. A Newer ( “transformationalist”) Approach

1. Bach, Emmon . An Introduction to Transformational

Grammars. Holt, New York, 1964.
2. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965.
3. Langacker, Ronald W. Language And its Structure.
Harcourt, New York, 1968.

V. Journals to Glance at

1. Language
2. Lingua
3. Linguistics
4. Linguistic Reporter
5. InternationalJournal of American Linguistics

VI. References
1. Rutherford, Phillip R. A Bibliography of American
Doctoral Dissertations in Linguistics, 1900-1964.
Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D.C.,
1968.
2. Linguisticinformation. Center for Applied Linguistics,
Washington, D.C., 1965.
3. Cartter, Allan M. “Doctoral Programs in Linguistics,”
in his An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Educa¬
tion. American Council on Education, Washington,
D.C., 1966.
4. Various articles on linguistic topics in the International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Macmillan, New
York, 1968.
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 Section II

SOME BASIC
SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONCEPTS

Sociolinguistics deals with quite a range of topics: small-

group interaction and large-group membership, language use
and language attitudes, language-and-behavior norms as well
as changes in these norms. We expect to deal with all of these
topics, at least briefly, in this section, and necessarily to in¬
troduce the technical terms and concepts which specialized
fields of discourse inevitably require. However, before mov¬
ing into any of these more specialized substantive topics
there are a number of basic sociolinguistic concepts that are
of such general intertopic utility that we had best pause to
consider them here, rather than to permit them to remain as
primitives any longer.

2.1 LANGUAGE-DIALECT-VARIETY

Th^ tern variety is frequently utilized in sociolinguistics as a

nonjudgmental designation. The very fact that an objective,
unemotional, technical term is needed in order to refer to “a
kind of language” is, in itself, an indication that the expres¬
sion of “a language” is often a judgmental one, a term that is
indicative of emotion and opinion, as well as a term that

21
 22 SOME BASIC SOCIO\ LI N G U 1ST IC CONCEPTS

elicits emotion and opinion. This is an important fact about

languages and one to which we will return repeatedly. As a
result, we will use the term “variety” in order not to become
trapped in the very phenomena that we seek to investigate,
namely, when and by whom is a certain variety considered to
be a language and when and by whom is it considered to be
something else.
Those varieties that initially and basically represent diver¬
gent geographic origins are known as dialects (Ferguson and
Gumperz 1960; Halliday 1964). It is in this purely objective
sense of the word that it is used in such terms as dialectology
and dialect geography within linguistics, and it is in this sense
that sociolinguistics employs it as well. However, dialects
may easily come to represent (to stand for, to connote, to
symbolize) other factors than geographic ones. If immigrants
from region A come to be a large portion of tFe pFb'rj the
disliked, and the illiteiate in region B, then their speech
■i variety (dialect A) will come to stand for much more than
I ^ geographic origin alone in the minds of the inhabitants of
1 region B. Dialect A will come to stand for lower social status
(educationally, occupationally) than will dialect B. In this
way, what was initially a regional variety may become a
social variety or sociolect (Blanc 1964). Furthermore, if the
speakers of variety A are given hardly any access into the
interaction networks of region B, if they marry primarily
only each other, engage primarily in their original regional
customs, and continue to value only each other’s company,
they may, in time, come to consider themselves a different
society, with goals, beliefs, and traditions of its own. As a
result variety A may no longer be viewed as a social variety,
but rather as an ethnic or religious variety and, indeed, it may
come to be cultivated as such to the point of being viewed as
a separate language (Kloss 1967; Fishman 1968c). However,
within the community of A speakers there may come to be
some who have learned B as well. They may utilize A with
each other for purposes of intimacy and in-group solidarity,
but they may also use B with each other for occupational and
 LANGUAGE-DIALECT-VARIETY 23

deferential purposes. Thus, for them, A and B will be con¬

trasted and complementary functional varieties, with B also
being (or including) a specialized (occupational) variety
(Weinreich M. 1953).
The above theoretical sketch has more than general didac¬
tic value. It represents the route that many varieties-regional
and social—have traveled in the past and the route on which
still others are embarked at this very time (Haugen 1966c;
Deutsch 1966). Nevertheless, it is the genera/ point that is of
particular value to us at this juncture. YaikJdes ma^L^be
regional at one time and^ciafat^another. Varieties may be re¬
acted to as regional within the speech community of their users
and as social (or ethnic) by outsiders. Varieties may have addi¬
tional functional uses for some of their users that they do not
have for others who possess fewer contrasted varieties in their
verbal repertoires. Thus, the term variety—unlike the term
dialect—indicates no particular linguistic status (other than
difference) vis-a-vis other varieties. A dialect must be a
regional subunit in relation to a language, particularly in its
vernacular or spoken realization. “Language is a superordi
nate designation; “dialect” is a subordinate designation. Both|
terms require that the entire taxonomy to which they pertain
be known before they themselves can be accepted. Sociolin¬
guistics is interested in them only in so far as members of
speech communities contend over which is which, and why.
As the result of such contention dialects may throw off then-
subordination and be “promoted” by their speakers to
official and independent status, whereas formerly indepen¬
dent languages may become subordinated. The term variety,!
on the other hand, merely designates a member of a verbal
repertoire. Its use implies only that there are other varieties
as well. These can be specified by outsiders on the basis of
the phonological, lexical, and grammatical differences that
they (the varieties) manifest. Their functional allocations,
however-as languages or as dialects-are derivable only from
societal observation of their uses and users rather than from
any characteristics of the codes themselves.
24 SOME BASIC SOCIO LING U ISTIC CONCEPTS

^ Varieties change over time, but varieties are also changed,

either by drift or by design. Varieties that have been used in
palaces and universities may later come to be used only by
the rural and unlettered. In this process their lexicons may
well become impoverished, hundreds or thousands of the
terms once needed dropping into disuse. At the same time
lexicons and grammars as well as phonologies may become
much influenced by other temporarily more prestigeful and
possibly genetically unrelated varieties. Conversely, varieties
that had never been used outside of the most humble speech
networks may be elevated in function, increased in lexicon,
and purified or enriched in whatever direction their circum¬
stantially improved speakers may desire (Kloss 1952; Fish¬
man 1968c). All varieties of all languages are equally expand¬
able and changeable; all are equally con tractable and inter-
penetrable under the influence of foreign models. Their
virtues are in the eyes (or ears) of their beholders. Then-
functions depend on the norms of the speech communities
that employ them. These norms, in turn, change as speech
communities change in self-concepts, in their relations with
surrounding communities, and in their objective circum¬
stances. Finally, such changes usually lead to changes in the
varieties themselves. Speech communities and their varieties
are not only interrelated systems; they are completely inter¬
dependent systems as well. It is this interdependence that
sociolinguistics examines.

2.2 MAJOR TYPES OF ATTITUDE AND

BEHAVIOR TOWARD LANGUAGE

One of the best known societal behaviors toward language is

standardization, i.e., “the codification and acceptance, within
a community of users, of a formal set of norms defining
‘correct’ usage” (Stewart 1968). Codification is, typically, the
concern of such language “gatekeepers” as scribes, story¬
tellers, grammarians, teachers, and writers, i.e., of certain
 MAJOR TYPES OF ATTITUDE 25

groups that arise in most diversified societies and whose use of

language is professional and conscious. Codification is formu¬
lated and presented to all or part of the speech community
via such means as grammars, dictionaries, spellers, style
manuals, and exemplary texts, whether written or oral. Fin¬
ally the acceptance of the formally codified (i.e., the stan-
'Bardized) variety of aTanguage is advanced via such agencies
and authorities as the goverment, the educational system, the
mass media, etc. The standard variety then becomes associ¬
ated with these institutions, the types of interactions that
most commonly occur within them, and the values or goals
they represent (Haugen 1966a).
Note that not all languages have standard varieties. Note
also, that where a standard variety does exist it does not
necessarily displace the nonstandard varieties from the lin¬
guistic repertoires of the speech community for functions
that are distinct from but complementary to those of the
standard variety. Note, additionally, that there may be
several competing standard varieties in the same speech com¬
munity. Note, finally, that hitherto nonstandard varieties
may themselves undergo standardization, whereas hithertOj
standardized varieties may undergo destandardization as their
speakers no longer view them as worthy of codification and
cultivation^ Standardization is not a property of any language
per se, but a^aracteristiclo^cietal treatment oflarLguag£,j;iyen
sufficient Societal dTversit)^and need for symbalk elaboratiorh
Another common societal view of language is that which is
concerned with its autonomy, i.e., with the uniqueness and
independence of the linguistic system, or at least of some
variety within that system. Autonomy is often of little con¬
cern to speech communities whose languages differ markedly
from each other. These may be said to be autonomous by
dint of sheer abstand or linguistic distance between them
(Kloss 1952; Kloss 1967). On the other hand, where lan¬
guages seem to be quite similar to each other phonologi-
cally, lexically, and grammatically-it may be of great con¬
cern to establish their autonomy from each other, or at least
that of the weaker from the stronger. Were such autonomy
26 SOME BASIC SOCIO ^.1NG UISTIC CONCEPTS

not to be established it might occur to some that one was

“no more than” a dialect (a regional variety) of the other, a
subservience which might become part of a rationale for
political subservience as well.
A major vehicle of fostering autonomy views concerning a
language is its standardization. The availability of dictionaries
and grammars is taken as a sure sign that a particular variety
is “really a language.” However, the availability of dic¬
tionaries and grammars not only represents autonomy, but
also cultivates and increases it by introducing new vocabulary
and stressing those phonological and grammatical alternatives
that are most different from those of any given autonomy-
threatening contrast language. “Heroes are made not bom.”
The same is true of the autonomy of genetically (historically)
related languages. Their autonomy has to be worked on. It is
not autonomy by abstand, but, rather, by ausbau (by effort,
and often by fiat or decree), and pertains particularly to then-
standard (and most particularly to their written standard)
varieties.
It is a characteristic of the newly rich to supply their own
ancestors. In a similar vein those speech communities, the
autonomy of whose standard variety is based most com¬
pletely on ausbau activity, are also most likely to be con¬
cerned with its historicity, that is, with its “respectable”
ancestry in times long past. As a result, many speech com¬
munities create and cultivate myths and genealogies concern¬
ing the origin and development of their standard varieties in
order to deemphasize the numerous components of more re¬
cent vintage that they contain (Ferguson 1959b). As a result
of the widespread preference for historicity, currently uti¬
lized (and recently liberated or standardized) varieties are
found to be derived from ancient prototypes that had largely
been forgotten, or are found to be the language of the gods,
or to have been created by the same miraculous and mysteri¬
ous forces and processes that created the speech community
itself, etc. Thus, a variety achieves historicity by coming to
be associated with some great ideological or national move-
 MAJOR TYPES OF ATTITUDE 27

ment or tradition (Fishman 1965c). Usually, historicity pro¬

vides the ex post facto rationale for functional changes that
have occurred with respect to the verbal repertoire of a
speech community.
Finally, a speech community’s behavior toward any one or
another of the varieties in its linguistic repertoire is likely to
be determined, at least in part, by the degree to which these
varieties have visible vitality, i.e., interaction networks that
actually employ them natively for one or more vital func¬
tions. The more numerous and the more important the native
speakers of a particular variety are the greater its vitality and
the greater its potential for standardization, autonomy, and
historicity. Conversely, the fewer the number and the lower
the status of the native speakers of a variety, the more it is
reacted to as if it were somehow a defective or contaminated
instrument, unworthy of serious efforts or functions, and
lacking in proper parentage or uniqueness. As usual, such
biased views are likely to be self-fulfilling in that when the
numbers and the resources of the users of a given variety
dwindle they are less likely to be able to protect its stan¬
dardization, autonomy, or historicity from the inroads of
other speech communities and their verbal repertoires and
language-enforcing resources.
Given these four widespread patterns of societal belief and
behavior toward language, it is possible to define seven dif¬
ferent kinds of varieties, depending upon their absence or
presence at any given time (Table 2). Note, however, that any
speech community may include in its repertoire a number of
such varieties which are differentiable on the basis of the four
widespread belief-and-behavior systems just discussed.
Furthermore, occupational and social class subvarieties are
likely to exist within most of the varieties listed in Table 2.
In some speech communities deference due an interlocutor
with whom one stands in a particular role relationship may
be indicated by switching from one social-class variety or
from one dialect to another. In other speech communities
this very same function may be realized by switching from a
28 SOME BASIC SOC10 Lj NGU 1ST 1C CONCEPTS

TABLE 2. The Attributes of Different Types of Language Varieties

(from Stewart 1968).

ATTRIBUTES* VARIETY-TYPE SYMBOL

1 2 3 4

+ + + + Standard S

— + + + Vernacular U

— — + + Dialect D

— — — + Creole K

— — — — Pidgin P

+ + + — Classical C

+ + — — Artificial A

*1 = standardization, 2 = autonomy, 3 = historicity, 4 - vitality

dialect to the standard variety (which latter variety, alone,

may possess formal verb forms and pronouns of respect). In
yet another speech community a switch from one language to
another (or from a dialect of one language to the standard
variety of another) may be the accepted and recognized reali¬
zation pattern for deferential interaction. While the precise
nature of the switch will depend on the repertoire available
to the speech community, switching as such and the dif¬
ferentiae and concepts by means of which it may be noted
and explained are of constant interest to sociolinguistic
method and theory.

2.3 SPEECH COMMUNITY

Speech community, like variety, is a neutral term. Unlike

other societal designations it does not imply any particular
size or any particular basis of communality. A speech com¬
munity is one all of whose members share at least a single
speech variety and the norms for its appropriate use. A
speech community may be as small as a single closed interac-
 SPEECH COMMUNITY 29

tion network, all of whose members regard each other in but

a single capacity. Neither of these limitations, however, is
typical for speech communities throughout the world and
neither is typical for those that have been studied by sociolin¬
guists.
Isolated bands and nomadic clans not only represent small
speech communities but speech communities that also ex¬
haust their members’ entire network range, while providing
little specialization of roles or statuses. Such speech com¬
munities usually possess very limited verbal repertoires in
terms of different varieties, primarily because one individual’s
life experiences and responsibilities are pretty much like
another’s. Nevertheless, such similarity is likely to be more
apparent than real. Even small and total societies are likely to
differentiate between men and women, between minors and
adults, between children and parents, between leaders and
followers. Indeed, such societies are likely to have more con¬
tact with the “outside world” than is commonly imagined,
whether for purposes of trade or exogamy (Owens 1965).
Thus, even small total societies reveal functionally differen¬
tiated hnguistic repertoires (and, not infrequently, intragroup
bilingualism as well) based upon behaviorally differentiated
interaction networks.
Such small and total (or nearly total) societies differ, of
course, from equally small or even smaller family networks,
friendship networks, interest networks, or occupational net¬
works within such larger speech communities as tribes, cities,
or countries. In the latter cases the interaction networks are
not as redundant as in the former (i.e., one more frequently
interacts with different people in one’s various roles as son,
friend, work colleague, party member, etc.). However,
varieties are needed not only by diverse small networks but
also by large networks of individuals who rarely if ever inter¬
act, but who have certain interests, views, and allegiances in
common. Thus, not only are network redundancy and net¬
work size attributes that characterize and differentiate speech
30 SOME BASIC SOC10 L'l NG U 1ST IC CONCEPTS

communities, but so is the extent to which their existence is

experiential rather than merely referential.
One of the characteristics of large and diversified speech
communities is that some of the varieties within their verbal
repertoires are primarily experientially acquired and rein¬
forced by dint of actual verbal interaction within particular
networks, while others are primarily referentially acquired
and reinforced by dint of symbolic integration within ref¬
erence networks which may rarely or never exist in any
physical sense. The “nation” or the “region” are likely to
constitute a speech community of this latter type, and the
standard (“national”) language or the regional language is
likely to represent its corresponding linguistic variety.
Many American cities present ample evidence of both of
these bases—verbal interaction and symbolic integration—for
the functioning of speech communities. Every day hundreds
of thousands of residents of Connecticut, upstate New York,
and various parts of Pennsylvania come to New York City to
work and shop. In terms of waking hours of actual face-to-
face verbal interaction these speakers of dialects that differ
from New York City English may talk more, and more fre¬
quently, to New Yorkers than they do to inhabitants of their
places of residence and to speakers of their local dialects.
How then can we explain the fact that not only do most of
them differentially utilize the markers of their local dialects
(and not only during the evenings, weekends, and holidays,
when they are at home rather than at work), but the simul¬
taneous fact that many of them can and do also employ a
more regionally neutral variety, which is their approximation
to “Standard American,” as distinct from New York City
English on the one hand and Lower Connecticut Village
English on the other? Obviously, the “Standard American”
of these commuters to New York City cannot be based on
much verbal interaction with a separate network known as
“the American people,” nor can it be based upon any other
interaction network, however referred to, whose speakers use
“Standard American” and it alone. There is no other alterna-
 SPEECH COMMUNITY 31

tive but to conclude that the speech community of “Stan¬

dard American” represents a reference group for the denizens
of Connecticut villages, while “Standard American” itself is a
variety that has the functions of “symbolic integration with
the nation” in their linguistic repertoire.
Thus, some speech communities and their linguistic reper¬
toires are preserved primarily by communication gaps that
separate them from other communities and their repertoires.
Other speech communities and their repertoires are preserved
primarily by the force of symbolic (attitudinal) integration
even in the absence of face-to-face interaction. Many speech
communities contain networks of both types. Many networks
contain both kinds of members. Societal norms that define
communicative appropriateness can apply with equal force
and regularity regardless of whether direct interaction or
symbolic integration underlies their implementation.
As mentioned earlier, the standard variety of a language is
most likely to be that variety that stands for the nation as a
whole and for its most exalted institutions of government,
education, and high culture in general. It is this variety which
comes to be associated with the mission, glory, history, and
uniqueness of an entire “people” and, indeed, it is this
variety which helps unite individuals who do not otherwise
constitute an interaction network into a symbolic speech
community or “people.” Thus it is that standard varieties and
larger-than-face-to-face speech communities are historically
and functionally interdependent. While interaction networks
of speakers of standard varieties doubtlessly do exist (literati,
scholars, social and educational elites, etc.), these are likely
to arrive at somewhat specialized usages, on the one hand, as
well as to require a nonstandard variety, on the other hand, if
they are to engage in more intimate and informal kinds of
interactions as well. Thus, the standard language per se, with¬
out further differentiation or accompaniment, is most fitted
for communication across large but nonexistent (or noninter¬
acting) networks, such as those involving the mass media,
governmental pronouncements, legal codes, and textbooks.
32 SOME BASIC SOCIO LINGU 1ST 1C CONCEPTS

The standard variety is the “safest” for those communica¬

tions in which a speaker cannot know his diversified and
numerous listeners (Joos 1959). However, the more the
communication is expected to live on over an appreciable
period of time, independently of both speaker and listener
(or sender and receiver), the more it will be viewed as archaic
(or classical) rather than merely “standard.”
A basic definitional property of speech communities is
that they are not defined as communities of those who
“speak the same language” (notwithstanding Bloomfield
1933), but rather as communities set off by density of com¬
munication or/and by symbolic integration with respect to
communicative competence regardless of the number of lan¬
guages or varieties employed (Gumperz 1964a). The
complexity of speech communities thus defined will vary
with the extent of variation in the experiential and atti-
tudinal networks which they subsume. Speech communities
can be so selected as to include greater or lesser diversity on
each of these grounds. In general the verbal repertoire of a
speech community is a reflection of its role repertoire (in
terms of both implemented and ideologized roles). This re¬
flection pertains not only to repertoire range but also to
repertoire access and fluidity.
Speech communities with a larger role repertoire reveal a
larger verbal repertoire as well (Gumperz 1962). Communi¬
ties most of whose members are alike in daily experiences
and in life aspirations will also tend to show little linguistic
range in terms of differentiable varieties. This tends to be the
case not only in the small, total communities that were men¬
tioned earlier but also, some suspect, in large, democratic,
industrialized communities of the most modern sort. Actu¬
ally, both kinds of speech communities show more repertoire
range (in terms of verbal repertoire and in terms of role reper¬
toire) than is obvious on superficial inspection. Nevertheless,
they both tend to have narrower (and less diversified) ranges
than are encountered in the stratified speech communities
 SPEECH COMMUNITY 33

that exist in intermediate societies of the traditional, non-

Westem World. Whereas the modern, open speech com¬
munity tends to reveal several varieties of the same language,
the more traditional speech community will typically reveal
varieties of several languages (see Figure 1).
These two types of speech communities are also quite
likely to differ in the extent to which their members have
access to the roles and to the varieties available in the respec¬
tive repertoires of their communities. In the more traditional
speech communities access to certain roles is severely re¬
stricted and is attained, in those cases in which access to new
roles is available, on the basis of ascription. Those whose
ancestry is inappropriate cannot attain certain new roles, re¬
gardless of their personal achievement. Similarly, access to an
expanded verbal repertoire is also severely restricted, most

FIGURE 1. Speech Communities and Verbal Repertoires (based upon

concepts of Gumperz 1964a and elsewhere)

Speech Speech Speech Speech

Societal Community Community Community Community
Domain 1 2 3 4

Home dr
School and Culture ^2 s ba s
Work s da
Government ^a
Church ba "i
(Moscow, (Mea Shearim, (Ostropol, (Ostropol,
1960) 1966) 1905) 1905)
[Russians] [Jews] [Jews] [Ukrainians]

Some communities have more obviously diversified repertoires than others

(e.g., SCi utilized three varieties of one language and one of another, whereas
SC3 utilized varieties of four different languages). Varieties that are related to
one societal domain in one SC (e.g., bj in SC2) may be associated with more
or different societal domains in another SC (e.g., in SCJ). All speakers of
varieties of a particular language do not necessarily constitute a single speech
community.
34 SOME BASIC SOCIO LI NG U 1ST 1C CONCEPTS

varieties not learned in childhood being available only to those

who can afford to devote many years of patient and pains¬
taking formal study to their acquisition. Both of these condi¬
tions are not nearly so likely to exist in modern, personal-
achievement-oriented societies, although their lack of com¬
pletely equal and open access is evident to all students of the
disadvantaged (including Negro nonstandard speech) in the
midst of America’s plenty.
In more traditional societies in which status is based on
ascription there is also likely to be more role compartmentali-
zation. Thus, not only are certain individuals barred from
enacting certain roles, but in general the rights and duties
that constitute particular roles are more distinct and the
transitions from one role to the next, for members of those
classes who may enter into them, are ritually governed, as are
the roles themselves. Such societies also tend to reveal
marked verbal compartmentalization as well (McCormack
1962). When an individual speaks language or variety A he
takes great care not to switch into B and not to slip into
traces of B, whether phonologically, lexcally, or grammati¬
cally. Each variety is kept separate and uncontaminated from
the other just as is each role. How different such compart¬
mentalization is from the fluidity of modem democratic
speech communities in which there is such frequent change
from one role to another and from one variety to another
that individuals are frequently father and pal or teacher and
colleague simultaneously or in rapid succession! The result of
such frequent and easy role shifts is often that the roles
themselves become more similar and less distinctive or clear-
cut. The same occurs in the verbal repertoire as speakers
change from one variety (or language) to another with greater
frequency and fluidity. The varieties too tend to become
more similar as the roles in which they are appropriate be¬
come more and more alike. This is particularly likely to
occur, as we shall see below, among lower-class speakers
whose mastery of the more formal roles and varieties avail-
 SPEECH COMMUNITY 35

able to their speech communities is likely to be marginal at

best.
Thus, just as varieties are characterizable by a small
number of attributes and their combinations, so is this true
of the attributes that characterize speech communities at the
most general level. The interactional basis of speech com¬
munities, their symbolic-integrative basis, their size, reper¬
toire range, repertoire access, and repertoire compartmentali-
zation are all concepts that we shall need to refer to again
and again in the pages that follow.
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 Section III

INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS:
MICRO AND MACRO

Boss Carmen, do you have a minute?

Secretary Yes, Mr. Gonzalez.
Boss I have a letter to dictate to you.
Secretary Fine. Let me get my pen and pad. I’ll be right
back.
Boss Okay.
Secretary Okay.
Boss Okay, this is addressed to Mr. William Bolger.

Secretary That’s B-o-r-g-e-r?

Boss B-o-1
Secretary Oh, oh, I see.
Boss Okay. His address is in the files.

Secretary Okay.
Boss Okay. Dear Bill, Many thanks for telling me
about your work with the Science Research Proj¬
ect. The information you gave me ought to prove
most helpful.
Secretary That was “The information you gave me ought
to prove most helpful.”

37
38 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Boss Correct.
Secretary Okay.
Boss Okay, ah. I very much appreciate the time you
gave me. Never mind, strike that out. Ah, en¬
closed are two of the forms that you let me
borrow. I’ll be sending back the data sheets very
soon. Thanks again, I hope that your hospital stay
will be as pleasant as possible and that your back
will be soon in top shape. Will soon be in top
shape. It was nice seeing you again. Sincerely,
Louis Gonzalez
Secretary Do you have the enclosures for the letter, Mr.
Gonzalez?
Boss Oh yes, here they are.
Secretary Okay.
Boss Ah, this man William Bolger got his organization
to contribute a lot of money to the Puerto
Rican parade. He’s very much for it.
^Tu fuiste a la parada?
(Did you go to the parade?)
Secretary Si, yo fui.
(Yes, I went.)
Boss ^Si?
(Yes?)
Secretary Uh huh.
Boss (Y como te estuvo?
(And how did you like it?)
Secretary Ay, lo mas bonita.
(Oh, very pretty.)
Boss Si, porque yo fui y yo nunca habia participado
en la parada y
(Yes, because I went and I had never partici¬
pated in the parade and
 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS 39

este ano me dio curiosidad por ir a ver como

era y estuvo eso
this year I became curious to go and see how it
was and that was

fenomeno. Fui con mi senora y con mis nenes y

a ellos tambien
a phenomenon. I went with my wife and my
children and they
le gusto mucho. Eh, y tuve dia bien agradable.
Ahora lo que
also liked it very much. And I had a pleasant
day. Now
me molesta a mi es que las personas cuando
viene una cosa asi,
what bothers me is that people when something
like this comes along,
la parada Puertorriquena o la fiesta de San Juan,
corren de la
the Puerto Rican parade, or the festival of San
Juan they run from
casa a participar porque es una actividad festiva,
alegre, y sin
the house to participate because it is a festive
activity, happy, and
embargo, cuando tienen que ir a la iglesia, o la
misa para pedirle . . .
then, when they have to go to church or to
mass, to ask . . .
Secretary (Laughter)
Boss A Dios entonce no van.
(God then they don’t go.)
Secretary Si, entonces no van.
(Yes, then they don’t go.)
40 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Boss Pero, asi es la vida, caramba. Do you think that

you could get
(But that’s life, you know.)
this letter out today?
Secretary Oh yes, I’ll have it this afternoon for you.
Boss Okay, good, fine then.
Secretary Okay.
Boss Okay.

If we carefully consider the above conversation it becomes

evident that it reveals considerable internal variation. Speaker
A does not always speak in the same way nor does his inter¬
locutor, Speaker B. Were it possible for us to listen to the
original tapes of this conversation, several kinds of variation
within each of them would become evident to us: variations
in speed of speaking, variations in the extent to which
Spanish phonology creeps into English discourse and vice
versa, variations in the extent to which English phonology
creeps into the Spanish discourse, etc. However, even from
the conventionally (orthographically) rendered transcription
available to us on the previous pages one kind of variation
remains exceedingly clear: that from Spanish to English or
from English to Spanish for each speaker. It is precisely be¬
cause bilingual code switching is often more noticeable than
other kinds of sociolinguistic variation that bilingualism is so
commonly examined in sociolinguistic theory and research.
However, the concepts and findings that derive from such
examinations must be provocative and illuminating for socio¬
linguistics more generally. And, indeed, that is the case, for
the societal patterning of bilingual interaction is merely an
instance (hopefully, a more obvious and, therefore, pedagogi-
cally useful instance) of the vastly more general phenomenon
of societal patterning of variation in verbal interaction.
How shall we describe or measure the phenomenon of
interest to us: societal patterning of variation in verbal inter-
 HOW SHOULD TALK BE CONTEXTUALLY DESCRIBED? 41

action? Usefully accurate description or measurement is cer¬

tainly the basic problem of every scientific field of endeavor.
Most of mankind has constantly been immersed in a veritable
ocean of crosscurrents of talk. Nevertheless, as with most
other aspects of everyday social behavior, it is only in very
recent days that man has begun to recognize the latent order
and regularity in the manifest chaos of verbal interaction that
surrounds him.

3.1 HOW SHOULD TALK BE CONTEXTUALLY DESCRIBED?

How should “talk” be contextually described in order to best

reveal or discover its social systemization (assuming that its
“basic” linguistic description is already available)? Let us be¬
gin with some passages of actual “talk,” making sure to pre¬
serve its verbatim form (preferably, by utilizing sensitive
audio and visual recording equipment) rather than merely
summarizing the content of such talk. The smallest sociolin-
guistic unit that will be of interest to us is a speech act: a
joke, an interjection, an opening remark (Schegloff 1968a), a
question, in general-a segment of talk that is also societally
recognizable and reoccurring. Speech acts are normally parts
of somewhat larger speech events, such as conversations, in¬
troductions, lectures, prayers, arguments, etc. (Hymes 1967),
which, of course, must also be societally recognizable and
reoccurring.
If we note that a switch has occurred from variety a to
variety Z?—perhaps from a kind of Spanish to a kind of En¬
glish, or from more formal English to less formal English, or
from regionally neutral, informal Spanish to Jibaro (rural)
informal Spanish-the first question that presents itself is
whether one variety tends to be used (or used more often) in
certain kinds of speech acts or events whereas the other tends
to be used (or used more often) in others. Thus, were we
aware of the speech acts recognized by bilingual Puerto Rican
youngsters in New York, we might venture to explain a
switch such as the following:
42 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

First Girl Yes, and don’t tell me that the United States is the
only one that has been able to in Puerto Rico. . . .
Boy Okay so you have a couple of people like Moscoso
and Luis Ferrer.
First Girl j Un momento!
Boy j Bueno!
First Girl ; Un momento!
Boy Have you got people capable of starting something
like . . . like General Motors?

as being related to the act of interruption or disagreement in

the midst of a somewhat specialized argument. There may be
a problem, however, when testing this interpretation, in de¬
termining the speech acts and speech events that are to be
recognized within a speech community.
Certainly, it is not appropriate to simply apply the system
of acts and events that has been determined for one speech
community in the study of another, without first deter¬
mining its appropriateness in the second community. Simi¬
larly, it is not sufficient for the investigator, no matter how
much experience he has had with the verbal behavior of a
particular speech community, merely to devise as detailed a
listing of speech acts and events as he can. Such a list runs the
decided risk of being etic rather than emic, i.e., of making far
too many, as well as behaviorally inconsequential, differentia¬
tions, just as was often the case with phonet/c vs. phonem/c
analysis in linguistics proper. An emic set of speech acts and
events must be one that is validated as meaningful via final
recourse to the native members of a speech community
rather than via appeal to the investigator’s ingenuity or intui¬
tion alone.
An emic set of speech acts and speech events is best
approximated, perhaps along a never-ending asymptote, by
playing back recorded samples of “talk” to native speakers
and by encouraging them to react to and comment upon the
reasons for the use of variety a “here” as contrasted with the
 MICROLEVEL ANALYSIS IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS 43

use of variety b “there.” The more the sensitive investigator

observes the speech community that he seeks to describe
sociolinguistically the more hunches he will have concerning
functionally different speech acts and speech events. How¬
ever, even the best hunches require verification from within
the speech community. Such verification may take various
shapes. The views of both naive and skilled informants may
be cited and tabulated as they comment upon recorded in¬
stances of variation in “talk” and as they reply to the investi¬
gator’s patient probes and queries as to “Why didn’t he say
‘Just a minute!’ instead of ‘;Momento!’? Would it have
meant something different if he had said that instead? When
is it appropriate to say ‘jMomento!’ and when is it appro¬
priate to say ‘Just a minute!’ (assuming the persons involved
know both languages equally well)?”, etc. Once the investi¬
gator has demonstrated (not merely assumed or argued) the
validity of his sets of functionally different speech acts and
events, he may then proceed to utilize them in the collection
and analysis of samples of talk which are independent of
those already utilized for validational purposes. Such, at
least, is the rationale of research procedure at this microlevel
of sociolinguistic analysis, although the field itself is still too
young and too linguistically oriented toTiave produced many
instances of such cross-validation of its social units selected
for purposes of sociolinguistic analysis.

3.2 MICROLEVEL ANALYSIS IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Sociolinguistic description may merely begin—rather than

end-with the specification and the utilization of speech acts
and events, depending on the purpose of a particular research
enterprise. The more linguistically oriented a particular study
may be, the more likely it is to remain content with micro¬
level analysis, since the microlevel in sociolinguistics is
already a much higher (i.e., a more contextual and comph-
cated) level of analysis than that traditionally employed with-
44 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

in linguistics proper. However, the more societally oriented a

particular sociolinguistic study may be, the more concerned
with investigating social processes and societal organization
per se, the more likely it is to seek successively more macro¬
level analyses. Microlevel sociolinguistics (sometimes referred
to as ethnomethodological sociolinguistics) constitutes one of
the levels within sociolinguistic inquiry (Garfinkel 1967; Gar-
finkel and Sacks 1968). The various levels do not differ in the
degree to which they are correct or accurate. They differ in
purpose and therefore in method. We can trace only a few of
the successive levels in this section, primarily in order to
demonstrate their similarities and their differences.
One of the awarenesses to which an investigator may come
after pondering a mountain of sociolinguistic data at the level
of speech acts and events is that variation in “talk” is more
common and differently proportioned or distributed between
certain interlocutors than it is between others (Schegloff
1968a, 1968b). Thus, whereas either the boy or the girl in
Conversation 2 may initiate the switch from one language to
another, it may seem from Conversation 1 that the boss is the
initiator of switching far more frequently than is the secre¬
tary. Therefore, while a great deal of switching is functionally
metaphorical, i.e., it indicates a contrast in emphasis (from
humor to seriousness, from agreement to disagreement, from
the inessential or secondary to the essential or primary, in
any interchange already underway in a particular language
variety), interlocutors may vary in the extent to which they
may appropriately initiate or engage in such switching, de¬
pending on their role relationships to each other. Note, how¬
ever, that it is necessary for a certain appropriateness to exist
between a variety and certain characteristics of the social
setting before it is possible to utilize another variety for
metaphorical or contrastive purposes.

3.3 ROLE RELATIONSHIPS

Any two interlocutors within a given speech community (or,

more narrowly, within a given speech network within a
 ROLE RELATIONSHIPS 45

Speech community) must recognize the role relationship that

ejdsts between them at any particular time. Such recognition
is part of the communality of norms and behaviors upon
which the existence of speech communities depends. Father-
son, husband-wife, teacher-pupil, clergyman-layman, em¬
ployer-employee, friend-friend: these are but some examples
of the role relationships that may exist in various (but not in
all) speech communities (Goodenough 1965). Role relation- ?
ships are implicitly recognized and accepted sets of mutual ;
rights and obligations between members of the same sociocul-y
tural system. One of the ways in which members reveal sucu
common membership to each other, as well as their recognition
of the rights and obligations that they owe toward each other,
is via appropriate variation (which, of course, may include ap¬
propriate nonvariation) of the way(s) they talk to each other.
Perhaps children should generally be seen and not heard, but
when they are heard most societies insist that they talk dif¬
ferently to their parents than they do to their friends
(Fischer 1958). One of the frequent comments about Ameri¬
can travelers abroad is that they know {at most) only one
variety of the language of the country they are visiting. As a
result, they speak in the same way to a child, a professor, a
bootblack, and a shopkeeper, thus revealing not only their
foreignness, but also their ignorance of the appropriate ways
of signaling local role relationships.
It is probably not necessary, at this point, to dwell upon
the kinds of variation in talk that may be required (or pro¬
hibited) by certain role relationships. In addition, and this
too should require no extensive discussion at this point,
whether the variation required is from one language to
another or from one geographic, social, or occupational
variety to another, the functionally differential role relation¬
ships must be emically validated rather than merely etically
enumerated. There are certainly sociolinguistic allo-roles in
most speech communities. However, two other characteriza¬
tions of role relationships do merit mention at this point,
particularly because they have proved to be useful in sociolin¬
guistic description and analysis.
46 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Role relationships vary in the extent to which their

mutual rights and obligations must or must not be continu¬
ally stressed. The king-subject role relationship may retain
more invariant steps than the shopkeeper-customer relation¬
ship. If shopkeepers and their customers may also interact
with each other as friends, as relatives, as members of the
same political party, etc., whereas kings and their subjects (in
the same speech community) may not experience a similar
degree of role range, access, and fluidity vis-a-vis each other,
then we would expect to encounter more variation in the
“talk” of two individuals who encounter each other as shop¬
keeper and customer than we would expect between two
individuals who encounter each other as king and subject. In
addition, a shopkeeper and his customer may be able to set
aside their roles entirely and interact entirely on the basis of
their individual and momentary needs and inclinations. This
may not be permissible for the king and his subjects. Thus,
we should say that a shopkeeper and his customer may en¬
gage in both personal and transactional interactions
(Gumperz 1964a), whereas the king and his subjects engage
only in transactional interactions. Transactional interactions
are those which stress the mutual rights and obligations of
their participants. Personal interactions are more informal,
more fluid, more varied.
In part, speech acts and events are differentially distrib¬
uted throughout various role relationships because personal
and transactional interactions are differentially permitted in
various role relationships. Sociolinguistics is necessarily of in¬
terest to those investigators who are concerned with deter¬
mining the functionally different role relationships that exist
within a given community. Microsociolinguistics, at least, is
concerned with the validation of such relationships, via the
demonstration of differential role access, role range, and role
fluidity, as well as via the demonstration of differential pro¬
portions of personal and transactional interaction, through
the data of “talk.” Role relationships may be used as data-
organizing units both with respect to variation in talk as well
as with respect to other variations in interpersonal behavior.
 THE SITUATION: CONGRUENT AND INCONGRUENT 47

This is the reason why role relations are so frequently ex¬

amined in sociolinguistics.

3.4 THE SITUATION: CONGRUENT AND INCONGRUENT

It has probably occurred to the reader that if the shopkeeper

and his customer are not to interact only as such, but rather
also as friends, lovers, relatives, or party members, that more
than their roles are likely to change. After all, neither the
time nor the place of the storekeeper-customer role relation¬
ship is really ideal for any of the other relationships men¬
tioned. Lovers require a time and a place of their own, and
the same is true—or, at least, is typical—for other role rela¬
tionships as well. These three ingredients (the implementa- ^
f/07TJDfLthe right_s_and duties of a particular role relationship, \
in the place (locale) most appropriate or most typical for that 1
relationship, and at the time societally defined as appropriate /
for that relationship), taken together, constitute a construct /
that has proven itself to be of great value in sociolinguistics:
the social situation (Bock 1964; see Tables 3 and 4).
The simplest type of social situation for microsociolinguis¬
tics to describe and analyze is the congruent situation in
which all three ingredients “go-together” in the culturally
expected way. This is not to say that the investigator may
assume that there is only one place and one time appropriate
for the realization of a particular role relationship. Quite the
contrary. As with the wakes studied by Bock on a Micmac
Indian Reserve, there may be various times and various places
for the appropriate realization of particular role relationships

TABLE 3. The Social Situation IBock 1964).

SITUATION: “CLASS” Time: Class Meeting

Space: Classroom Roles: + Teacher

+ Pupil
± Student-Teacher

+ indicates obligatory occurrence

± indicates optional occurrence
48 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

TABLE 4. Situation-Matrix #14: Indian Wake (Bock, 1964).

M-14 T-1 T-2 T-3 T-4 T-5

S-1: Bier s-1.1:

R-1 R-1 R-1 R-1 R-1
nucleus
Area s-1.2:
margin ±R-2 ±R-2

S-2: Front Area R-3 R-4 r-2.1

S-3: Audience ±R-2 r-2.2

R-2 R-2
Area ±R-4 R-4

S-4: Mar¬ s-4.1:

r-2.1
ginal kitchen
Area s-4.2: ±r-2.2
r-2.2
outside ±R-4

14. SC-A: Place of Wake—External distribution into 9.S-A.1: House site

(usually that occupied by deceased).
S-1: Bier Area
s-1.1: nuclus—contains coffin
s-1.2: margin-area immediately surrounding crffin
S-2: Front Area-focal region of performances during T-2, -3, and -5
S-3: Audience Area-seating area for R-2: Mourner
S-4: Marginal Areanresidual space, including
s-4.1: kitchen area
s-4.2: outside of house
14 TC-A: Time of Wake—External distribution (see discussion above).
TC-A = //T-l/T-2//:T-3/T-4://±T-5//:T-3/T-4://
T-1: Gathering Time—participants arrive at SC-A: Place of Wake
T-2: Prayer Time—saying of the Rosary by R-3: Prayer Leader
T-3: Singing Time—several hymns sung with brief pauses in between
T-4: Intermission-longer pause in singing
T-5: Meal Time-optional serving of meal (about midnight)
14 RC-A: Participant Roles-External distribution noted for each:
R-1: Corpse—from 3: RC-A: Band Member
R-2: Mourner
r-2.1: Host-member of 9.RC-A: Household Group (of deceased)
r-2.2: Other—residual category
R-3: Prayer Leader
r-3.1: Priest-from 3.R-B.1.1: Priest
r-3.2: Other-from 14.R-4
R-4: Singer-usually from 11.R-A.4: Choir Member
 THE SITUATION: CONGRUENT AND INCONGRUENT 49

(see Table 4). Nevertheless, the total number of permissible

combinations is likely to be small and small or not, there is
likely to be little ambiguity among members of the society or
culture under study as to what the situation in question is
and what its requirements are with respect to their participa¬
tion in it. As a result, if there are language usage norms with
respect to situations these are likely to be most clearly and
uniformly realized in avowedly congruent situations.
However, lovers quarrel. Although they meet in the proper
time and place, they do not invariably behave toward each
other as lovers should. Similarly, if a secretary and a boss are
required to meet in the office at 3:00 A.M. in order to com¬
plete an emergency report, it may well be difficult for them
to maintain the usual secretary-boss relationship. Finally, if
priest and parishioner meet at the Yonkers Raceway during
the time normally set aside for confessions, this must have
some impact on the normal priest-parishioner role relation¬
ship. However, in all such instances of initial incongruency
(wrong behavior, wrong time, or wrong place) the resulting
interaction-whether sociolinguistic or otherwise—is normally
far from random or chaotic. One party to the interaction of
another, if not both, reinterprets the seeming incongruency
so as to yield a congruent situation, at least phenomenologi¬
cally, for that particular encounter, where one does not exist
socioculturally.
Because of incongruent behavior toward each other lovers
may reinterpret each other as employer and employee and
the date situation is reinterpreted as a dispassionate work
situation. Because of the incongruent time, secretary and
boss may view the work situation as more akin to a date than
is their usual custom. Because of the incongruent place priest
and parishioner may pretend not to recognize each other, or
to treat each other as “old pals.” In short, after a bit of
fumbling around, in which various and varying tentative re¬
definitions may be tried out, a new congruent situation is
interpreted as existing and its behavioral and sociolinguistic
requirements are implemented (Blom and Gumperz 1968;
50 INTERACTIONALvSOCIO LINGUISTICS

Fishman 1968b). Thus, whereas bilingual Puerto^ Rican

parent^, and their children in New York are most likely to
talk to each other in Spanish at home when conversing about
family matters, they will probably speak in English to each
other in the public school building (Fishman, Cooper, and Ma
1968). As far as they are concerned these are two different
situations, perhaps calling for two different role relationships |
and requiring the utilization of two different languages or;
varieties.
Situational contrasts need not be as discontinuous as most
of our examples have thus far implied. Within a basically
Spanish-speaking situation one or another member of a bilin¬
gual speech community may still switch to English (or, in
Paraguay, to Guarani) in the midst of a speech event for
purely metaphorical purposes. Such metaphorical purposes
could not be served, however, if there were no general norm
assigning the particular situation, as one of a class of such
situations, to one language rather than to the other. However,
in contrast to the largely unilateral and fluid back-and-forth
nature of metaphorical switching (perhaps to indicate a per¬
sonal interlude in a basically transactional interaction) there
stands the more reciprocal and unidirectional nature of situa¬
tional switching. In the midst of a discussion the inter¬
locutors recognize an intense dislike for each other (or go
over from talking about baseball to talking about electrical
engineering) and both quickly change the variety of “talk”
that is employed. When friends come to view each other as
nonfriends, when mountain climbers pass beyond a certain
altitude and relative safety, when officers and their men find
themselves in an unexpected danger, it is only natural that
this situational change be evident in their sociolinguistic
usage. What has changed is far more than the topic of con¬
versation (the latter being part and parcel of appropriate role
behavior to begin with). What has changed is the definition of
the situation in which the interlocutors find themselves.
 THE TRANSITION TO MACROSOCIOLINGUISTICS 51

3.5 THE TRANSITION TO MACRO -SOCIOLINGUISTICS

The situational analysis of language and behavior represents

the boundary area between micro- and macrosociolinguistics.
The very fact that a baseball conversation “belongs” to one
speech variety and an electrical engineering lecture “belongs”
to another speech variety is a major key to an even more
generalized description of sociolinguistic variation. The very
fact that humor during a formal lecture is realized through a
metaphorical switch to another variety must be indicative of
an underlying sociolinguistic regularity, perhaps of the view
that lecturelike or formal situations are generally associated
with one language or variety whereas levity or intimacy is tied
to another (Joos 1959). The large-scale aggregative regulari¬
ties that obtain between varieties and societally recognized
functions are examined via the construct termed domain ■¥
(Fishman 1965d; Fishman 1970).
Sociolinguistic domains are societal constructs derived
from painstaking analysis and summarization of patently
congruent situations (see Fishman, Cooper, and Ma 1968, for
many examples of the extraction of emic domains via factor
analysis as well as for examples of the validation of initially
etic domains). The macrosociologist or social psychologist
may well inquire: What is the significance of the fact that
school situations and “schoolish” situations (the latter being
initiall:^ incongruent sltuafTohTreinterpreted in the direction
of their most salient component) am^related to variety a?
Frequently, it is helpful to recognize a number of behavioF
ally separate domains (behaviorally separate in that they are
derived from discontinuous social situations), all of which are
commonly associated with a particular variety or language.
Thus, in many bilingual speech communities such domains as
school,"church, professional work sphere, and government
have been verified and found to be congruent with a language
or variety that we will refer to as H (although for purely
labeling purposes we might refer to it as a or X or 1). Simi-
52 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

larly, such domains as family, neighborhood, and lower work

sphere have been validated and found to be congruent with a
language or variety that we will refer to as L (or b, or Y or 2).
All in all, the fact that a complex speech community contains
various superposed varieties—in some cases, various languages,
and in others, various varieties of the same language—is now
well documented. The existence of complementary varieties
for intragroup purposes is known as diglossia (Ferguson
1959a) and the communities in which diglossia is encoun¬
tered are referred to as diglossic. Domains are particularly
useful constructs for the macrolevel (i.e., community-wide)
functional description of societally patterned variation in
“talk” within large and complex diglossic speech communi¬
ties, about which more will be said in Section Six.
Some members of diglossic speech communities can ver¬
balize the relationship between certain broad categories of
behavior and certain broad categories of “talk.” More edu¬
cated and verbally fluent members of speech communities
can tell an investigator about such relationships at great
length and in great detail. Less educated and verbally limited
members can only grope to express a regularity which they
vaguely realize exists. However, the fact that the formulation
of a regular association between language (variety) and large-
scale situational behaviors may be difficult to come by is no
more indicative of a dubious relationship than the fact that
grammatical regularities can rarely be explicitly formulated
by native speakers is to be considered as calling the ab¬
stracted rules themselves into question.
As with all constructs (including situations, role relation-
sliips, and speech events), domains originate in the integrative
intuition of the investigator. If the investigator notes that
student-teacher interactions in classrooms, school corridors,)
school auditoriums, and school laboratories of elementary
schools, high schools, colleges, and universities are all realized;
via H as long as these interactions are focused upon educa¬
tional technicality and specialization, he may begin to sus¬
pect that these hypothetically congruent situations all belong
 THE TRANSITION TO MACROSOCIOLINGUISTICS 53

to a single (educational) domain\ If he further finds that

hypothetically incongruent situations involving an educa¬
tional and a noneducational ingredient are, by and large, ,
predictably resolved in terms of H rather than L if the third '
ingredient is an educational time, place, or role relationship,
he may feel further justified in positing an educational do- j
main. Finally, if informants tell him that the predicted Ian- :
guage or variety would be appropriate in all of the examples
he can think of that derive from his notion of the educational
domain, whereas they proclaim that it would not be appro¬
priate for examples that he draws from a contrasted domain,
then the construct is as usefully validated as is that of situa¬
tion or event—with one major difference.
Whereas particular speech acts (and speech excerpts of an
even briefer nature) can be apportioned to the speech events
and social situations in which they occurred, the same cannot
be done with respect to such acts or excerpts in relationship
to societal domains. Domains are extrapolated from the data v-
of “talk” rather than being an actual component of the pro¬
cess of talk. However, domains are as real as the very social
institutions of a speech community, and indeed they show a
marked paralleling with such major social institutions (Barker
1947). There is an undeniable difference between the social
institution, “the family,” and any particular family, but there
is no doubt that the societal norms concerning the former
must be derived from data on many instances of the latter.
Once such societal norms are formulated they can be utilized
to test predictions concerning the distributions of societally
patterned variation in talk across all instances of one domain
vs. all instances of another.
Thus domains and social situations reveal the links that
exist between micro- and macrosociolinguistics. The members
of diglossic speech communities can come to have certain
views concerning their varieties or languages because these
varieties are associated (in behavior and in attitude) with
particular domains. The H variety (or language) is considered
to reflect certain values and relationships within the speech
 54 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

community, whereas the L variety is considered to reflect

others. Certain individuals and groups may come to advocate
the expansion of the functions of L into additional domains.
Others may advocate the displacement of L entirely and the
use of H solely. Neither of these revisionist views could be
held or advocated without recognition of the reality of do¬
mains of language-and-behavior in terms of existing norms of
communicative appropriateness. The high-culture values with
which certain varieties are associated and the intimacy and
folksiness values with which others are congruent are both
derivable from domain-appropriate norms governing charac-
1 leristic verbal interaction.
! '

3.6 SOCIOLINGUISTICS: MULTILEVEL AND MULTIMETHOD

The list of constructs utilized in the sociolinguistic descrip¬

tion and analysis of samples of “talk” is far from exhausted.
We have not mentioned several of the social units long advo¬
cated by Hymes (1962) such as the participant vs. audience
roles, the purposes and the outcomes of speech events, the
tone or manner of communication, the channel of communi¬
cation employed (oral, written, telegraphic), nor have we
mentioned the social or educational class of interlocutors
(Ross 1965), or the saliency of individual vs. collective needs
(Herman 1961), etc., etc. Suffice it to say that there are
several levels and approaches to sociolinguistic description
and a host of linguistic, sociolinguistic, and societal con¬
structs within each (see Figure 2). The choice among them
depends on the particular problem at hand (Ervin-Tripp
1964). This is necessarily so. Sociolinguistics is of interest to
students of small societies as well as to students of national
and international integration. It must help clarify the change
from one face-to-face situation to another. It must also help
clarify the different language-related beliefs and behaviors of
entire social sectors and classes. In some cases the variation
between closely related varieties must be highlighted. In
 SOCIOLINGUISTICS: MULTILEVEL AND MULTIMETHOD 55

FIGURE 2. Relationships among Some Constructs Employed in Socio-

linguistic Analysis

*From Robert L. Cooper. How Can We Measure The Roles Which A Bilingual’s ,
Languages Play in His Everyday Behavior? Preprints of The International Seminar ’
on the Measurement and Description of Bihngualism. Ottawa, Canadian Commis¬
sion for Unesco, (1967), pp. 119-132.
56 INTERACTIONAL S'pC 10 LI N G U ISTICS

Other cases the variation between obviously unrelated lan¬

guages is of concern.
It would be foolhardy to demand that one and the same
method of data collection and data analysis be utilized for
such a variety of problems and purposes. It is one of the
hallmarks of scientific social inquiry that methods are
selected as a result of problem specifications rather than in¬
dependently of them. Sociolinguistics is neither methodologi¬
cally nor theoretically uniform. Nevertheless, it is gratifying
to note that for those who seek such ties the links between
micro- and macroconstructs and methods exist (as do a num¬
ber of constructs and methods that have wide applicability
through the entire range of sociolinguistics). Just as there is
no societally unencumbered verbal interaction, so are there
no large scale relationships between language and society that
do not depend on individual interaction for their realization.
Although there is no mechanical part-whole relationship
between them, micro- and macrosociolinguistics are both
conceptually and methodologically complementary.
 Section IV

SOCIETAL DIFFERENTIATION
AND REPERTOIRE RANGE

Speech communities—particularly those at the city-wide,

regional, or national levels-obviously vary in the degrees and
kinds of language diversity that they reveal. What do such
differences imply with respect to the social differentiation
and organization of the communities and networks to which
they apply? If we examine the varieties of Javanese required
by hnguistic etiquette in the communities described by
Geertz (1960), the varieties of Baghdadi Arabic described by
Blanc (1964), the varieties of Hindi or Kannada described by
Gumperz (1958) or McCormack (1960), and the varieties of
Indonesian described by Tanner (1967), it is clear that these
compose quite different kinds of repertoires than do the va¬
rieties of Norwegian described by Haugen (1961) or the va¬
rieties of American English described by Labov (1963, 1964,
1965) or by Levine and Crockett (1966). In addition, the
types of speech communities in which these varieties are en¬
countered also differ strikingly, as do the larger national or
regional units in which the communities are embedded. To
put it very briefly, the speech communities in the first cluster
seem to be much more stratified socially and to employ
much more diversified repertoires linguistically than do those
in the second. The document co-occurrence of linguistic

57
 \ «Hj
■§
sp
-Q S'
ti) ^ s-
3 .§ a -3 Si I
cu c Cl. 5
•Sis .53 oj --
5 *=>- S ^ «Sr J- S 13
;!■ I bo
3 ~ S Q ^ g* Ci, — s5U tu
•'U ^ «
O 5s ,a I ^
’H- Ci, ^ S-
CO s ^
Cl CO ^
^ ^ Si I ^ .S ~
S 'll) ^ i>» ^ S a
E ^
Cu 'O S-
Co S' "Q c S
"•J
S li.SC
o CU f3 S ^
U < -^5 -S <L c: CO ^ s: ^=1: s s

I
c -S^

'U
S'
-§
s:
Dialect of Non-Prijaji, Urbanized, Somewhat Educated Persons.

:§. s:
.3

l)
C<1

1C.
53 §3
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00
c T3 .^u
'o a '5' s-
00 -Q a 3

§ I
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s.
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cx S -S

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g
TABLE 5A.

§■
C I
cd
m m <N
 vQj
&
•Si, Si,
'S s 11
« t
.'3 s
-S = -f
.'S s
c^r -S ^ bo
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K t>o
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53
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50 Co
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5/
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c r
<0) '50 C "5 CV.. 53
^ bo
-Co 50 11
«
« «
k
I- 3
53 5U
Q
^ S
"S
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53
^
'QU
I
^

53 -2 rC 5U c
cx S c C
E
S' ^
S '<o •S, 50
3s g
S'
S '<o .53
c Co ^
53 Co
U
M
^ O..
Q *r»*
.a
i^
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CO 50
X 3
& S
3
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"C!
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1^
s s

-3
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53

'<0
g- &
•3

s
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^3 c
C
C3

2S
p)
5U
Oi CO

■§ -s; ■S3 1
50 5U 53
C ■§ a 5

(SO
c
•^ B-
o
(SO -Cl I
Dialect of the Prijajis.

c a

I50 c
I a
C 53 c .«
3 .50 '5r 5U 'Sr
O '5' a. ■S' Ci-
c S c
a 53
Co S CO

53

§ 53
TABLE 5C.

§“

cd cd
CO CO
-1!_1
 PERVASIVE LINGUISTIC DISCONTINUITY 61

heterogeneity and societal heterogeneity-when both are

examined in intragroup perspective—is a major contribution
of sociolinguistics to the study of social organization and
social change (see Table 5).

4.1 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PERVASIVE

LINGUISTIC DISCONTINUITY

Prior to the development of sociolinguistics, area dialectology

had already clearly indicated that discontinuous populations
(i.e., populations that lived at some distance from each other
or that were impeded in their communication with each
other by physical or political barriers) frequently revealed
substantial phonological and morphological differences
between their language systems. Where such differences did
not obtain despite the absence of communicational fre¬
quency and sociocultural unity, recency of settlement from a
single source or other similar unifying factors (conquest, re¬
ligious conversion, etc.) were assumed and encountered. In¬
deed, if we view the entire world as a single geographic area,
we tend to find similar (i.e., genetically related) languages
clustered contiguously or closely to each other (“language
families” are normally clustered geographically, except for
the confounding fact of colonization and distant migration).
Some parts of the world, of course, are famous for then-
concentration of highly diversified languages found in close
proximity to each other. However, these same areas are also
noted for their mountains, jungles, deserts, and rivers, i.e., for
barriers that have limited travel, commerce, and common
endeavor.
More difficult to explain are those variations in language
and behavior that are coterritorial. In such instances sheer
physical distance cannot be invoked as either a causal or a
maintenance variable for the variations encountered. In such
cases cultural and social factors alone must be examined and
they alone must be meaningfully related to the degvcc and
62 SOCIETAL DIFFERENTIATION AND REPERTOIRE RANGE

kind of language differences noted. In reviewing coterritorial

linguistic diversity throughout history it becomes clear that it
can be maintained in an extremely stable manner. Through¬
out the world—but particularly throughout the ancient and
traditional world—populations have lived side by side for
centuries without learning each other’s languages and without
significantly modifying or giving up their distinctly discon¬
tinuous repertoires. Except for the relatively few middlemen
that connect them (merchants, translators, etc.), such popula¬
tions represent distinct speech communities although they
may be citizens of the same country, of the same city, and,
indeed, of the same neighborhood. However, the main¬
tenance of such well-nigh complete linguistic and sociocul¬
tural cleavage—equal in degree and kind to that encountered
between territorially discontinuous populations—is often
indicative of population relocation sometime in the past that
has subsequently been buttressed and maintained by socio¬
cultural (including ethnic and religious) differences. Jht for¬
mer differences are responsible for the origin of the dif¬
ferences noted by Blanc (1964) between the Moslem Arabic,
Christian Arabic, and Jewish Arabic of Baghdad. The latter
differences are responsible for the maintenance of these
cleavages in as sharp a manner, or nearly so, as initially estab¬
lished.
While it may often be relatively difficult to overcome the
cleavage between separate but coterritorial speech communi¬
ties, it is not impossible to do so. The forced conversion of
various Jewish and Christian communities during certain
periods of Islamic rule, the urban-industrial assimilation of
hitherto rural or small-town immigrants and their children in
the United States (Nahirny and Fishman 1965, Fishman
1965a, 1965e, 1966c), the very similar assimilation of tribal
populations moving to Wolof-speaking Dakar (Tabouret-Kel-
ler 1968), the Hellenization and Romanization of many “bar¬
barian” elites in ancient Rome and Alexandria, the conver¬
gence between illiterate speakers of Marati and Kannada in
India (Gumperz 1967)-these are all examples of the fusing
 MORE MARGINAL SYSTEMATIC DISCONTINUITY 63

into one of populations that originally functioned as largely

separate though coterritorial speech communities. Con¬
versely, the mutual alienation of populations that originally
considered themselves to be united can create fargoing lin¬
guistic differences between them where none, or few, existed
previously. In general, the more fargoing the linguistic dif¬
ferences between any two coterritorial populations (i.e., the
more the differences are basically grammatical-syntactic and
morphological-rather than primarily phonological or lexi¬
cal), the more their linguistic repertoires are compartmenta¬
lized from each other so as to reveal little if any interference,
and the more they reveal functionally different verbal reper¬
toires in terms of the sociolinguistic units reviewed in Section
4, above—then the greater the interactional and sociocultural
gap between the speech communities involved.

4 2 MORE MARGINAL SYSTEMATIC DISCONTINUITY

However, most coterritorial populations that differ in verbal

repertoire cannot be considered fully separate speech com¬
munities, even if the differences between them can be con¬
sidered as basically geographic in origin. There are very many
areas today, primarily urban in nature, where subpopulations
that differ in social class, religion, or ethnic affiliation never¬
theless view themselves as sharing many common norms and
standards and where these subpopulations interact suf¬
ficiently (or are sufficiently exposed to common educational
institutions and media) to be termed a single speech com¬
munity. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the linguistic
differences between such sociocultural subpopulations (or
networks) within the same speech community are linguisti¬
cally marginal (i.c., lexical and, to a lesser degree, morpholog¬
ical and phonological) rather than syntactic and all-embrac¬
ing. It is clear that the social-class variation that exists in New
York City English is of this kind rather than of the kind that
develops between clearly separate, noninteracting, and
64 SOCIETAL DI F F E,R E N Tl AT 10 N AND REPERTOIRE RANGE

mutually alienated speech communities. One of the surest

indications of this is the fact that (if we delete features attrib- .
utable to Southern Negro, Puerto Rican, and other recent
geographically derived differences) few of the characteristic'
phonological features of lower-class speech in New York are '
entirely absent from the speech of other classes in New York
City, just as few of the characteristic phonological features of
irs tipper-class speech are entirely lacking from the lower-class
speech of that city. What does differentiate between the
social classes in New York is the degree to which certain
phonological variables are realized in certain ways on particu¬
lar occasions rather than their complete absence from the
repertoire of any particular class.
•Labo^ recent studies of the phonological correlates of
social stratification (1964, 1965, 1966a, 1966b, 1968) illus¬
trate this point. In one of his studies (1964) Labov gathered
four different samples of speech (each by a different method
calculated to elicit material approximating a different kind of
speech situation) from four different social classes of infor¬
mants. Studying such variables as th (as in thing, through), eh
the height of the vowel in bad, ask, half, dance, r (the pres¬
ence or absence of final and preconsonantal /r/) and oh (the
height of the vowel in off, chocolate, all, coffee) Labov-
found that all social classes yielded some values of each vari- ,
able in nearly every speech situation (see Figure 3). However, ;
the differences between the social classes remained clear ^
enough. Lower-class speakers were less likely to pronounce
the fricative form of the [®] than were working-class
speakers; working-class speakers, less likely to pronounce it
than lower-middle-class speakers; lower-middle-class speakers,
less likely to yield it than upper-middle-class speakers.
Speakers of all classes were more likely to pronounce the
standard fricative form (rather than the substandard affricate
[t ] or lenis stop [t]) in reading word lists than they were
when reading passages; more likely to pronounce it when
reading passages than when being interviewed (= careful
speech); more likely to pronounce it when being interviewed
 MORE MARGINAL SYSTEMATIC DISCONTINUITY 65
Average (TH) Index Scores

casual careful reading word

speech speech style hsts
Contextual Style
FIGURE 3A. Class Stratification Diagram for (th). (Labov 1964)
Socio-economic class groups
SEC 0|
lower class

9-31
working class

6-8 lower middle class

Average (R) Index Scores

9 upper middle class

casual careful reading word minimal

speech speech style lists pairs
Contextual Style
FIGURE 3B. Class Stratification Diagram for (r). (Labov 1964)
66 SOCIETAL DIFFERENTIATION AND REPERTOIRE RANGE
\

than when recounting “a situation where you thought you

were in serious danger of being killed” (= casual speech).
This may be considered a hallmark of social-class dif¬
ferences in speech where the classes as a whole are still mem¬
bers of the same speech community. As long as individuals in
each class can differ in repertoire, depending on their per¬
sonal opportunities and experiences with respect to interac¬
tion with various speech networks, there can be no complete
discontinuity in repertoires, no complete freezing of social-
class position, and no overriding alienation into separate re¬
ligious, ethnic, or other relatively fixed and immutable
speech communities.
Of course, not all variables yield such dramatic and clear-
cut social class differences as those found in connection with
th in New York. With respect to r, eh, and oh Labov’s data
reveal much more similarity between the several social
classes, although the differences between contexts and
between classes remain quite clear. Labov’s data also reveal a
recurring reversal with respect to the lower-middle-class per¬
formance on word and passage reading lists. This reversal,
dubbed hypercorrection, shows the lower middle class to be
more “correct” (more careful, more inclined to utilize the
standard or cultured pronunciation) than is the upper middle
class at its most correct or careful. Such a reversal may well
indicate a variable that has become a stereotype rather than
merely a marker of class position. As such it tends to be used
(or overused) by those who are insecure about their social
position, i.e., by those who are striving to create a more
advantageous social position for themselves in a speech com¬
munity in which upward social mobility seems to be possible.
This explanation is not dissimilar from that which Labov
utilized to explain observed differences in centralization of
/ai/ and /au/ in Martha’s Vineyard (1963). Such centraliza¬
tion was most common among minority-group members (of
Portuguese and Indian extraction) who sought to stress their
positive orientation to Martha’s Vineyard, rather than among
the old Yankees, whose feelings toward the Vineyard were
 nonproletarians of all regions, UNITE! 67

more low-keyed and required no linguistic underscoring.

Whether consciously employed or not the “Pygmalian effect
in language is a striking indicator of reference group behavior
and of social aspirations more generally (Ross 1956).

4.3 NONPROLETARIANS OF ALL REGIONS, UNITE!

In a relatively open and fluid society there will be few charac¬

teristics of lower-class speech that are not also present (albeit
to a lesser extent) in the speech of the working and lower
middle classes. Whether we look to phonological features
such as those examined by Labov or to morphological units
such as those reported by Fischer (1958) (Fischer studied the
variation between -in ’ and -ing for the present participle ending,
i.e., runnin’ vs. running—and found that the former realiza¬
tion was more common when children were talking to each
other than when they were talking to him, more common
among boys than among girls, and more common among
“typical boys” than among “model boys”), we find not a
clear-cut cleavage between the social classes but a difference
in rate of realization of particular variants of particular van-
ables for particular contexts. Even the widely publicized dis¬
tinction between the “restricted code” of lower-class
speakers and the “elaborated code” of middle-class speakers
(Bernstein 1964, 1966) is of this type, since Bernstein in¬
cludes the cocktail party and the religious service amor^ the
social situations in which restricted codes are realized. Thus,
even in the somewhat more stratified British setting the mid¬
dle class is found to share some of the features of what is
considered to be “typically” lower-class speech. Obvious y
then “typicality,” if it has any meaning at all m relatively
open societies, must refer largely to repertoire range rather
than to unique features of the repertoire.
Those speech networks with the widest range of expe-
riences, interactions, and interests are also those that have the
greatest linguistic repertoire range. In many speech communi-
68 SOCIETAL DIFFERENTIATION AND REPERTOIRE RANGE

ties these networks are likely to be in one or another of the

middle classes, since some networks within these classes are
most likely to maintain direct contact with the lower and
working classes below them (in employer-employee, teacher-
pupil, and other role relationships), as well as with the upper
class above them (in educational, recreational, and cultural
interactions). However, whereas the repertoire ranges of the
upper and lower classes are likely to be equally discontinuous
(even if restricted), there is likely to be a very major distinc¬
tion between them if the larger speech community (the re¬
gion, the country) is considered. Lower classes tend to be(
regionally and occupationally separated from each other to a
far greater extent than do upper and middle classes (Gumperz
1958). Thus there may well be several different lower-class
varieties in a country (depending on regional and on occupa¬
tional or other specializations), while at the same time upper
and upper-middle-class speech may attain greater uniformity
and greater regional neutrality. The more advantaged classes
travel more frequently, engage in joint enterprises more fre¬
quently, control the agencies of language uniformation
(schools, media, language-planning agencies, and government
per se). They more quickly arrive at a common standard, at
least for formal occasions, than do the lower classes, who re¬
main fragmented and parochial. Differences such as these are
illustrated in Nancy Tanner’s case study of an Indonesian elite
group (1967). Whereas the lower classes speak only their local
ethnic language, the middle and upper classes also speak
several varieties of Indonesian (including a regionally neutral
variety that is least influenced by local characteristics), and
the elites speak English and Dutch as well. One can predict
that as these elites lose their local ties and affiliations and
assume Pan-Indonesian roles, establishing speech communi¬
ties of their own in Djakarta and in a few other large cities,
their need for local languages and for locally influenced and
informal Indonesian will lessen and their stylistic variation
will proceed, as it has with elites in England, France,
 DIVERSIFICATION VS. M ASSIF IC AT 10 N 69

Germany, Russia, and elsewhere in the world, via contrasts

with foreign tongues (see Figure 4).

4.4 DIVERSIFICATION VS. MASSIFICATION

One further consideration deserves at least brief attention in

our review of societal differentiation and language variation,
namely, the common view that there is a trend toward over¬
all uniformation, in lanugage and in other social behavior, as
industrialization progresses (Bell 1961; Boulding 1963;
Hertzler 1965; Hodges 1964). It is undeniable that life in
urbanized and industrial countries is in some ways more uni¬
form than it is in countries where local and regional partic¬
ularisms remain relatively untouched. Nevertheless, it seems
to be erroneous to think of preindustrial rural heterogeneity
and industrial urban homogeneity as either accurate or
mutually exclusive designations. Both stages of development
seem to foster as well as to inhibit certain kinds of uniforma-

FIGURE 4. Functional Specialization of Codes in Indonesia and

(Tanner 1967)
70 SOCIETAL DIFFERENTIATION AND REPERTOIRE RANGE

tion and differentiation, in language as well as in other

aspects of behavior.
Certainly, the preindustrial rural society is not so inter¬
nally heterogeneous as is the urban society with its variety of
classes, religions, ethnic groups, and interest groups. Thus,
the supposedly uniformizing effect of urbanization and in¬
dustrialization must pertain to interregional or interurban
comparisons rather than to intraurban or intralocal ones.
Nevertheless, the best available evidence indicates that no
trend toward interregional homogeneity in religion, pohtics,
or other generalized behaviors is apparent in the United
States (Glenn 1966, 1967a, 1967b), nor are such trends
apparent in other countries, such as England, France, Hol¬
land, or Belgium, that have been industrialized or urbanized
for the greatest length of time. There the differences in
values, tastes, and social and political orientations between
manual and nonmanual workers seem to be as great or greater
than they are today in the United States (Hamilton 1965;
Bonjean 1966; Schnore 1966; Broom and Glenn 1966,
etc.).
At the language level both uniformation and differentia¬
tion are found to go on simultaneously, indicative of the fact
that the traditional and the modern are frequently combined
into new constellations rather than displaced one by the
other. Uniformation pressures seem to be strongest in con¬
junction with only certain varieties within a speech com¬
munity’s verbal repertoire as well as in conjunction with only
some of the interaction networks of that community. The
language variety associated with school, government, and in¬
dustry tends to be adopted differentially, the degree of its
adoption varying with the degree of interaction in these do¬
mains. Not only need such adoption not be displacive (partic¬
ularly when populations remain in their former places of
residence), but-even though the adoption may be quite uni¬
form and official for an entire country—it may remain an
entirely passive rather than an active component in the reper¬
toire of many interaction networks. Thus, even though televi-
 DIVERSIFICATION VS. M ASSIF IC AT 10 N 71

sion viewing and radio listening are most frequent and pro¬
longed among the lower classes, their overt repertoires seem
to be little influenced by such viewing or listening.
Finally, it should be recognized that urbanization may
also foster certain kinds of differentiation. Whereas the num¬
ber of different etlmic groups (and, therefore, the number of
mutually exclusive language groups) may decline, new social
differentiations and new occupational and interest groups
normally follow in the wake of industrialization. These latter
commonly develop sociolects and specialized usages of then-
own, thus expanding the repertoires of many speakers. Even
the rise of languages of wider communication frequently re¬
sults in differentiation rather than in uniformation. The
spread of English as a second language in the past fifty years
has resulted in there being more varieties of English today
(including Indian English, East African English, Franglais,
Spanglish, and others) rather than less. It is, of course, true
that certain languages, now as in the past, are in danger of
dying out. Nevertheless, others, frequently regarded as “mere
varieties” rather than as full-fledged languages, are constantly
being “born” in terms of differentiating themselves within
the linguistic repertoires of certain interaction networks and,
at times, of entire speech communities. Modernization is a
complex phenomenon. While it depresses the status and
decreases the number of speakers of certain varieties (e-g-»
recent years; Frisian, Romansch, Landsmal, Yiddish), it raises
the status and increases the speakers of others (Macedonian,
Neo-Melanesian, Indonesian, Swahili, etc.).
Our own American environment is an atypical example. It
reveals the uniformation that results from the rapid urbaniza¬
tion and industrialization oi dislocated populations. We must
not confuse the American experience with that of the rest of
the world (Greenberg 1965). In addition we must come to rec¬
ognize that American uniformation, whether in speech or in
diet, is a surface phenomenon. It is an added variety to the
repertoires that are still there and that are still substantial if
we but scratch a little deeper (Fishman 1967).
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 Section V

SOCIETAL BILINGUALISM:
STABLE AND TRANSITIONAL

Societal bilingualism has been referred to so many times in

the previous pages that it is time that we paused to consider
it in its own right rather than as a means of illustrating more
general sociolinguistic phenomena. The psychological litera¬
ture on bilingualism is so much more extensive than its socio¬
logical counterpart that workers in the former field have
often failed to establish contact with those in the latter. It is
the purpose of this section to relate these two research tradi¬
tions to each other by tracing the interaction between then-
two major constructs: bilingualism (on the part of psycholo¬
gists and psycholinguists) and diglossia (on the part of
sociologists and sociolinguists).

5.1 DIGLOSSIA

In the few years that have elapsed since Ferguson (1959a)

first advanced it, the term diglossia has not only become
widely accepted by sociolinguists and sociologists of lan¬
guage, but it has been further extended and refined. Initially
it was used in connection with a society that recognized two
(or more) languages for introsocietal communication. The use

73
 74 SOCIETAL BILINGUALISM: STABLE AND TRANSITIONAL

within a single society of several separate codes (and then-

stable maintenance rather than the displacement of one by
the other over time) was found to be dependent on each
code’s serving functions distinct from those considered
appropriate for the other code. Whereas one set of behaviors,
attitudes, and values supported, and was expressed in, one
language, another set of behaviors attitudes, and values sup¬
ported and was expressed in the other. Both sets of be¬
haviors, attitudes, and values were fully accepted as culturally
legitimate and complementary (i.e., nonconflictual) and in¬
deed, little if any conflict between them was possible in view
of the functional separation between them. This separation
was most often along the lines of an H(igh) language, on the
one hand, utilized in conjunction with religion, education,
and other aspects of high culture, and an L(ow) language, on
the other hand, utilized in conjunction with everyday pur¬
suits of hearth, home, and lower work sphere. Ferguson
spoke of H as “superposed” because it is normally learned
later and in a more formal setting than L and is thereby super¬
imposed on it.
To this original edifice others have added several signifi¬
cant considerations. Gumperz (1961, 1962, 1964a, 1964b,
1966) is primarily responsible for our greater awareness that
diglossia exists not only in multilingual societies which offi¬
cially recognize several “languages,” and not only in societies
that utilize vernacular and classical varieties, but also in
societies which employ separate dialects, registers, or func¬
tionally differentiated language varieties of whatever kind. He
has also done the lion’s share of the work in providing the
conceptual apparatus by means of which investigators of
multilingual speech communities seek to discern the societal
patterns that govern the use of one variety rather than
another, particularly at the level of small group interaction.
Fishman (1964, 1965a, 1965c, 1965d, 1965e, 1966a,
1968c), on the other hand, has attempted to trace the main¬
tenance of diglossia as well as its disruption at the national or
societal level. In addition he has attempted to relate diglossia
to psychologically pertinent considerations such as com-
 BOTH DIGLOSSIA AND Bl LINGUALISM 75

pound and coordinate bilingualism (1965b). The present sec¬

tion represents an extension and integration of these several
previous attempts.
For purposes of simplicity it seems best to represent the
possible relationships between bilingualism and diglossia by
means of a fourfold table such as that shown in Figure 5.

5.2 SPEECH COMMUNITIES CHARACTERIZED BY

BOTH DIGLOSSIA AND BILINGUALISM

The first quadrant of Figure 5 refers to those speech com¬

munities in which both diglossia and bilingualism are wide¬
spread. At times such communities comprise an entire nation,
but of course this requires extremely widespread (if not all-
pervasive) bilingualism, and as a result there are really few
nations that are fully bilingual and diglossic. An approxima¬
tion to such a nation is Paraguay, where more than half of
the population speaks both Spanish and Guarani (Rubin
1962, 1968). A substantial proportion of the formerly mono¬
lingual rural population has added Spanish to its linguistic
repertoire in connection with matters of education, religion,
government, and high culture (although in the rural areas
social distance or status stressing more generally may still be
expressed in Guarani). On the other hand, the vast majority
of city dwellers (being relatively new from the country)

FIGURE 5. The Relationships Between Bilingualism and Diglossia

DIGLOSSIA

BILINGUALISM ^

1. Both diglossia 2. Bilingualism

+ without diglossia
and bilingualism

3. Diglossia without 4. Neither diglossia

bilingualism nor bilingualism
76 SOCIETAL BILINGUALISM: STABLE AND TRANSITIONAL

maintain Guarani for matters of intimacy and primary group

solidarity, even in the midst of their more newly acquired
Spanish urbanity (see Figure 6). Note that Guarani is not an
“official” language (i.e., recognized and utilized for purposes
of government, formal education, the courts, etc.) in Para¬
guay, although it was finally recognized as a “national lan¬
guage” at the 1967 constitutional convention. It is not un¬
common for the H variety alone to be recognized as
“official” in diglossic settings without this fact threatening

FIGURE 6. National Bilingualism in Paraguay: Ordered Dimensions in

the Choice of Language in a Diglossic Society.

Location

Rural-Guarani Non-Rural

F ormality-Informality

Formal-Spanish Non-Formal

i
Intimate

Non-Intimate Intimate
Spanish
i
Seriousness of Discourse

Non-Serious Serious
Guarani

' I

First Language Learned

(Joan Rubin Predicted Language Proficiency
1968) Sex
 BOTH DIGLOSSIA AND BILINGUALISM 77

the acceptance or the stability of the L variety \vithin the

speech community. However, the existence of a single “offi¬
cial” language should not divert the investigator from recog¬
nizing the fact of widespread and stable multilingualism at
the levels of societal and interpersonal functioning (see Table
6).
Below the level of nationwide functioning there are many
more examples of stable diglossia co-occurring with wide¬
spread bilingualism. The Swiss-German cantons may be men¬
tioned, since their entire population of school age and older
alternates between High German (H) and Swiss German (L)
each with its own firmly established and highly valued func¬
tions (Ferguson 1959a; Weinreich, U. 1951, 1953). Tradi¬
tional (pre-World War I) Eastern European Jewish males com¬
municated in Hebrew (H) and Yiddish (L). In more recent
days many of their descendents have continued to do so in
various countries of resettlement, even wliile adding to their
repertoire a Western language (notably English) in certain
domains of intragroup communication as well as for broader
intergroup contacts (Fishman 1965a, 1965e; Weinreich, U.
1953; Weinreich, M. 1953). This development differs signifi-

TABLE 6. Linguistic Unity and Diversity, by World Region.

No. of Countries by Percent of Population Speaking Main Language

REGION 90- 80- 70- 60- 50- 40- 30- 20- 10- Total
100 89 79 69 59 49 39 29 19 10-100%

17 4 2 2 2 27
Europe
5 3 4 3 1 4 1 21
East and South Asia
2 2
Oceania*
Middle East and
8 6 2 3 1 2 22
Northern Africa
Tropical and
3 2 5 8 7 5 3 33
Southern Africa
15 6 2 2 1 26
The Americas
50 19 8 10 11 16 8 6 3 131
World Total

Source.'Table 1 (Rustow, D. 1967). ..... ,, it.!

♦Not including New Guinea, for which no breakdown by individual languages was available
78 SOCIETAL BILINGUALISM: STABLE AND TRANSITIONAL

cantly from the traditional Eastern European Jewish pattern

in which males whose occupational activities brought them
into regular contact with various strata of the non-Jewish
coterritorial population utilized one or more coterritorial lan¬
guages (which involved H and L varieties of their own, such
as Russian, German, or Polish on the one hand, and
Ukrainian, Byelorussian, or “Baltic” varieties, on the other),
but did so for intergroup purposes almost exclusively. A
similar example is that of upper and upper-middle-class males
throughout the Arabic world who use classical (Koranic)
Arabic for traditional Islamic studies, vernacular (Egyptian,
Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, etc.) Arabic for informal conversa¬
tion, and, not infrequently, also a Western language (French
or English, most usually) for purposes of intragroup scientific
or technological communication (Blanc 1964; Ferguson
1959a; Nader 1962).
All of the foregoing examples have in common the
existence of a fairly large and complex speech community, so
that its members have available to them both a range of
compartmentalized roles as well as ready access to these roles.
If the role repertoires of these speech communities were of
lesser range, then their linguistic repertoires would also be-
(come) more restricted in range, with the result that one or
more separate languages or varieties would be(come)
superflous. In addition, were the roles not compart¬
mentalized, i.e., were they not kept separate by dint of
association with quite separate (though complementary)
values, domains of activity, and everyday situations, one lan¬
guage (or variety) would displace the other as role and value
distinctions merged and became blurred. Finally, were wide¬
spread access not available to the range of compartmentalized
roles (and compartmentalized languages or varieties), then
the bilingual population would be a small, privileged caste or
class (as it is or was throughout most of traditional India or
China) rather than a broadly based population segment.
 BOTH DIGLOSSIA AND BILINGUALISM 79

These observations must lead us to the conclusion that

many modern speech communities that are normally thought
of as monolingual are, rather, marked by both diglossia and
bilingualism, if their several registers are viewed as separate
varieties or languages in the same sense as the examples listed
above. Wherever speech communities exist whose speakers
engage in a considerable range of roles (and this is coming to
be the case for all but the extremely upper and lower levels
of complex societies), wherever access to several roles is en¬
couraged or facilitated by powerful social institutions and
‘ processes, and finally, wherever the roles are clearly dif¬
ferentiated (in terms of when, where, and with whom they
are felt to be appropriate), both diglossia and bilingualism
may be said to exist. The benefit of this approach to the
topic at hand is that it provides a single theoretical frame¬
work for viewing bilingual speech communities and speech
communities whose linguistic diversity is realized through
varieties not (yet) recognized as constituting separate “lan¬
guages.” Thus, rather than becoming fewer in modern times,
the number of speech communities characterized by diglossia
and the widespread command of diversified linguistic reper¬
toires has increased greatly as a consequence of moderniz¬
ation and growing social complexity (Fishman 1966b). In
such communities each generation begins anew on a mono¬
lingual or restricted repertoire base of hearth and home and
must be rendered bilingual or provided with a fuller reper¬
toire by the formal institutions of education, religion, govern¬
ment, or the work sphere. In diglossic-bilingual speech com¬
munities children do not attain their full repertoires at home
or in their neighborhood play groups. Indeed, those who
most commonly remain at home or in the home neighbor¬
hood (the preschool young and the postwork old) are most
likely to be functionally monolingual, as Lieberson’s tables
on French-English bilingualism in Montreal amply reveal (see
Table 7).
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13
a>
i-M
H-*
G 00 -H VO 00
O ^ ■rf m CO (N (N
s

c
3
73
t-H
vqinov-^inoqavvqtNQ''^
<u Ov in-H^rni-Ir^oiri—HOOTf
>
13
I
XxX.
o
Percentage Bilingual, by Age and Sex, Montreal Area, 1931-61.

Ln
4-»
/'/‘/yl ///M
G CO VO
O Ov Tj-oo^TfcnoN'^^r^Tfi—i
s

G
G
'G
1-1
<D

> VO iOOv'3-vO-<^r-~COvO(N p p
Ov (N0v(N0\0\0vior0r''(N •vt
o m VO VO «o vio ■'t
(S'^io'/ovovoiriio

■//////
G
O
B
0)
>-N
>o fc5c'~i/oppp-^t<for'{cs
G Ov coovOO'^o6odcsr~avfs
o I
P P VO VO wo •Jf
13
o1-N
4-»
G
Ov CO
K / / / /"/
r-; »o vo‘jr-fcNpr-pppp
iri '^(N-Ht^OOco’OCOOvCO
O iCNmvOVOvOVOUO'v^rrl-
s

c
3
•O
0) t> p (N p p p r-- p
> ov <N I/O p 00 CO o CO Ov (N
VO VO IT)
13
<D
Ui
(Lieberson 1965).

G
CO O _ p Tj- Tt p p p p p
O Ov w Ti- od CO oi r~ ^ r4 Ov C'' vd -H
^rj-vovovovoioioinuo
TABLE 7.

4>
eo
<
OuoOi/oommvnioiAo
^^(NCNco'vtvnvor^
 DIGLOSSIA WITHOUT BILINGUALISM 81

5.3 DIGLOSSIA WITHOUT BILINGUALISM

\

Departing from the co-occurrence of bilingualism and

' diglossia we come first to polities in which diglossia obtains,
whereas bilingualism is generally absent (quadrant 3). Here
we find two or more speech communities united politically,
religiously, and/or economically into a single functioning unit
notwithstanding the sociocultural cleavages that separate
them. At the level of this larger (but not always voluntary)
unity, two or more languages or varieties must be recognized
as obtaining. However one (or both) of the speech com¬
munities involved is (are) marked by such relatively im¬
permeable group boundaries that for “outsiders” (and this
may well mean all those not born into the speech com¬
munity, i.e., an emphasis on ascribed rather than on achieved
status) role access and linguistic access are severely restricted.
At the same time linguistic repertoires in one or both groups
are limited due to role specialization.
Examples of such situations are not hard to find (see, e.g.,
the many instances listed by Kloss 1966). Pre-World War I
European elites often stood in this relationship with their
countrymen, the elites speaking French or some other
fashionable H tongue for their intragroup purposes (at various
times and in various places; Danish, Salish, Provencal, Rus¬
sian, etc.) and the masses speaking another, not necessarily
linguistically related, language for their intragroup purposes.
Since the majority of elites and the majority of the masses
never interacted with one another they did not form a single
speech community (i.e., their linguistic repertoires were dis¬
continuous) and their intercommunications were via trans¬
lators or interpreters (a certain sign of intragroup monolin-
gualism). Since the majority of the elites and the majority of
the masses led lives characterized by extremely narrow role
repertoires, their linguistic repertoires also were too narrow
to permit widespread societal bilingualism to develop. Never¬
theless, the body politic in all of its economic and national
manifestations tied these two groups together into a “unity”
82 SOCIETAL BILINGgALISM; STABLE AND TRANSITIONAL

that revealed an upper and a lower class, each with a language

appropriate to its own restricted concerns. Some have sug¬
gested that the modicum of direct interaction that does occur
between servants and masters who differ in mother tongue
brings into being the marginal languages (pidgins) for which
such settings are known.
Thus, the existence of national diglossia does not imply
widespread bilingualism among rural or recently urbanized
African groups (as distinguished from somewhat more
Westernized populations in those settings); or among most
lower-caste Hindus, as distinguished from their more fortu¬
nate compatriots the Brahmins, or among most lower-class
French Canadians, as distinguished from their upper and
upper-middle-class city cousins, etc. In general, this pattern is
characteristic of polities that are economically underde¬
veloped and unmobilized, combining groups that are locked
into opposite extr-emes of the social spectrum and, therefore,
groups that operate within extremely restricted and dis¬
continuous linguistic repertoires (Friederich 1962). Obvi¬
ously, such polities are bound to experience language prob¬
lems as their social patterns alter in the direction of indus¬
trialization^ widespread literacy and education, democratiza¬
tion, and modernization more generally. Since few polities
that exhibit diglossia without bilingualism developed out of
prior sociocultural consensus or unity, any educational,
political, or economic development experienced by their
lower classes is likely to lead to secessionism or to demands
for equality for their submerged languages. The linguistic
states of Eastern Europe and India, and the language prob¬
lems of Wales, Canada, and Belgium stem from origins such as
these. This is the pattern of development that may yet con¬
vulse modern West African nations if their de-ethnicized
Westernized elites continue to fail to foster widespread and
stable bilingual speech communities that incorporate the
masses and that recognize both the official language of wider
communication and the local languages of hearth and
home.
 BILINGUALISM WITHOUT DIGLOSSIA 83

5.4 BILINGUALISM WITHOUT DIGLOSSIA

We turn next to those situations in which bilingualism ob¬

tains, whereas diglossia is generally absent (quadrant 2). Here
we see even more clearly than before that bilingualism is
essentially a characterization of individual linguistic versatil¬
ity whereas diglossia is a characterization of the societal allo¬
cation of functions to different languages or varieties. Under
what circumstances do bilinguals function without the bene¬
fit of a well-understood and widely accepted social consensus
as to which language is to be used between which inter¬
locutors, for communication concerning what topics or for
what purposes? Under what circumstances do the varieties or
languages involved lack well-defined or protected separate
functions? Briefly put, these are circumstances of rapid social
change, of great social unrest, of widespread abandonment of
prior norms before the consolidation of new ones. Children
typically become bilingual at a very early age, when they are
still largely confined to home and neighborhood, since their
elders (both adults and school aged) carry into the domains
of intimacy a language learned outside its confines. Formal
institutions tend to render individuals increasingly monolin¬
gual in a language other than that of hearth and home.
Ultimately, the language of school and government replaces
the language of home and neighborhood precisely because it
provides status in the later domains as well (seeTables 8 and 9 ).
Many studies of bilingualism and intelligence or of bilin¬
gualism and school achievement have been conducted within
the context of bilingualism without diglossia (for a review see
Macnamara 1966), often without sufficient understanding on
the part of investigators that this was but one of several
possible contexts for the study of bilingualism. As a result,
many of the purported “disadvantages” of bilingualism have
been falsely generalized to the phenomenon at large rather
than related to the absence or presence of social patterns
which reach substantially beyond bilingualism (Fishman
1965b; 1966a).
 4-> r^ P p p
I id so vd CN
° s
E ^
<N m
CN o
CO

*Data reported by parents. The German and Polish parents studied were primarily second-generation individuals. The Jewish and Ukranian parents
1 (N

c 1
.2 c
o P ON P Tf CO p
r4 d id so
c3 cr »—1 m CN CO
ID
Ui VO iiO 00 o CO CO
Qh z 1 (N
TABLE 8. Frequency of Mother Tongue Use in Conversations by Oldest and Youngest Children of Four Ethnic

•4-* CO ro p P p rn p o
o ^ VO ON d vd d
E >
On 00 00
VO <N
in rs
O lO
CO in
Tj-
z <N CN
•4-* (N p p p rn p o
CO id id vd 00 id d
i ^
^ a>
(N CO
VO 1 irj
VO so
00
00 00
CN
< iz: z CN CN CN

studied were primarily first-generation individuals. All parents were ethnic cultural or organizational “leaders.”
X c
C/3 <D CN r-; oo os
=3 ON vd id cd 1 1
CJ* CN CN »—I (N
cu o
tJ- in 0\
tXn z ! 1
-4-^ CO VO p 00 p P
O ^ !> 00 ON Ov 0\ id d
1—( CN
E &
rf“i CN
liO CN VO
1
CO CO
z CN

o O) p cn p p
CO
d d CN T—1 id Ti-
I ^ m io iO
r--
00
o
r-
Tj-
ON
1—1
ON
00
cn CN CO ro CN

4=1 -4-J
CO c
<D o p p r-; p p
=3 d Tf 00 (N id
CO CO CO fN
ID
i-4 ON cn ON o
z CN
•4^ CO
o P 00
o ^ 1 1 i 1
E ^
d id Ov
<N
z VO <n iO 1 1 1 1
+-» 00 p P VO p 00
CO
id 1—1 CN so CO
E ^
iO
CN
00 so
ON o
00
in
z z CN CN (N
C
a •4>^
Backgrounds.* (Fishman 1966c)

E C
<D p p rn p p
D 13 vd vd CN 00 cn id vd
O CnI CN rs
<D
Vh VO O CN c~- CO
bu z
Almost
Always

1
P o p
vd 00 vd 00 o' 1—4 id
<N ’-H 1 1-H
z VO r- iiO CN cn CN

CO
■5 CO Td
•4-* C/i 00
c U4 Lh 1-H 3
*0 <D 0 <u
Wife

c t-H <D 43 J3 ^ u
and

•4-»
0 c cd •4-4 '4-» GO C 40 c
cd (D CO
*-4->
ci
04 cd 0 2 § ‘C =3
c/5 0 bu s CQ bu K 0
 BILINGUALISM WITHOUT DIGLOSSIA 85

TABLE 9. 1940-1960 Totals for 23 Non-English Mother Tongues in

the USA (Fishman 1966c).

Total Change
Language 1940 Total 1960 Total
n %
Norwegian 658,220 321,774 -336,446 -51.1%
Swedish 830,900 415,597 -415,303 -50.0%
Danish 226,740 147,619 - 79,121 -65.1%
Dutch/Flemish 289,580 321,613 + 32,033 +11.1%
French 1,412,060 1,043,220 -368,840 -26.1%
German 4,949,780 3,145,772 -1,804,008 -36.4%
Polish 2,416,320 2,184,936 -231,384 -9.6%
Czech 520,440 217,771 -302,669 -58.2%
Slovak 484,360 260,000 -224,360 -46.3%
Hungarian 453,000 404,114 -48,886 -10.8%
Serbo-Croatian 153,080 184,094 +31,014 +20.3%
Slovenian 178,640 67,108 -111,532 -62.4%
Russian 585,080 460,834 -124,246 -21.2%
Ukrainian 83,600 252,974 +169,374 +202.6%
Lithuanian 272,680 206,043 -66,637 -24.4%
Finnish 230,420 110,168 -120,252 -52.2%
Rumanian 65,520 58,019 -7,501 -11.4%
Yiddish 1,751,100 964,605 -786,495 -44.9%
Greek 273,520 292,031 +18,511 +6.8%
Italian 3,766,820 3,673,141 -93,679 -2.5%
Spanish 1,861,400 3,335,961 +1,474,561 +79.2%
Portuguese 215,660 181,109 -34,551 -16.0%
Arabic 107,420 103,908 -3,512 -3.3%

Total 21,786,540 18,352,351 -3,434,189 -15.8%

In 1940 the numerically strongest mother tongues in the United States

were German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Yiddish, and French, in that
order Each of these languages was claimed by approximately a million
and a half or more individuals. In 1960 these same languages remained
the “big six” although their order had changed to Italian, Spanish,
German! Pohsh, French, and Yiddish. Among them, only Spanish
registered gains (and substantial gains at that) m this 20-year interval.
The losses among the “big six” varied from a low of 2.5% for Italian to
a high of 44 9% for Yiddish. The only other languages to gam in overall
number of claimants during this period (disregarding the generationa
distribution of such gains) were Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch /
Flemish, and Greek. The greatest gain of all was that of Ukrainian
86 SOCIETAL BILINGUALISM: STABLE AND TRANSITIONAL
\

(202.6%!). Most mother tongues, including five of the “big six”, suf¬
fered substantial losses during this period, the sharpest being that of
Danish (65.1%). All in all, the 23 non-English mother tongues for which
a 1940-1960 comparison is possible lost approximately one-sixth of
their claimants during this interval. Yet the total number of claimants
of non-English mother tongues in the United States is still quite sub¬
stantial, encompassing nearly 11% of the total 1960 population (and an
appreciably higher proportion of the white population).®

®The 1940 and 1960 totals shown in Table 9 must not be taken as the totals for
all non-Enghsh mother tongue claimants in those years. Figures for Armenian
were reported in 1940 but not in 1960. Figures for Chinese and Japanese were
reported in 1960 but not in 1940. Total figures for “All other” languages were
reported in both years. None of these inconsistent or non-specific listings are
included in Table 2.4. Adding in these figures as well as the necessary generational
estimates based upon them, the two totals would become 1940: 22,036,240;
1960: 19,381,786.

The history of industrialization in the Western world (as

well as in those parts of Africa and Asia which have ex¬
perienced industrialization under Western “auspices”) is such
that the means (capital, plant, organization) of production
have often been controlled by one speech community while
the productive manpower was drawn from another (Deutsch
1966). Initially, both speech communities may have main¬
tained their separate diglossia-with-bilingualism patterns or,
alternatively, that of an overarching diglossia without bilin¬
gualism. In either case, the needs as well as the consequences
of rapid and massive industrialization and urbanization were
frequently such that members of the speech community pro¬
viding productive manpower rapidly abandoned their tradi¬
tional sociocultural patterns and learned (or were taught) the
language associated with the means of production much
earlier than their absorption into the sociocultural patterns
and privileges to which that language pertained. In response
to this imbalance some reacted by further stressing the ad¬
vantages of the newly gained language of education and in¬
dustry while others reacted by seeking to replace the latter
by an elaborated version of their own largely preindustrial,
preurban, premobilization tongue.
 BILINGUALISM WITHOUT DIGLOSSIA 87

Under circumstances such as these no well-established,

socially recognized and protected functional differentiation
of languages obtains in many speech communities of the
lower and lower middle classes. Dislocated immigrants and
their children (for whom a separate “political solution” is
seldom possible) are particularly inclined to use their mother
tongue and other tongue for intragroup communication in
seemingly random fashion (Fishman, Cooper, and Ma 1968;
Nahirny and Fishman 1965; Herman 1961). Since the for¬
merly separate roles of the home domain, the school domain,
and the work domain are all disturbed by the massive disloca¬
tion of values and norms that result from simultaneous im¬
migration and industrialization, the language of work (and of
the school) comes to be used at home. As role compart-
mentalization and value complementarity decrease under the
impact of foreign models and massive change, the linguistic
repertoire also becomes less compartmentalized. Languages
and varieties formerly kept apart come to influence each
other phonetically, lexically, semantically, and even gram¬
matically much more than before. Instead of two (or more)
carefully separated languages each under the eye of caretaker
groups of teachers, preachers, and writers, several intervening
varieties may obtain differing in degree of interpenetration.
Under these circumstances the languages of immigrants may
come to be ridiculed as “debased” and “broken” while at the
same time their standard varieties are given no language
maintenance support.
Thus, bilingualism without diglossia tends to be transi- ^
tional both in terms of the linguistic repertoires of speech
communities as well as in terms of the speech varieties in¬
volved per se. Without separate though complementary
norms and values to establish and maintain functional separa¬
tion of the speech varieties, that language or variety which is
fortunate enough to be associated with the predominant drift
of social forces tends to displace the other(s). Furthermore,
pidginization (the crystallization of new fusion languages or
varieties) is likely to set in when members of the work

fi
88 SOCIETAL BILINGUALISM: STABLE AND TRANSITIONAL

force” are so dislocated as not to be able to maintain or

develop significantly compartmentalized, limited access roles
(in which they might be able to safeguard a stable mother-
tongue variety), on the one hand, and when social change
stops short of permitting them to interact sufficiently with
those members of the “power class” who might serve as
standard other-tongue models, on the other hand.

5.5 NEITHER DIGLOSSIA NOR BILINGUALISM

Only very small, isolated, and undifferentiated speech com¬

munities may be said to reveal neither diglossia nor bilin¬
gualism (Gumperz 1962; Fishman 1965c). Given little role
differentiation or compartmentalization and frequent face-
to-face interaction between all members of the speech com¬
munity, no fully differentiated registers or varieties may
establish themselves. Given self-sufficiency, no regular or
significant contacts with other speech communities may be
maintained. Nevertheless, such groups—be they bands or
clans—are easier to hypothesize than to find (Owens 1965;
Sorensen 1967). All speech communities seem to have certain
ceremonies or pursuits to which access is limited, if only on
an age basis. Thus, all linguistic repertoires contain certain
terms that are unknown to certain members of the speech
community, and certain terms that are used differently by
different subsets of speakers. In addition, metaphorical
switching for purposes of emphasis, humor, satire, or criti¬
cism must be available in some form even in relatively undif¬
ferentiated communities. Finally, such factors as exogamy,
warfare, expansion of population, economic growth, and con¬
tact with others all lead to internal diversification and, conse¬
quently, to repertoire diversification. Such diversification is
the beginning of bilingualism. Its societal normification is the
hallmark of diglossia. Quadrant four tends to be self-liqui¬
dating.
 NEITHER DIGLOSSIA NOR BILINGUALISM 89

5.6 CONCLUSIONS
/

Many efforts are now under way to bring to pass a rapproche¬

ment between psychological, linguistic, and sociological work
on bilingualism. The student of bilingualism, most particu¬
larly the student of bilingualism in the context of social
issues and social change, should benefit from an awareness of
the various possible relationships between individual bilin¬
gualism and societal diglossia illustrated in this section. One
of the fruits of such awareness will be that problems of tran¬
sition and dislocation will not be mistaken for the entire
gamut of societal bilingualism.
 ‘J , I i,k >i > ^; i v^ .. |it»
s

f » i4

> c.n.*!?,' vn-^K

^.V)r : » ’ ' lvVi,^i (

4w ni'l .'♦ 54*1 • ^
>|«tA **Ji**<' *1 <’
’O^ lfelfiitf»u«* r* , #»ii«W oit^lii ij[ti»^i i fuctvst
inO .rc-i^au in-’ 'u ‘‘Wtoliib l^Jadoi kcjt rtntitiil
-nan .^> ' 'tuU •<* Uiw >* v^tav* fLMf'to txtin\ •'*• to
v?\ ' ooa IIOB&
r-* |i4Uartii|ldl Ut-arii'^f \0 JWmtJt

■'^ <•!« »! .

• ■«*• • ./.,■ • ^ I • ,* - ■
1^' - '•

t. \ • i ■ •

->. . . • '- * V f f
If 0 ■ - . . . ' • 1 • 1 ': • .'**■< lm^

» I, ,, ■ .. ■ - I *-.1' . ' V'. 'v- *i »,*'

«.;ti !■ V '»• ; . 1. ., ♦ <’ ^ 1-

.4. . . 1 , . ;,J
4. -T-tf- ■^ ‘ -*■*«.*»••. ...i
f*
’-' ■ »■ ■ '' . V’* *•' ■* '■• ■ ' ’• ‘ i^4''

'■ ' > J '<• ■ ' ■ - V^,'* ' ^

; 4 . fi', ■ . ■ ■ ■* : . -' !• ■■ > ■ , tf »ui jr'v*

’ 1 J • k « . ' . rtAk Ml
V■ • t r * '■ -

- is *-,■■•'

' ■ r> ’ 1 '

‘ .»V 41# '. »

.' -■ -UW** « ^ « •/.

. f* 4 «'■■<? 1 •

► PrAt' Ji -IWt ' . •

t|frs^ -«-■'• '■■ '-W •( .;

• ♦ * « * 1 WMi*. ,4:x '.

’♦. 1 »K/i f*

' jpmiiip •' •. »! il-A- ■ M4

.rii.- ?v'“^

>
' ■

■
 Section VI

SOCIOCULTURAL ORGANIZATION:
LANGUAGE CONSTRAINTS
AND LANGUAGE REFLECTIONS

One of the major lines of social and behavioral science in- ^

terest in language during the past century has been that
which has claimed that the radically differing structures of
the languages of the world constrain the cognitive func¬
tioning of their speakers in different ways. It is only in rela¬
tively recent years—and partially as a result of the contribu¬
tions of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics—that this view
(which we shall refer to as the linguistic relativity view) has
come to be replaced by others: (a) that languages primarily
reflect rather than create sociocultural regularities in values
and orientations, and (b) that languages throughout the
world share a far larger number of structural universals than
has heretofore been recognized. While we cannot here ex-.-
amine the work related to language universals (Greenberg
1966; Osgood 1960), since it is both highly technical and
hardly sociolinguistic in nature, we can pause to consider the
linguistic relativity view itself as well as the linguistic reflec¬
tion view which is increasingly coming to replace it in the
interests and in the convictions of social scientists.

91
92 SOCIOCULTURAL\ORGANIZATION

6.1 GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE CONSTRAINS COGNITION

The strongest claim of the adherents of linguistic relativity—

whether by Whorf (1940, 1941), Hoijer(1951, 1954),Trager
(1959), Kluckhohn (1961), or by others—is that cognitive
organization is directly constrained by linguistic structure.
Some languages recognize far more tenses than do others (see
Figure 7). Sone languages recognize gender of nouns (and,
therefore, also require markers of gender in the verb and
adjective systems), whereas others do not. Some languages
build into the verb system recognition of certainty or un¬
certainty of past, present, or future action. Other languages
build into the verb system a recognition of the size, shape,
and color of nouns referred to. There are languages that
signify affirmation and negation by different sets of pro¬
nouns just as there are languages that utilize different sets of
pronouns in order to indicate tense and absence or presence
of emphasis. Some languages utilize tone and vowel length in
their phonological systems, whereas English and most other
modern European languages utilize neither. There are lan¬
guages that utilize only twelve phonemes while others require
more than fifty. A list of such striking structural differences
between languages could go on and on—without in any way
denying that each language is a perfectly adequate instrument
(probably the most adequate instrument) for expressing the
needs and interests of its speakers. That the societies utilizing
these very different languages differ one from the other in
many ways is obvious to all. Is it not possible, therefore, that
these sociocultural differences—including ways of reasoning,
perceiving, learning, distinguishing, remembering, etc.—are
directly relatable to the structured differences between the
languages themselves? The Whorfian hypothesis claims that
this is indeed the case (Fishman 1960).
Intriguing though this claim may be it is necessary to
admit that many years of intensive research have not
succeeded in demonstrating it to be tenable. Although many
 GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE CONSTRAINS COGNITION 93

Data of (Cognitive) Behavior

Data of Language data Nonlinguistic

Language Characteristics (“cultural themes”) data

Lexical or “semantic” Level 1 Level 2

characteristics
Level 3 Level 4
Grammatical characteristics

FIGURE?. Schematic Systematization of the Whorfian Hypothesis

(Fishman 1960).

Level 1 of the Whorfian (“linguistic relativity”) hypothesis predicts that

speakers of languages that make certain lexical distinctions are enabled
thereby to talk about certain matters (for example, different kinds of
snow among speakers of Eskimo and different kinds of horses among
speakers of Arabic) that cannot as easily be discussed by speakers of
languages that do not make these lexical distinctions. Similarly, Level 3
of the Whorfian hypothesis predicts that speakers of languages that
possess particular grammatical features (absence of tense in the verb
system, as in Hopi, or whether adjectives normally precede or follow
the noun, as in English vs. French) predispose these speakers to certain
cultural styles or emphases (timelessness; inductiveness vs. deductive¬
ness). These two levels of the Whorfian hypothesis have often been
criticized for their anecdotal nature as well as for their circularity in
that they utihzed verbal evidence for both their independent (causal)
and dependent (consequential) variables. Level 2 of the Whorfian
hypothesis predicts that the availability of certain lexical items or dis¬
tinctions enables the speakers of these languages to remember, perceive,
or learn certain nonlinguistic tasks more rapidly or completely than can
the speakers of languages that lack these particular lexical items or
distinctions. This level of the Whorfian hypothesis has been demon¬
strated several times-most recently and forcefully in connection with
the differing color terminologies of English and Zuni—but it is difficult
to argue that the absence of lexical items or distinctions in a particular
language is more a cause of behavioral differences than a reflectioTi of
the differing sociocultural concerns or norms of its speakers. As soon as
speakers of Zuni become interested in orange (color) they devise a term
for it. Language relativity should be more stable and less manipulable
than that! Level 4 of the Whorfian hypothesis is the most demanding of
all. It predicts that grammatical characteristics of languages facilitate or
render more difficult various nonlinguistic behaviors on the part of
their speakers. This level has yet to be successfully demonstrated via
experimental studies of cognitive behavior.
94 SOCIOCULTURAL'ORGANIZATION

have tried to do so, no one has successfully predicted and

demonstrated a cognitive difference between two populations
on the basis of the grammatical or other structural dif¬
ferences between their languages. Speakers of tone languages
and of vowel-length languages and of many-voweled lan¬
guages do not seem to hear better than do speakers of lan¬
guages that lack all of these features. Speakers of languages
that code for color, shape, and size in the very verb form
itself do not tend to categorize or classify a random set of
items much differently than do the speakers of languages
whose verbs merely encode tense, person, and number
(Carroll and Casagrande, 1958). Whorfs claims (1940) that
“. . . the background linguistic system [in other words, the
grammar] of each language is not merely a reproducing in¬
strument for voicing ideas, but rather is itself the shaper of
ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental
activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of
his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an
independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but it
is part of a particular grammar and differs, from slightly to
greatly, between grammars” seem to be overstated and no
one-to-one correspondence between grammatical structure
and either cognitive or sociocultural structure measured in¬
dependently of language has ever been obtained. Several of
the basic principles of sociolinguistic theory may help explain
why this is so.
In contrast with the older anthropological-linguistic
approach of Whorf, Sapir, Kluckhohn, Korzybski, and others
who pursued this problem during the first half of the
twentieth century, sociolinguistics is less likely to think of
entire languages or entire societies as categorizable or typable
in an over-all way. The very concepts of linguistic repertoire,
role repertoire, repertoire range, and repertoire compart-
mentalization argue against any such neat classification once
functional realities are brought into consideration. Any rea¬
sonably complex speech community contains various speech
networks that vary with respect to the nature and ranges of
 GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE CONSTRAINS COGNITION 95

their speech repertoires. Structural features that may be pre¬

sent in the speech of certain interaction networks may be
lacking (or marginally represented) in the speech of others.
Structural features that may be present in certain varieties
within the verbal repertoire of a particular interaction net¬
work may be absent (or marginally represented) in other
varieties within that very same repertoire. Mother-tongue
speakers of language X may be other-tongue speakers of lan¬
guage Y. These two languages may coexist in a stable
diglossic pattern throughout the speech community and yet
be as structurally different as any two languages chosen at
random.
Certainly, all that has been said above about the difficulty
in setting up “whole-language” typologies is equally true
when we turn to the question of “whole-society” typologies.
Role repertoires vary from one interaction network to the
next, and roles themselves vary from one situation to the
next within the same role repertoire. Distinctions that are
appropriately made in one setting are inappropriate in
another, and behaviors that occur within certain interaction
networks do not occur in still others within the same culture.
The existence of structured biculturism is as real as the exis¬
tence of structured bilingualism, and both of these phe¬
nomena tend to counteract any neat and simple linguistic
relativity of the kind that Whorf had in mind.
Nevertheless, there are at least two large areas in which a
limited degree of linguistic relativity may be said to obtain:
(a) the structuring of verbal interaction, and (b) the struc¬
turing of lexical components. The first area of concern points
to the fact that the role of language (when to speak, to whom
to speak, the importance of speaking per se relative to inac¬
tive silence or relative to other appropriate action) varies
greatly from society to society (Hymes 1966). However, this
type of relativity has nothing to do with the structure of
language per se in which Whorf was so interested. The second
area of concern deals with lexical taxonomies and with their
consequences in cognition and behavior. However these
96 SOCIOCULTURAL'ORGANIZATION

border on being linguistic reflections of sociocultural struc¬

ture rather than being clearly and solely linguistic constraints
that inescapably and interminably must bring about the par¬
ticular behaviors to which they are supposedly related. It is to
a consideration of these lexical taxonomies that we now turn.

6.2 LEXICAL STRUCTURE CONSTRAINS COGNITION

For many years it was believed that the only tightly struc¬
tured levels of language were the grammatical (morphological
and syntactic), on the one hand, and the phonological, on the
other. These two levels certainly received the brunt of linguis¬
tic attention and constituted the levels of analysis of which
linguists were most proud in their interactions with other
social and behavioral scientists. By contrast, the lexical level
was considered to be unstructured and exposed to infinite
expansion (as words were added to any language) and infinite
interference (as words were borrowed from other languages).
A small but hardy group of lexicographers (dictionary
makers) and etymologists (students of word origins) con¬
tinued to be enamored of words per se, but the majority of
linguists acted as though the lexicon were the black sheep,
rather than a bona fide member in good standing, of the
linguistic family. The discovery of structured parsimony in
parts of the lexicon has done much to revive linguistic in¬
terest in the lexical level of analysis. The discovery as such is
one in which psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists
were at least every bit as active as were linguists themselves.
This may also explain why the interrelationship between
lexical organization and behavioral organization has been so
prominent in conjunction with the investigation of lexical
structure.
The psychological contributions to this area of analysis
take us back to one level of the Whorfian hypothesis (see
Level 2 in Figure 7). Psychologists had long before demon¬
strated that the availability of verbal labels was an asset in
 LEXICAL STRUCTURE CONSTRAINS COGNITION 97

learning, perception, and memory tasks (see, e.g., Carmichael

et al. 1932; Lehmann 1889; Maier 1930). A new generation
of psychologists has recently set out to determine whether
this can be demonstrated both interlinguistically (i.e., by
comparing different languages) as well as intralinguistically
(i.e., within a given language) on a structured set of behaviors
that correspond to a structured portion of lexicon.
They chose the color spectrum to work with because it is
a real continuum that tends to be environmentally present in
all cultures. Nevertheless, the investigators hypothesized that
language labels for the color spectrum are culturally idio¬
syncratic. These labels not only chop up the color continuum
into purely conventional segments in every language com¬
munity, but they probably do so differently in different lan¬
guage communities. By a series of ingenious experiments.
Brown and Lenneberg (1954), Lenneberg (1953, 1957),
Lantz and Stefflre (1964), and others have demonstrated that
this is indeed true. They have demonstrated that those colors
for which a language has readily available labels are more
unhesitatingly named than are colors for which no such
handy labels are available. They have shown that the colors
for which a language has readily available labels (i.e., highly
codable colors) are more readily recognized or remembered
when they must be selected from among many colors after a
delay subsequent to their initial presentation. They have
demonstrated that somewhat different segments of the color
spectrum are highly codable in different language com
munities. Finally, they have shown that the learning of non
sense-syllable associations for colors is predictably easier for
highly codable colors than for less codable colors that require
a phrase—often an individually formulated phrase—in order
to be named.
All in all, this series of experiments has forcefully shown
that the availability of a structured set of terms has both
intralinguistic as well as interlinguistic consequences. How¬
ever, in addition, it has underscored the equally important
fact that every speech community has exactly the terms for
98 SOCIOCULTURAL, ORGANIZATION

those phenomena that are of concern to it. Certainly, artists,

painters, and fashion buyers have a structured color terminol¬
ogy that goes far beyond that available to ordinary speakers
of English. The relative absence or presence of particular
color terms in the lexicon of a given speech network is thus
not a reflection of the state of that network’s code per se so
much as it is a reflection of the color interests, sensitivities,
and conventions of that network at a particular time in its
history.
A color terminology is merely one kind of folk taxonomy,
i.e., it is an example of the many emic semantic grids that are
contained in the lexicons of all speech communities. Other
such examples are the kinship terminologies of speech com¬
munities, their disease or illness terminologies, their plant
terminologies, their terms of address, etc. (Basso 1967;
Conklin 1962; Frake 1961, 1962; Pospisil 1965; Friederich
1966; Price 1967; Wittermans 1967; etc.). In each of these
instances the particular lexicons involved constitute “un
systeme ou tout se tient.” Each such system is considered by
its users to be both literally exhaustive and objectively cor¬
rect. Nevertheless, each system is socially particularistic, i.e.,
for all of its self-evident objectivity (“what other kind of
kinship system could there possibly be?”-we can imagine the
average member of each of the scores of such systems asking
himselO, it is a reflection of locally accepted conventions
rather than a necessary reflection either of nature or of lan¬
guage per se. This last is particularly well demonstrated in the
work of Friederich (on Russian kinship terms), Wittermans
(on Javanese terms of address), and Basso (on Western
Apache anatomical terms and their extension to auto parts;
see Figure 8).
The Russian Revolution brought with it such fargoing
social change that the kinship terms in use in Czarist days had
to be changed to some degree. In contrast with the refined
stratificational distinctions that existed in Czarist days-
distinctions that recognized gradations of power, wealth, and
proximity within the universe of kin, not unlike those that
 FIGURE 8A. Taxonomic Structure of Anatomical Set
Note: Black bars indicate position of additional (unextended) anatomical terms.

Western Apache

FIGURE 8B. Taxonomic Structure of Extended Set

*“ Area extending from top of windshield to bumper”

Basso, Keith H., Semantic Aspects of Linguistic hcculXui^Xion, American Anthro¬

pologist, (1967), 69. 471-477.
100 SOCIOCULTURAL ORGANIZATION

were recognized in the larger universe of social and economic

relationships—Soviet society stressed far fewer and broader
distinctions. As a result, various kinship terms were
abandoned entirely, others were merged and others were ex¬
panded. A very similar development occurred in Javanese
with respect to its highly stratified system of terms of
address. The impact of postwar independence, industrializa¬
tion, urbanization, and the resulting modification or aban¬
donment of traditional role relationships led to the discontin¬
uation of certain terms of address and the broadening of
others, particularly of those that implied relatively egalitarian
status between interlocutors. Howell’s review of changes in
the pronouns of address in Japan (1967) also makes the same
point, as did his earlier study of status markers in Korean
(1965). Not only does he indicate how individuals change the
pronouns that they use in referring to themselves and to each
other, as their attitudes and roles vis-a-vis each other change,
but he implies that widespread and cumulative changes of
this kind have occurred in Japan since the war, with the
result that certain pronouns have been practically replaced by
others. Certainly the best known study of this kind is Brown
and Gilman’s review of widespread Western European social
change with respect to the use of informal (T) vs. formal (V)
pronouns and verb forms for the third person singular
(1960). Feudalism, Renaissance, Reformation, the French
Revolution, nineteenth-century liberalism, and twentieth-
century democratization each had recognizable and cumula¬
tive impact. As a result, both T and V forms were retained in
interclass communication (except in the case of English), but
their differential use came to indicate differences primarily in
solidarity or differences in solidarity and in power rather
than differences in power alone as had been the case in the
early Middle Ages (see Figure 9).
Note that the complexities of the prerevolutionary kinship
taxonomies in Russia did not keep Russians from thinking
about or from engaging in revolution. Note also that the
revolution did not entirely scrap the pre-existing kinship
 101

Superiors
Equal and Equal and Not
Solidary Solidary
V

Inferiors

(a)

Superior and / iv
Superior and Not
Solidary T V Solidary
Equal and Equal and Not
Solidary Solidary

T V
Inferior and Inferior and Not
Solidary J’N fy Solidary

(b)
FIGURE 9. The two-dimensional semantic (a) in equilibrium and (b)
under tension. (Brown and Gilman)

Solidarity comes into the European pronouns as a means of differentiating

address among power equals. It introduces a second dimension into the semantic
system on the level of power equivalents. So long as solidarity was confined to
this level, the two-dimensional system was in equilibrium (see Figure la), and it
seems to’have remained here for a considerable time in all our lanpages. It is
from the long reign of the two-dimensional semantic that T derives its common
definition as the pronoun of either condescension or intimacy and V its definition
as the pronoun of reverence or formality. These definitions are stiU current but
usage has, in fact, gone somewhat beyond them.
The dimension of solidarity is potentially apphcable to aU persons addressed.
Power superiors may be solidary (parents, elder sibhngs) or not solidary (officials
whom one seldom sees). Power inferiors, similarly, may be as sohdary as the old
family retainer and as remote as the waiter in a strange restaurant. Extension of
the sohdarity dimension along the dotted Unes of Figure lb creates six categories
of persons defined by their relations to a speaker. Rules of address are in confiict
for persons in the upper left and lower right categories. For the upper left, power
indicates V and sohdarity T. For the lower right, power indicates T and sohdarity
V. ...
Weh into the nineteenth century the power semantic prevailed and waiters,
common soldiers, and employees were caUed T while parents, masters, and elder
brothers were cahed V. However, all our evidence consistently indicates that in
the past century the solidarity semantic has gained supremacy. The abstract result
is a simple one-dimensional system with the reciprocal T for the solidary and the
reciprocal V for the nonsolidary.
 102 SOCIOCULTURAL. ORGANIZATION

taxonomy. Similarly, the Apache anatomical taxonomy did

not preclude (but rather assisted) taxonomic organization of
automobile parts. Thus, while we are clearly indicating the
untenability of any strong linguistic relativity position when
we show that semantic taxonomies are subject to change,
expansion, and contraction as the sociocultural realities of
their users change, we are also demonstrating that their lin¬
guistic reflection of social reality is also likely to be both
slow and partial. Nevertheless, as between the two, the taxo¬
nomic reflection of sociocultural reality is more likely to have
widespread heuristic utility at any given time, however much
the existence of such taxonomies is likely to be constraining
in the momentary cognitive behavior of individual members
of sociocultural systems.
The emic distinctions which underlie these taxonomies are
differentially constraining for various interaction networks
within any speech community. Some networks (e.g., the net¬
works of quantitative scientists) can repeatedly rise above the
cognitive constraints of the taxonomies current in their
speech communities. These networks are likely to be the ones
that are most actively engaged in social change and in taxo¬
nomic change as well. Other networks are unable to break out
of the sociocultural taxonomies that surround them. In such
cases as, e.g., in connection with Kantrowitz’ race relations
taxonomy among white and Negro prison inmates (1967; see
Figure 10), or Price’s botanical taxonomies among the
Huichols (1967), these taxonomies may be taken not only as
useful reflections of the cognitive world of the speech com¬
munity from which they were derived, but also as forceful
constraints on the cognitive behavior of most, if not all, of
the individual members of these networks.

6.3 LEXICAL STRUCTURE REFLECTS SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

There are, however, more pervasive (and, therefore, seem¬

ingly less systematic) ways in which lexicons in particular and
LEXICAL STRUCTURE REFLECTS SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 103

FIGURE 10. Selected Examples of Vocabulary Used by White and

Negro Prison Inmates

CONCEPTS OR names names USED IN COM¬ CONCEPTS OR

USED EXCLUSIVELY MON BY BOTH names USED EX¬
BY NEGROES NEGROES AND CLUSIVELY BY
WHITES WHITES

A white man who A white man who

does not discriminate associates with
against Negroes Negroes

free thinker^ nigger over

\
A Negro who believes A Negro who is
whites are superior, not aggressive or
and acts subservient does not insist on
to them his equal rights
with whites
Sander, smoke-blower,
Jeff, jeffer, jeff-davis, easy going-black slave free thinker
Jeff artist, charlie
mccarthy, chalk eyes,
renegade, shuffler,
sometimer, uncle tom,
devil lover, stays in
uncle tom ’s-cabin.
hoosier lover

A Negro who
A Negro who constantly hates whites, and
tells both Negroes and expresses it vehe¬
whites that Negroes mently and freely
must be accorded the among Ndgroes
same status and rights
as whites
civil rights nigger,
ivil rights man, race freedom rider,
tan, mau mau, equal little-rocker, lu-
aggressive man, free-
ights man mumba, a-martin
speaker, man of-
luther king, mau
reasoning
mau preacher,
muslim, pale
hater, tom tom
guy

N. Kantrowitz, ADS, Chicago, (1967).

104 SOCIOCULTURAL' ORGANIZATION

languages as a whole are reflective of the speech communities

that employ them. In a very real sense a language variety is an
inventory of the concerns and interests of those who employ
it at any given time. If any portion of this inventory reveals
features not present in other portions, this may be indicative
of particular stresses or influences in certain interaction net¬
works within the speech community as a whole or in certain
role relationships within the community’s total role repertoire.
Thus Epstein’s study of linguistic innovation on the Copper-
belt of Northern Rhodesia (1959) revealed that the English
and other Western influences on the local languages were
largely limited to matters dealing with urban, industrial, and
generally nontraditional pursuits and relationships. Similarly,
M. Weinreich’s meticulous inquiry into the non-Germanic
elements in Yiddish (1953) sheds much light on the dynamics
of German-Jewish relations in the eleventh-century Rhineland.
Like all other immigrants to differently speaking milieus,
Jews, learning a variety of medieval German in the eleventh
century, brought to this language-learning task sociolinguistic
norms which incorporated their prior verbal repertoire. In
this case the repertoire consisted of a vernacular (Loez, a
variety of Romance) and a set of sacred languages (Hebrew-
Aramaic). However, the pre-existing sociolinguistic norms did
not impinge upon the newly acquired Germanic code either
in a random fashion or on an equal-sampling basis. Quite the
contrary. Both the Romance and the Hebraic-Aramaic ele¬
ments in Yiddish were overwhelmingly retained to deal with
a specific domain: traditional religious pursuits and concerns.
The Christological overtones of many common German
words, for example lesen (to read) and segnen (to bless), were
strong enough to lead to the retention of more neutral words
of Romance origin {leyenen and bentshn) in their stead. Simi¬
larly, Hebrew and Aramaic terms were retained not only for
all traditional and sanctified objects and ceremonies, but also
in doublets with certain Germanic elements in order to pro¬
vide contrastive emphases: bukh (book) vs. seyfer (religious
book, scholarly book); lerer (teacher) vs. meldmed or rebi
LEXICAL STRUCTURE REFLECTS SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 105

(teacher of religious subjects), etc. Thus Yiddish is a wonder- ^

ful example of how all languages in contact borrow from
each other selectively and of how this very selectivity is in¬
dicative of the primary interests and emphases of the bor¬
rowers and the donors alike. Indeed, M. Weinreich has con¬
clusively demonstrated (1953, 1967, etc.) that a language not
only reflects the society of its speakers, but conversely that
societal data per se is crucial if language usage and change are
to be understood.
 fW 'I* iV'• r^.’. < 1*

<• f. .'f . ‘^f-4 ftk ^. ier«Ht**l

c i.'j^' ^1/4.; .*.‘m ^ L'. •’, iiri>/>v

•■'’■ ■'vltfo'#-*': W.A'i: —i: Ia.._,, i^-'t . ■ .,t.w

. V u#*4>>t|.,>yV‘- rTu;tvb t.:

l^ffl

:3- > ^ 1/ . * »-. n .- « •»•«“.'Yiiit §4^

Uz
Ti I * - '• «• li irf; , (, » f, ' •

•* j p * • (<
t•
» ■ ' '• *;> * j ■(!*' ■ ■ '»•.‘S* -'• -
?i V 4
m !vi 9
♦i • 1* ' i A
- -w ' - • P'’ '■“ » 5 T.ri\,

?.•*» - t 14 !»• •• ^ li
<A:U< .••'V. ' ^.-VUVri •• • • ■' 11 T ■ «. ’ < 1 .1 * .■*'
J$,

JrtVFfW TT^'li 'T ■ 'if *f t'U'f ’ • rrl I i ' , » K

■ *’.»- .Ik 1 'T •

iV '/'i-il.’ir , ,, 1 ;r; „.-=•. • • k'.'-’-^'i 1 ■ tir’ »• «»-

Ai' . *4 7 W. i'V |»nr^WWM , • . ’■/..■* y .. • ^■

•!>?« Tt-'?^' * * * *C Ji . J't.i'iv'J

U. . .1^ VO ■“ • r f j: i ‘ftf

’=ri.-T.,rK, *;•*•»? ||tf

'T’.»'

;K •■■ ■♦ *M’' -V’ **’ '>0' *^' * '. '

•tiU -*>. . '.Y ' •■ '■
'*j|''(B'^ -■' »■*' ' 11 ..-^'*3'mi|yi- ■•-.t#;pofj-
,t,. i'.f l'.* » 4 * i?,' ' r,i .V/'-
. •*, V* ■ t-u UiKl/M
 Section VII

APPLIED SOCIOLINGUISTICS

One of the wisest maxims that Kurt Lewin bequeathed to

social psychology is that which claims that “nothing is as
practical as a good theory.” In addition, social science theory
is undoubtedly enriched by attempting to cope with the real
problems of the workaday world. Thus if social science theory
is really any good (really powerful, really correct) it should
have relevance for practitioners whose work brings them into
contact with larger or smaller groups of human beings.
Applied sociolinguistics attempts both to enrich sociolinguis¬
tics and to assist in the solution of societal language prob¬
lems. Applied sociolinguistics is of particular interest when¬
ever; (a) language varieties must be “developed” in order to
function in the vastly new settings, role relationships, or pur¬
poses in which certain important networks of their speakers
come to be involved, or (b) whenever important networks of
a speech community must be taught varieties that they do
not know well (or at all), so that they may function in the
vastly new settings, role relationships, or purposes that might
then be open to them. In many instances (a) and (b) co¬
occur, that is, language varieties must be both developed and
taught in order that import networks within a speech com¬
munity may be fruitfully involved in the new settings, role

107
108 APPLIED SOCIOLINGUISTICS

relationships, and purposes that have become available to

them. This is but another way of saying that planned lan¬
guage change and planned social change are highly interre¬
lated activities and that applied sociolinguistics is pertinent to
their interaction.

7.1 THE FORMULATION OF LANGUAGE POLICY

Applied sociolinguistics most often comes into play when

decisions concerning language policy have been reached and
require implementation. It is to be hoped that as language
planning and social-planning agencies become more aware of
the possible contributions of applied sociolinguistics, they
may become more inclined to involve sociolinguists and other
language specialists in guiding the decision-making process
itself rather than merely in implementing decisions already
reached. Several signs already point in this direction. Thus
the several nations of East Africa are interested in the current
“Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching” (Prator
1967) in order to adopt (or revise) language operations in
schools, mass media, public services, etc:, on the basis of
more precise information as to the age, number, location, and
interactions of the speakers of various local languages. Simi¬
larly, the Philippine government has long followed a policy of
evaluating language policy in the area of education via re¬
search projects dealing with such matters as the advisability
of initiating education in the local mother tongues and intro¬
ducing the national language (Tagalog) only in some optimal
subsequent year (Ramos et al. 1967). The Irish government
has sponsored “motivation research” and opinion polls in
order to determine how its citizens view the Irish language
and how they react to the government’s efforts to “restore”
it to wider functions (Anon. 1968). One of the most widely
cited guides to governmental language policies and their edu¬
cational implications is an applied sociolinguistic report
issued by UNESCO and dealing with The Use of the Ver¬
nacular in Education (Anon. 1953).
 THE IMPLEMENTATION OF LANGUAGE POLICY 109

7.2 THE IMPLEMENTATION OF LANGUAGE POLICY

I

Once a policy has been adopted it is then necessary to imple¬

ment it. Such implementation not only takes the obvious
route of requiring and/or encouraging the functional realloca¬
tion of varieties, but also their phonological, lexical, and
grammatical realization along prescribed lines. Language
agencies, institutes, academies, or boards are commonly
authorized to develop or plan the variety selected by pohcy
makers. Such agencies are increasingly likely to seek feedback
concerning the effectiveness or the acceptability of the
“products” (orthographies, dictionaries, grammars, spellers,
textbooks, translation series, subsidized literary works, etc.)
that they have produced. Sociolinguists have already
produced many studies which language agencies are likely to
find extremely useful in terms of their implications for the
work that such agencies conduct.
The studies by Berry (1958), Sjoberg (1966), Smalley
(1964) and Stern (1968) are likely to be of great value in plan¬
ning alphabets for hitherto nonliterate peoples whose lan¬
guages are destined to become vehicles of literacy. The diffi¬
culties cenountered and the lessons learned in planned lexical
expansion to cope with the terminology of modern technol¬
ogy, education, government, and daily life are recounted by
Alisjabana (1962), Bacon (1966), Morag (1959), Passin (1963),
and Tietze (1962) in their accounts of language planning in
Indonesia, Central Asia, Japan, Israel, and Turkey, respec¬
tively. The problems of planned language standardization
have been illuminated by Ferguson (1968), Garvin (1959),
Guxman (1960), Ray (1963), U. Weinreich (1953), Havranek
(1958), Valdman (1968), and Twadell (1959) in sufficiently
general terms to be of interest in any speech community
where this process needs to be set in motion.

7.3 LANGUAGE PLANNING

Even the very process of government involvement in language

issues has begun to be documented. In this connection one
110 APPLIED SOCIOLINGUISTICS

must mention the reports of the Irish government on its own

efforts to restore the Irish language (Anon. 1965); Good¬
man’s review of Soviet efforts to provide—as well as to
deny—indigenous standard languages to the peoples under
their control (Goodman 1960); Haugen’s many insightful re¬
ports of the Norwegian government’s attempts to cope with
language conflict by both protecting and limiting the linguis¬
tic divergence of its citizenry (Haugen 1961, 1966a, 1966b);
Heyd’s account of language reform in modern Turkey (Heyd
1954); Lunt’s account of the studied efforts in Titoist
Yugoslavia to separate Macedonian from Serbian and from
Bulgarian (Lunt 1959); the contrasts between different parts
of Africa noted by Armstrong (1968), Polome (1968), and
Whiteley (1968); Mills’s report of how Communist China
advanced and retreated in connection with the writing reform
it so desperately needs (Mills 1956); Wurm’s descriptions of
the very beginnings of language policy in reference to Pidgin
English (“Neomelanesian”) in New Guinea (Wurm and Lay-
cock 1961-1962), and several others (e.g., Brosnahan 1963;
LePage 1964; Fishman 1968c) of more general or conceptual
relevance.

7.4 EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS

One of the most developed areas of applied sociolinguistics is

that which deals with educational problems. In this connec¬
tion there have been studies of the organization and opera¬
tion of bilingual schools (Gaarder 1967); of the academic
consequences of compulsory education via the weaker lan¬
guage for most learners (Macnamara 1966, 1967); of dif¬
ferent approaches to teaching hitherto untaught mother
tongues (Davis 1967); of varying South American and West
Indian approaches to teaching both local and “wider” lan¬
guages (Burns 1968; LePage 1968; Rubin 1968); of difficul¬
ties in teaching English (as the compulsory school language
for non-English speakers) encountered by teachers who are
 THE RATIONALIZATION OF LANGUAGE DECISION 111

themselves nonnative speakers of English (Lanham 1965);

and, more specifically, of the problem of teaching standard
English to speakers of very discrepant, nonstandard varieties
of that language (Stewart 1964, 1965). A more generalized
interest in applied sociolinguistics is that shown by the recent
Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Bicul-
turism. It authorized studies not only of bilingual schooling,
but also of bilingualism in broadcasting, in industrial opera¬
tions, in military operations, and in the operation of various
other social enterprises.

7.5 THE RATIONALIZATION OF LANGUAGE DECISION

All in all, applied sociolinguistics has been concerned with (a)

providing information on the basis of which language policy
could be tentatively or experimentally formulated, (b) ex¬
perimenting with small-scale alternative approaches to lan¬
guage policy, (c) determining the political and other inter¬
group and interpersonal processes via which language de¬
cisions are reached, (d) studying the consequences of lan¬
guage policy in terms of the authoritative implementation of
policy, and (e) studying the consequences of language policy
in terms of target-population responses to the programs or
products that have been devised by authoritative bodies. In
the near future we may also expect attemts at cost/benefit
analysis of various sociolinguistic policies. Given such
analyses the costs of alternative policies may become more
apparent and, in some instances, may even become predict¬
able. Language planning as a rational and technical process
informed by actuarial data and by ongoing feedback is still a
dream, but it is by no means so farfetched a dream as it
seemed to be merely a decade ago.
At the present time, sociolinguistics is largely a descriptive
science. Given further advances in applied sociolinguistics and
continued interaction between theory and application, socio¬
linguistics may well become a far more experimental dis-
112 APPLIED SOCIOLINGUISTICS

cipline in the future than it has been in the past (Ervin-Tripp

1968). Undergraduate and graduate training in sociolinguis¬
tics, now just beginning primarily under the impetus of the
Social Science Research Council’s “Committee on Sociolin¬
guistics,” will certainly increase rapidly in the future, particu¬
larly as experimental and applied sociolinguistic research and
research opportunities grow in number and in importance.
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 %

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»
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'!#» -liI TtV \ ’. .-H m "’fitwirfjt
; ■* '’’Cl/'-i •I't tin,-* ^tru f
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^(Wi yN 1M J, unit A v (nit>i'<

KM'. ,i?y,‘ vf
Jit . M-vcxi") ! Ml»tii'*>' -iktrit'^i'-l
wi>v\ -'‘f'ii .ijij^Jiw^t.) 'v' T’jfftO 2.A •>* M W1V-- M
Arr^ {fiviyAMJ »»-,'t^'l ,tttXtl /|i »«t iV ftut
•afi mfit.ij »\*l t.w4 .y IfiO f w ,rvn4*‘'l
v-ji'f **m.*wa v* a V ^tiv/yia.i

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A' t* ..g, ; ^ .-ilgl
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' i*/..' r. • »Ji(*<Ajjo,> k ►KwhirtNfT* .''iif
o> ' . A * '/ k t >4
.<!V* V - A«r VL». *•i•;'3«^K^
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 SOCIOLINGUISTICS

“The idea of systematic study of language as a social

phenomenon is not new . . . But in spite of the recognition of
language as a social phenomenon and the connection between
linguistics and anthropology, the methods and insights of the
social sciences and those of linguistics have generally gone
their separate ways ... In this introduction, however, Fish¬
man has tried not only to represent all the major streams of
research but also to integrate them as far as this can be
done ... he has succeeded in giving an unusually well
balanced conspectus of the whole field . . . The social
scientist will acquire a smattering of linguistics and perhaps a
little respect for it, and the linguist will be lured on to the
sociolinguistic theory and research methods which are more
fundamental to his own discipline than he realizes.”
CHARLES A. FERGUSON
from the FOREWORD

“Sociolinguistics is the study of the characteristics of

language varieties, the characteristics of their functions, and
the characteristics of their speakers as these tifeee constantly
interact, change, and change one another within a speech
community.”
JOSHUA A. FISHMAN
from the book

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