Sociolinguistics

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CHAPTER 6

SPEECH COMMUNITIES

Source: prnews

Alone, we can do so little, together, we can do so so much
Helen Keller

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INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses a speech community. The speech community is a group of people
who share a series of language standards and language expectations. We are referred to as a
speech community when we speak the same language, dialect, or variety, i.e. when we use
the same code. A typical speech community can be a small town, but William Labov asserted
that a large metropolitan area, such as New York City, can also be considered a single
speech community. Further, this chapter also will discuss intersecting communities,
networking and repertoires, and linguistic repertoires.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After you have read this chapter you should be able to:

1. Students are able to define speech communities.
2. Students are able to present the concept of shared norms.
3. Students are able to analyze an intersecting communities.
4. Students are able to present Network and repertoires.
5. Students are able to explain speech repertoires.

6.1 Definition: Speech Community
Speech community consists of two basic terminologies. They are speech and community
(Stockwell, 2002; Herk, 2012). A community is a group of people who share similar
activities, practices, beliefs, and social structures, on the other hand, the kind of group that
sociolinguist attempt to study is called speech. A speech community is a group of people
who share similar ideas, uses, and norms of language (Holmes, 2013). The principle unit of
analysis in the ethnography of community is the speech community. Further, a speech

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community is a group of speakers who share a language and patterns of language use.
Members of the community speak more often with each other than they do with members
outside the community (Holmes, & Wilson, 2017). This pattern of behavior is known as
communicative isolation. Social, cultural, economic, and geographical factors all contribute
to increased communicative isolation. As a result, the speech community develops language
and language use characteristics that differ from those of other communities over time.
There are many definition of speech community from the experts. They are as follow:

1. Gumperz (1968)
Gumperz (1968) defines the speech community as any human aggregate that interacts
on a regular and frequent basis using a shared set of verbal signs. In this definition, a
human aggregate is any group of people who share some common characteristic, such
as language, region, race, ethnicity, age, occupation, religion, sexual orientation, and so
on. Moreover, Gumperz (1968) defines Interaction as a social process in which
utterances are chosen to conform to socially recognized norms and expectations. The
“shared body of verbal signs” refers to the set of rules for one or more linguistic codes
and ways of speaking that emerge as a result of regular participation in overlapping
networks.

2. Wardhaugh (2006) and Wardaugh & Fuller (2015)
Based on Lyons (1970) in Wardaugh & Fuller (2015), speech comminity is defined as ‘all
the people who use a given language or dialect’. If speech communities are defined
solely by their linguistic features, the circularity of any such definition inherent in the
fact that a language is a communal property is recognized.

It also notes that a single language community can employ more than one language,
regardless of whether we use the national boundaries for defining it (e.g., Switzerland,
Canada, Papua New Guinea, all of the countries of more than one official language), town
designations (e.g. in cities such as Berlin, Singapore and New York City, where several

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languages are used for daily interactions, education and trade). Further, these speech
communities all are defined in terms of geographical areas, there are other language and
region criteria which are available for defining speaking communities.

3. Southerland and Katamba (1996)
Southerland and Katamba (1996) stated ‘a speech community is the locus of all
sociolinguistic investigation’. They further explain that the speech community can be as
small as a town, village, or even a club, or it can be as large as a country or group of
countries. A language group is characterized by the fact that its members share a
particular language (or language variety), the norms (or norms) for proper social use of
their langue, and that they are distinguished by similar sociolinguistic criterias from
other comparable groups.

4. Coulmas (1998)
According to Labov, the speech community is a locus in which speakers agree on the
social meanings and evaluations of the variants used, and it, of course, includes
variability in language use. Coulmas (1998) added that a speech community is defined
as one in which every speaker agrees on the evaluation of varying linguistic norms.

5. Holmes (2013)
There are three social factors that are important in accounting for language choice in
many different types of speech communities: who you are talking to (participants), the
social context of the talk (setting), and the function and topic of the discussion (topic).
They then are defined as domain.

Using information about the domains of use in a community, it is possible to draw a very
simple model summarising the norms of language use for the community. This is often
particularly useful for bilingual and multilingual speech communities.

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People can live in a bilingual environment at home and easily switch between two
languages. They may shop in one language but work in the other. Their accent in one of
the languages may indicate that they are an immigrant to the society in which they live,
and an immigrant from a particular country. Their accent in the other language indicates
that they are native of region Y in country Z. Outside of country Z, as they are now, they
consider themselves to be speaking not a Y variety of Z, but Z itself. They may also have
received extensive technical training in their new position.

6.2 Shared Norms
In order to define a speech community, we need an approach which says that speakers in
a community share a sense of linguistic conduct (linguistic norms). It is a key component
of Labov's definition of the community of speech (1972).

The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language
elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms; these norms may be
observed on overt types of evaluative behaviour, and by the uniformity of abstract
patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of usage.

The above-mentioned definition shifts the emphasis from speaking members to giving
specific ways of speaking the same social meanings. A view like this has been expressed
by Milroy (1987):

Thus, all New York speakers from the highest to lowest status are said to constitute a
single speech community because, for example they agree in viewing presence of post
vocalic (r) as prestigious. They also agree on the social value of a large number of other
linguistic elements. Southern British English speakers cannot be said to belong to the
same speech community as New Yorkers, since they do not attach the same social
meanings to, for example (r): on the contrary, the highest prestige accent in Southern
England( RP) is non-rhotic. Yet, the Soutern British speech community may be said to
be united by a common evaluation of the variable (h); h-dropping is stigmatized in

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Southern England....but is irrelevant in New York City or for that matter, in Glasgow or
Belfast.

The concept for any particular speaker community:

Reflect what people do and know as they interact. When people come together
through speech practices, they are assumed to function in a common set of
standards, local knowledge, convictions and values (Morgan, 2001).

In other words, we use the concept of communication skill. In a speech community,
speakers share a sense of social norms in discourse, together with ideas on the identities of
the social group that are indexed by different language varieties or characteristics. One
example of how discourse pattern may be significat within a speech coommunity is found in
Hymes (1974). He presents analysis of narratives from various Native American groups,
showing how, even when they are produced in English, there are distinctive features which
can be traced back to narrtive structure in the Native American Languages.

Furthermore, Gumperz (1971) expresses the importance of common norms in a similar
way, and also notes the fact that the groups may be of different sizes and for different
purposes. The connection between language and social structure therefore plays a central
role in the concept of the language community, including the idea that different levels of
language communities correspond to various social groups (Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015).
Gumperz (1971) discusses the possibility of dialect, style and register grouping linguistic
forms. Many speakers in Eastern Europe share rules about appropriate forms of greeting,
appropriate topics and how to conduct them but no common language, for example, for
Czech, Austro German and Hungarian.

6.3 Communities of Practice
One way that sociolinguistics attempt to get this dynamic view of social groups is to think
that speakers are involved in different practical communities. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet
(1998) call a practice-based community an aggressive population which unites with each

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other in a joint endeavor. In addition, the members of a community of practice are also a
group of workers in a factory, a wider family, a group of teenage friends, a fitness course, a
kindergarten classroom, etc. a group of people in a community.

Bucholtz & Hall (1960) tried to use the practice community which builds on language and
identity study. In his studies he studied in the US high school the language of 'nerd girls.'
They note the following ways in which the concept of speech community is inadequate for
research on language gender:

(a) Its tendency to take language as central.
(b) Its emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community.
(c) Its preference for studying central memebrs of the community over those at the

margins.
(d) Its focus on the group at the expense of individuals.
(e) Its view of identity as a set of static categories.
(f) Its valorization of researchers’ interpretations over participants’ own understading

of their partcices.

Bucholtz argues that we can define a social group through all social practices within the
community of practice, not only language. In his research on nerd girls, Bucholtz further
notes that, by focussing on academic achievement, they conform to the broader social order
and resist it by dismissing traditional women's ideas in dress and appearance.

Another studies (Davies, 2005; Moore, 2006) seek to expand on the community of practice
concept of conflict, not consensus, as part of interaction. According to Davies (2005), the
concept of legitimacy is central in community of practice analyses, and power structures
cannot be ignored. Meanwhile, Moore (2006) examines narratives told by high school
students in the northwest of England, noting that status inequalities can lead to unequal
control allocation within a community of practice, and that such hierarchies must be
considered in the study of community –building and identity construction.

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6.4 Intersecting Communities

Intersecting communities which indicate the place-speaker use expressions indicate that
they have some understanding of how a "typical" person from each site speaks – to be part
of somewhat loosely defined speaking community. For example: Speech from New York,
London, South Africa. The "typical" way of each individual is based on his or her home or a
particular community of speech.Such a person may be considered typical by observing the
language standards associated with that particular place. What are those standards?
Preston (2000) says the standard is that a person does not always have a language
perception of specific areas.

Rosen argues that urban linguistic patchwork maps cannot be considered as a ghetto
because:
1. Languages and dialects have no simple geographical distribution and
2. Because interaction between them blurs whatever boundaries might be drawn.

Dialects and languages start influencing each other, for example, London is in some ways a
community, but not in others. Even though it has 300 or more languages, neither a single
community of speech is too large and fragmented. The language or languages spoken by the
language community is not easily linked. Each community member has an inventory of
social identities, each of which is connected with various forms of nonverbal and verbal
language in a given context. There is no clear way of defining how individuals and speakers
can classify themselves and create and recreate social identities.So, it is impossible to
predict the group or community he or she will consider itself to belong in a particular
moment. This group will change according to situation.

6.5 Networking and Repertoires

Social networks are another way of seeing how one person relates to other people in
society (O’Grady, Dobrovolsky, & Katamba, 1996). We can ask him or her in what social

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networks. It explains how and when a certain person A interacts with B, then with C and
then again with D. How intensive are the different relations: Does A interact with B more
frequently than C or D? How extensive is A's relationship to B to the extent that many
others interact with A and B in any activity? If A, B, C, D and E are connected to each other
on the net, are they all interconnected, are they B, C, D and E connected with A, but not each
other?

Networks and repertoires demonstrate that a person can be a member of multiple speech
communities, some of which overlap and some of which do not. Individuals may belong to
one or more groups but not to others. A dense network exists if the people you know and
interact with also know and interact with one another. If they do not, the network is shaky.
You also stated that you are involved in a multiplex network if the people in it are
connected in more than one way, i.e., not just through work but also through other social
activities. Dense multiplex networks are made up of people who go to school together,
marry each other's siblings, and work and play together. One individual speaker's linguistic
repertoire is determined by the language varieties that he or she knows and uses within his
or her speech community (= active and passive knowledge). A speaker's verbal repertoire
defines his or her individual communicative competence. Communicative competence is the
ability to not only construct grammatically correct sentences but also to apply language
correctly and appropriately, i.e. in different social speech situations. A competent speaker
can vary his or her language by using different registers and styles. Open Network: A
network that provides its users with unrestricted access. A blogger and blog visitor
frequently receives new and important information. Closed Network: Mostly strong ties.
The information that flows through these networks is often redundant and inefficient.

In sociolinguistics, research on social networks has proliferated in recent decades, but it is
most directly related to Milroy (1980, 1987; Milroy and Llamas 2013). This work adapted
sociological social network theory to sociolinguistics and demonstrated how it could be
used in language research. If the people you know and interact with also know and interact

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with one another, you are said to be part of a dense social network. If they do not, the social
network will be shaky. You are also said to be a part of a multiplex social network if the
people in it are connected in more than one way, such as through work and other social
activities.
Based on O’ Grady, Dobrovolsky, & Katamba (1996) social networks have been likened to a
chinese fan. It can be seen in the following figure.

Figure 6.1 Social Networks
Each group is both separate but at the same time exhibits overlap with other groups and all
groups converge on the person at its centre. Thus the nature and frequency of interactions
in the family group will differ from those among fellow workers, members of the same
sports team, neighbours, and the like. In a sense, such studies can lend weight to the notion
that we ‘talk like those we talk to’, more especially where those interactions are in a
closeknit network.
Dubois and Horvath (1999) acknowledge that while the concept ofsocial networks seems to
be useful in studying language behavior in urbansettings, its effectiveness in nonurban
settings, in their case among English–French bilingual Cajuns in rural Louisiana, is not so
clear.

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Figure 6.2 simple network relationship
They say: ‘The notionof network is strongly conditioned by the effects of scale and place.
Being amember of an open or closed network is quite different if you live in New Orleans . . .
, Lafayette . . . , Eunice . . . , or Iota. . . . We do not wish to implythat the notion of network
loses its methodological importance in nonurbansettings, but only that the linguistic effect
of closed and open networks is intimatelyrelated to the type of community under study.’
6.6 Linguistic Repertoires
The linguistic repertoire is the set of skills and knowledge a person has of one or more
languages, as well as their different varieties (be they diatopic, diaphasic, diastratic or
diachronic). This repertoire comprises elements of the different levels of description of
language and its use (phonetic-graphical, lexical-grammatical, discursive-textual or
pragmatic). Concerning the use of languages, this repertoire forms the basis of every
language learner’s plurilingual competence (either current or possible). If the learner's
education system includes the study of non-living languages, like Latin, this

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linguistic knowledge also forms part of that person’s linguistic repertoire, even though their
command is usually restricted to the receptive use of written texts.

The term was coined in the context of language sociology, for the set of language varieties—
including registers and dialects—“exhibited in the speaking and writing patterns of a
speech community” (Fishman 1972: 48). Lingusitic repertoire has also been called
the verbal repertoire (Finegan 2004). The concept is applied both to multilingual and
monolingual repertoires: “Just as a multilingual linguistic repertoire allocates different
language varieties to different speech situations, so does a monolingual repertoire. For all
speakers —monolingual and multilingual— there is marked variation in the forms of
language used for different activities, addressees, topics, and settings”.

6.7 Summary
We discussed how to define a speech community in this chapter. There is a tendency to
focus on the presence of shared norms rather than the ways in which people speak to define
what makes them a community. Alternative ways of defining groups, such as a community
of practice or a social network, are also presented as less abstract ways of determining a
social group for research purposes; both rely on linguistic interaction for their definitions.
We also go over the concept of identities again, this time focusing on how identities are
related to social group membership.

It is called as a speech community when we speak the same language or the same dialect or
the same variety, i.e., to employ the same code. Two degrees of emphasis of speech
community involve: shared community membership and shared linguistic communication.

6.8 Exercises
1. How do you define the speech communities? Please elaborate!
2. How can the following three dimensions be used to distinguish between H and L

varieties in diglossic speech community?

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(1) Formality
(2) Social distance
(3) Social status
3. Blom and Gumperz (1972), Gal (1978, 1979), and Milroy (1980, 1987a) all use the
concept of ‘network’ in their investigations. What similarities and differences do you find
in their uses?
4. Describe the linguistic uses of some bilinguals with whom you are familiar. When do they
use each of the languages? If you are bilingual yourself, in what ways do you identify with
people who show the same range of linguistic abilities? A different range?
5. How do you differenciate between a dense network and multiple network?
6. Describe the linguistic uses of some bilinguals with whom you are familiar. When do they
use each of the languages? If you are bilingual yourself, in whatways do you identify with
people who show the same range of linguisticabilities? A different range?
7. In what respects does the language which is characteristic of each of the following
groups, if there is such a characteristic language, mark each group off as a separate
speech community: adolescents; stockbrokers; women; linguists; air traffic controllers;
priests; disk jockeys? How useful is the concept of ‘speech community’ in cases such as
these?
8. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) and Trudgill (1986, pp. 85–6) distinguish between
focused and diffuse languages and communities, the main difference being the degree to
which people agree about the shared features of the language or community. In this view
the English public schools wouldbe highly focused but Kingston, Jamaica, would be quite
diffuse. Try to apply this distinction to other situations of which you are aware.

References
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 1960. “Language and Identity.” In A Companion to Linguistic

Anthropology, edited by A. Duranti, 369–94. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.
Coulmas, Florian. 1998. The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

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Davies, G. 2005. Higher education, equal access, and residence conditions: does EU law
allow Member States to charge higher fees to students not previously resident?.
Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, 12 (3), 227-240.

Dubois, S., & Horvath, B. (1999). When the music changes, you change too: Gender and
language change in Cajun English. Language Variation and Change, 11(3), 287-313.

Eckert, P. & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1998). Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender,
and Power All Live. In Wardhaugh, (2010).

Finegan, E. 2004. Language Its Structure & Use. 4 Edition. California: University of Southern
California Press.

Fishman, J.A. 1972. Sociolinguistics: A brief Introduction. Rowley: Massachusetts: Newbury
House Publisher.

Gumperz, J.J. 1968. The Speech Community. International Encyclopedia of the social
sciences. New York: Macmillan, 381-386.
Herk, Gerrard Van. 2012. What is Sociolinguistics? New York: Willey Blackwell.
Holmes, Janet. 2013. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Forth Edition. New York: Longman.
Holmes, Janet & Wilson, Nick. 2017. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (5th edition). New

York: Routledge.
Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations of Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia:

U of Pennsylvania P.
Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. (Conduct and Communication, 4.) Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press.
Milroy, Lesley. 1987. Language and social networks, 2nd ed.Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Morgan, M. (2001). ‘‘Ain’t Nothin’ But A G Thang’’: Grammar, Variation and Language
Ideology in Hip Hop Identity. In S. Lanehart (ed.), African American Vernacular English
(pp. 185–207). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

O’Grady, W., Dobrovolsky, M., Katamba, F. 1996. Contemporary Linguistics An Introduction.
Longman.

Preston, Denis. 2000. Some plain facts about Americans and their language. American
speech, 75 (4), 398-401.

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Southerland, R.H & Katamba, F. 1996. ‘Language in social contexts’, Contemporary Lingistics:

An Introduction. Longman.
Stockwell, Peter, 2002. Sociolinguistics: A resource book for students. London: Routledge.
Wardaugh, Ronald. 2006. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Wardaugh, Ronald & Fuller, Janet. 2015. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. UK: Willey

Blackwell.

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CHAPTER 7

REGIONAL AND SOCIAL
VARIATION

Language development is a continuous process of learning how to mean through language.
(Halliday)

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INTRODUCTION

Language and communicaty are two related poles in communication. In a particular
community, there is always at least a language used. This is what is going to be discussed
here and the focus on language variation in multilingual communities. People often use a
language to signal their membership of particular groups and to construct different aspects
of their social identity. Social status, gender, age, ethnicity and the kinds of social networks
that people belong to turn out to be important dimensions of identity in many communities.
We will illustrate the way people use language to signal and enact such affiliations. Certain
individuals would behave linguistically like other individuals: they might be said to speak
the same language or the same dialect or the same variety, that is, to employ the same code.
In that respect they would be members of the same speech community. Sociolinguists have
offered different interpretations of this concept. Finally, we will link these ideas about how
we might define social groups with a framework for studying social identities in order to
provide a bridge between individual repertoires and social categories. So sociolinguists
think of language as a social object that gets its meaning and power through speakers’
participation in language-using groups. But what do we really mean by “social” in this
context? More specifically, what exactly are the social groups that matter in determining
what people are doing with language at any particular time?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Students are able to explain regional and social variation
2. Students are able to explain regional and social variation in the Indonesian context
3. Students are able to give example of regional and social variation in the Indonesian

context

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7.1 Regional variation
Language is dinamic. A language can be spoken differently in different areas, for example
English. British English, American English, Australian English, and Singaporean English.
When you answer the telephone, you can guess where the callers come from. Most listeners
can identify when the caller is a child without any problem. When the caller is an adult, it is
usually easy to tell whether a speaker is female or male. If the person has a distinctive
regional accent, then their regional origins will be evident even from a short utterance. Also,
it might be possible to make a reasonable guess about the person’s socio-economic or
educational background.

No two people speak exactly the same. There are infinite sources of variation in speech. A
sound spectrograph, a machine which represents the sound waves of speech in visual form,
shows that even a single vowel may be pronounced in hundreds of minutely different ways,
most of which listeners do not even register. Some features of speech, however, are shared
by groups, and become important because they differentiate one group from another. Just
as different languages often serve a unifying and separating function for their speakers, so
do speech characteristics within languages. The pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of
Scottish speakers of English are all in some respects quite distinct from those of people
from England, for example. Though there is variation within Scotland, there are also some
features which perform an overall unifying function. The letter r in words like girl and star
is pronounced in a number of English-speaking areas, and Scotland is certainly one of them.
And a Scot is far more likely to say I’ll not do it than I won’t do it, meet you at the back of 1
rather than some time after 1 and he lives outwith Edinburgh rather than he lives outside
Edinburgh.

Similarly the pronunciation of bath with the same vowel as in sat distinguishes a speaker
from the north of England from a southerner. And while many speakers of English use the

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same vowel in the three words bag, map and bad, workers in Belfast pronounce them in
ways that sound like [beg], [ma::rp] and [bod] to English people. Speech provides social
information too. Dropping the initial [h] in words like house and heaven often indicates a
lower socio-economic background in English. And so does the use of grammatical patterns
such as they don’t know nothing them kids or I done it last week. We signal our group
affiliations and our social identities by the speech forms we use.

There are vocabulary differences in the varieties spoken in different regions too.
Australians talk of sole parents, for example, while people in England call them single
parents and New Zealanders call them solo parents. South Africans use the term robot for
British traffic-light. British wellies (Wellington boots) are New Zealand gummies
(gumboots), while the word togs refers to very different types of clothes in different places.
In New Zealand, togs are what you swim in. In Britain you might wear them to a formal
dinner.

Pronunciation and vocabulary differences are probably the differences people are most
aware of between different dialects of English, but there are grammatical differences too.
Speakers of US English tend to prefer do you have, though this can now also be heard in
Britain alongside the traditional British English have you got. Americans say gotten where
people in England use got. Many Americans use dove while most British English speakers
prefer dived. Americans ask did you eat? while the English ask have you eaten? Are the US
or the British usages predominant where you live? In New Zealand, where US forms are
usually regarded as more innovative, younger New Zealanders say dove, while older New
Zealanders use dived.

The differences that English speakers throughout the world notice when they meet English
speakers from other nations are similar to those noted by speakers of other languages too.
Spanish and French, for example, are languages which are extensively used in a variety of
countries besides Spain and France. Speakers of Spanish can hear differences of

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pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar in the varieties of Spanish spoken in Mexico, Spain,
Argentina and Paraguay, for example. Native speakers of French can distinguish the French
used in Montreal from Parisian and Haitian French. There are differences in the vocabulary
of different varieties. So, for example, a Parisian’s travail (‘work’) is a djobe in Montreal. The
word for ‘beggar’ is mendiant in France but quêteux in Quebec. And Canadians tend to use
aller voir un film, while Parisians prefer aller au cinéma. Even grammatical gender
assignment differs in the two varieties. Appétit (‘appetite’) and midi (‘midday’), for instance,
are feminine in Canada, but masculine in France, while the opposite is true for automobile
and oreille (‘ear’). Clearly Canadian French and Parisian French are different dialects.

Regional variation takes time to develop. British and US English, for instance, provide much
more evidence of regional variation than New Zealand or Australian English. Dialectologists
can distinguish regional varieties for almost every English county, e.g. Yorkshire,
Lancashire, Northumberland, Somerset, Cornwall and so on, and for many towns too. Some
British dialects, such as Scouse (heard in Liverpool), Cockney and Geordie, even have
distinct names showing how significant they are in distinguishing groups from one another.
Within the London area, the Cockney dialect is quite distinctive with its glottal stop [ʔ]
instead of [t] between vowels in words like bitter and butter, and its rhyming slang: e.g.
apples and pears for ‘stairs’, lean and lurch for ‘church’, the undoubtedly sexist trouble and
strife for ‘wife’ and the more ambiguous cows and kisses for ‘the missus’.

In the USA, too, dialectologists can identify distinguishing features of the speech of people
from different regions. Northern, Midland and Southern are the main divisions, and within
those three areas a number of further divisions can be made. Different towns and even
parts of towns can be distinguished. Within the Midland area, for example, the Eastern
States can be distinguished; and within those the Boston dialect is different from that of
New York City; and within New York City, Brooklynese is quite distinctive. The Linguistic
Atlas Projects (http://us.english.uga.edu/) provide a rich source of information on the
features of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary which distinguish different US dialects

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and an archive of recordings of these dialects (and many others) can be found in the
International Dialects of English Archive (www.dialectsarchive.com). In the rural
Appalachians, one can hear pronunciations such as acrosst and clifft, as well as verbs with
a-prefixes, such as a-fishin’ and a-comin’. Words for dragonfly in the Eastern States include
darning needle, mosquito hawk, spindle, snake feeder, snake doctor and snake waiter, but
of these only darning needle is used in New York. From darning needle, however, New York
has developed two new variants dining needle and diamond needle. (It becomes difficult at
this point to remember that these are all names for an insect not a sewing implement!).

In areas where English has been introduced more recently, such as Australia and New
Zealand, there seems to be less regional variation – though there is evidence of social
variation. The high level of intra-national communication, together with the relatively small
populations, may have inhibited the development of marked regional differences in these
countries. In New Zealand, for instance, there are greater differences among the Maori
dialects than within English, reflecting the longer period of settlement and more restricted
means of communication between people from different Maori tribes before European
settlers arrived. Maori pronunciation of words written with an initial wh, for example,
differs from one place to another. The Maori word for ‘fish’ is ika in most areas but ngohi in
the far North, and kirikiri refers to ‘gravel’ in the west but ‘sand’ in the east of New Zealand.
There are many more such differences.

7.2 The linguistic Variation

The way a linguistic variation is realised or expressed may be interpreted in different ways
by different people. Listeners combine linguistic input with stereotypes and experience to
construct the perceived identity of a speaker. At the same time, speakers may also be
conscious of the ‘identity work’ that their own linguistic practices achieve, and purposefully
try to portray a particular stereotype in order to produce some effect on the hearer. For
instance, if Paul wanted to sound tough, he might adopt features of the broader Glaswegian
dialect that Danny uses such as the [h] variant for ‘thing’ and ‘think’. Another way of putting

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this is that in Glasgow, saying ‘hing’ indexes tough masculinity. Sociolinguists use the term
indexicality to refer to the associations that a language feature has in the mind of the
hearer. So you may have noticed that we used the term indexing in previous chapters to
refer to the way a person signals a particular aspect of their social identity (age, social
background, ethnicity, gender) through the way they speak. So we don’t construct our
identity in relation to just one social factor, and even the way we realise or express a single
linguistic variable can have implications for the way in which our identity is constructed.

When a speaker says something, listeners link the linguistic features they use to certain
social stereotypes that they associate with these features. These stereotypes may be based
on real sociolinguistics patterns of variation and often have to do with social prestige.
However, stereotypes are often inaccurate or exaggerated ways of thinking about people,
and a person’s identity is not constructed only with reference to social identity categories,
even when these are local categories such as ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’, or ‘neds’ and ‘chavs’.
When a person talks, they also communicate their understanding of a situation, and the way
they view the people they are talking to, and what they are talking about, and this
contributes to how they construct their identity in an interaction just as much as the dialect
features that they use.

Linguistic features may index identity categories such as age and membership of a speech
community. Linguistic features also construct the speaker’s identity in relation to local
norms or stereotypes. For instance, in this context they could be heard as constructing a
speaker as ‘cool’ because they are using a new variety of English, which has covert prestige.
‘Cool’ is a label for something which we call a stance. Stance indicates a speaker’s position in
relation to what they are saying. Other stances a person might convey through their
language are ‘sarcastic’, ‘cooperative’, ‘sceptical’ and ‘passionate’. Stances indicate a
speaker’s evaluation of things or events, their attitudes towards them and the degree to
which a speaker considers something is certain or credible (epistemic stance). When you
take a particular stance you indicate similarities or differences with the person(s) you are
speaking to (your interlocutors).

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7.2.1 Phonological Variation

The study of linguistic variation is often perceived to be quintessentially engaged with
phonological phenomena. This is a manifest misperception: variationist work on
morphosyntactic issues began with the original foundational articles that launched the
“variable rule” framework (Labov [1969] on the English copula, and Labov [1972] on
negative concord), and continues to be among the most active areas in the field. But it is
instructive to consider why such a misperception persists. There are two factors that drive
this view. First, there exists an almost prescriptive attitude that phonology is the only
domain in which linguists should speak of variation, arising from an uneasy suspicion that
any alternations found at other levels of linguistic structure might involve intentional
differences in meaning. In Labov’s informal definition, variation involves “different ways of
saying the same thing,” and for most linguists it is easy to conclude that runnin’ and running
are different versions of the “same thing,” but rather worrisome to make the same claim
about Kyle got arrested and Kyle was arrested. Hence the view that variationists tidily
confine their labors to the vineyard of phonology alleviates this existential angst about the
status of morphosyntactic variation.

Stress

Word stress is found to condition phonological operations and distribution in virtually
every language that has a stress contrast. The direction of effect observed here is that
stressed syllables have greater retention (i.e. are more faithful to underlying form), while
unstressed syllables are more congenial to deletion. This is consistent with theories of
prosody, positional prominence, etc., and with categorical alternations in many languages. It
is also consistent with diachronic principles: in language change, stressed positions are
more resistant to lenition and deletion processes.

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Following segment

Increased rates of deletion in preconsonantal contexts are widely observed in variation
studies. The theoretical explanation for this lies in principles of syllable structure. A word-
final consonant resides underlyingly in coda position, which is universally marked and
disfavored. Theories of syllable structure state this in various ways; thus, CV phonology
(Clements and Keyser 1983) treats CV as the universally unmarked syllable type, while
Optimality Theory postulates NoCoda as part of the universal inventory of phonological
constraints. So coda deletion is an expected repair, and a common diachronic change.
However, a following vowel licenses the consonant as an onset, which is an optimal position
for retention. Word-internally in Portuguese, as in many other languages, prevocalic
consonants are obligatorily syllabified rightwards, as onsets. Across word boundaries, this
is optional, and the outcomes are variable.

Voicing of following consonant

The data show appreciably more deletion before voiced than voiceless consonants. A
theoretical explanation of this result requires one additional observation about Brazilian
Portuguese. Voicing of sibilants is not phonemically distinctive in coda position; hence final
sibilants assimilate obligatorily to the voicing of a following segment. The pattern shown
here therefore reduces to the generalization that voiced fricatives are deleted more than
voiceless ones, which has a ready explanation in markedness. Voiced fricatives are
universally more marked than their voiceless counterparts; they are also typologically
rarer, and raise aerodynamic problems in articulation, since the glottal impedance
associated with voicing reduces the airflow required to generate the turbulence of frication.

Place of following consonant

The figures in the table indicate a robust effect of the place of a following consonant, with
highest deletion rates before an alveolar, second highest before a labial, and least deletion
before a velar. This is a clear example of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which
states that adjacent identical elements are dispreferred. It was first proposed in

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phonological theory to account for the avoidance in tonal languages of sequences of
adjacent identical tones, but it has been generalized to phonological processes that avoid
adjacent identical segments and features (cf. Yip 1988).

As the name implies, the OCP was originally postulated to account for obligatory,
categorical phenomena, but numerous gradient or variable phenomena also confirm a
general preference for “contoured” sequences (where adjacent elements are dissimilar)
over “level” sequences where adjacent elements are identical or similar. For example, Guy
and Boberg (1997) found that English coronal stop deletion shows an OCP effect of the
preceding consonant: there is more deletion after segments that are phonologically similar
to the targeted /t,d/, i.e. those that share more features. Thus deletion is favored by
preceding stops (e.g. act, apt – same in continuancy and obstruency) and alveolar fricatives
(last – same in place and obstruency), but disfavored by preceding liquids (cold, hard) and
labial fricatives (left), which share fewer features with the target. The place data in Table
1.1 show essentially the same pattern. A conventional distinctive feature treatment of place
contrasts velar, alveolar, and labial in terms of several features, as in the following matrix:

labial [coronal] [back]
alveolar - -
velar + -
- +

In this treatment, alveolar place shares one feature with labial place, but none with velar.
Hence the deletion target, a coronal sibilant, is most similar in place to a following coronal
consonant (like t, d, n), partially similar to labials (p, b, m), and most different from velars
(k, g). The deletion facts in Table 1.1 follow this cline of similarity, implying that they are
governed by a Contour Principle that is not obligatory, but probabilistic.

7.2.2 Syntactical Variation

Labov (1969) maintains that an approach to the study of language that encompasses
variable rules and constraints on the application of rules could help to answer questions

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about the acquisition of rule systems and the way “norms of the speech community” are
acquired (1969:760). Henry (2002), based on data from acquisition of BE, explains that
children do not just acquire a single grammar, they acquire “variable forms at an early age”
(2002:278), and they “have learned the statistical distribution of forms at an early age”
(2002: 279).

Just as there is a division between syntactic theory and sociolinguistic models, which
incorporate methods for determining variability and probability, there is also a divide
between research on child language development and the acquisition of variation. That is to
say that variation in child language has been considered from the sociolinguistic
perspective, and this is especially due to the association of variation with social meaning
and style. On the other hand, acquisition research that is concerned only with linguistic
factors has focused on the development of categorical features. Given the focus on
obligatory occurrence or categorical features and the development of the adult grammar,
there has not been much consideration of the role variation plays in language development
in research on general stages of acquisition. Also, as Roberts (2002) notes, one of the
challenges of studying child language variation is that it is not easy to distinguish
developmental variation from that which is socially motivated.

7.3 Relating linguistic variation to social variation

Languages are not purely linguistic entities. They serve social functions. In order to define a
language, it is important to look to its social and political functions, as well as its linguistic
features. So a language can be thought of as a collection of dialects that are usually
linguistically similar, used by different social groups who choose to say that they are
speakers of one language which functions to unite and represent them to other groups. This
definition is a sociolinguistic rather than a linguistic one: it includes all the linguistically
very different Chinese dialects, which the Chinese define as one language, while separating
the languages of Scandinavia which are linguistically very similar, but politically quite
distinct varieties.

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In earlier centuries, you could tell where an English lord or lady came from by their regional
form of English. But by the early twentieth century, a person who spoke with a regional
accent in England was most unlikely to belong to the upper class. Upper-class people had an
upper-class education, and that generally meant a public (i.e. private!) school where they
learned to speak RP. RP stands not for ‘Real Posh’ (as suggested to me by a young friend),
but rather for Received Pronunciation – the accent of the best educated and most
prestigious members of English society. It is claimed that the label derives from the accent
which was ‘received’ at the royal court, and it is sometimes identified with ‘the Queen’s
English’, although the accent used by Queen Elizabeth II, as portrayed so brilliantly by Helen
Mirren in the movie The Queen, is a rather old-fashioned variety of RP.

RP was promoted by the BBC for decades. It is essentially a social accent not a regional one.
Indeed, it conceals a speaker’s regional origins. This is nicely illustrated in figure 6.2, the
accent triangle. As the triangle suggests, most linguistic variation will be found at the lowest
socio-economic level where regional differences abound. Further up the social ladder the
amount of observable variation reduces till one reaches the pinnacle of RP – an accent used
by less than 5 per cent of the British population. So a linguist travelling round Britain may
collect over a dozen different pronunciations of the word grass from the working-class
people she meets in different regions. She will hear very much less variation from the
lower-middle-class and middle-class people. And, at least until recently, the upper classes
would pronounce the word as [gra:s] wherever they came from in England.

7.4 Summary
Geographically, a language can be spoken differently and even it has various different
words in different areas of a region or province. This difference refers language variation. In
addition, social status and class can also show variation of language especially relating to
family relationship, age, and cultural matters.

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Variation in non-standard dialects of American English has received some attention in
sociolinguistics, with emphasis on the social factors, linguistic constraints, and language
change that play a role in variable structures. In addition, in sociolinguistic variation theory,
variable structures in these varieties may also be characterized by a probability index,
which may be argued to be part of the grammar. Syntactic variation is also beginning to be
addressed in theoretical frameworks, such as Optimality Theory and the Minimalist
Program, which raise questions about whether speakers have multiple grammars and
choose from among them. The integration of variation in syntactic theory could contribute
to our understanding the range of possible intradialectal and interdialectal variation in
various constructions such as negation and questions.

Consideration of variation in theoretical syntactic models would also help to broaden
research on the acquisition of variation and the developmental paths children take as they
learn their community grammars. The copula and auxiliary be have received considerable
attention in linguistic research, and given the variable occurrence of the be forms in child
language, more data and research in this area would be useful in providing information
about developmental patterns in child language, especially in child AAE, which is often
compared to adult AAE without much focus on the properties of stages of acquisition.

7.5 Exercises
Exercise 1
Where there are differences between regions, it is interesting to discover the local names
for particular objects. There are often regional differences in the words used for standard
English scarecrow, stream and cowpat, for instance. When asking people what they call
these items, you should phrase your question so as to avoid using the word you are
interested in. To exemplify, we have provided four questions aimed at eliciting labels for
four more objects which often vary regionally:

(a) What do you call a small round sweet cake with a hole in the middle?

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(b) What do you call the vehicles people push babies round in?
(c) What do you call an item of clothing worn to protect clothing especially while cooking?
(d) What do you call the shoes people wear for tennis or running?

Collect information from a range of people on what they call these objects and where
possible include older people who were born outside your area.

Exercise 2
Have you ever been in a situation where you were speaking to somebody with a different
dialect or accent, and you just couldn’t understand each other? How did you deal with the
situation?

References
Boberg, C. (2000). Geolinguistic Diffusion and the U.S.–Canada Border. Language Variation

and Change, 12: 1–24.Green, Lisa. 2007. Syntactic Variation. In Robert Bayley and Ceil
Lucas, Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, Methods, and Applications, p. 24-44.
Guy , Gregory R. 2007. Variation and Phonological Theory. In Robert Bayley and Ceil Lucas,
Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, Methods, and Applications, p. 5-23.
Holmes, Janet & Wilson, Nick. 2017. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (5th edition). New
York: Routledge.
Holmes, Janet. 2013. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (4th Edition). New York: Longman.
Labov, W. (1969). Contraction, Deletion, and Inherent Variability of the English Copula.
Language, 45: 715–62.
Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.Wardaugh, Ronald & Fuller, Janet. 2015. An Introduction to Sociolinguistcs. UK:
Willey Balckwell.

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CHAPTER 8

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE,
SHIFT, AND DEATH

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
(Ferdinand De Sausure)

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INTRODUCTION

Choosing a particular language to communicate, people have social reasons, such as social
status, social group/community, and geographical situation. Sometime, people
automatically change their language when there is a triger, for example nativeness,
formal/informal situation, and relationship. Furthermore, the choice of language is also
influenced by economic and political factor. Here, what is going to concerned covers three
coverages, they are language maintenance, language shift, and the death of language.
Various problems related to language choice happen to different communities are discussed
here. Also, there are potential effects in such a longer-term toward language shift or
language death. In addition, this chapter will describe alternative way to handle the

consequences in the term of language revival efforts.

Uriel Weinreich (1968) used the term ‘language shift’ to denote a change from the ‘habitual
use of one language to that of another’. On the other hand, Joshua Fishman in 1964
introduced the terms ‘maintenance’ and ‘shift’ in a pioneering article. Language
maintenance is defined as the continuing use of a language in the face of competition from a
regionally and socially more powerful language. The opposite of this term, language shift,
denotes the replacement of one language by another as the primary means of
communication and socialisation within a community. The term language death is used
when a community is the last one (in the world) to use that language. In the other words, a
language will be in the status of death when there is no more any speaker uses the
language. Studies of language maintenance efforts can be found in Kloss (1966) and
Fishman (1966). Two notable classics in the field of language shift are Nancy Dorian’s case
study (1981) of the demise of Gaelic in north-east Scotland and Susan Gal’s study (1979)
conducted in a society in Oberwart, Austria found a language shift from Hungarian to
German.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Students are able to explain language maintenance, language shift, and language death
2. Students are able to explain cases of language maintenance, shift, and death in

Indonesian context
3. Students are able to give example of language maintenance, shift, and death in

Indonesian context.
4. Students are able to anaylize cases of language maintenance, shift, and death.

8.1 Language shift in different communities

Having different background of local language (indigenous language), people tend to use a
universal or common language used in a community or society such at work. This situation
influences people in choosing a language to communicate. It can happen to people with
minority language, so when meet other people with different language they use a universal
language. It is in order to ease the communication. It shows how people shift language.
There is a case which shows a person with minority language, for instance Maniben. Holmes
and Wilson (2017) Maniben’s pattern of language use at work has gradually shifted over a
period of ten years. At one stage she used mainly Gujarati; now she uses English almost
exclusively. Maniben’s experience is typical for those who use a minority language in a
predominantly monolingual culture and society. The order of domains in which language
shift occurs may differ for different individuals and different groups, but gradually over
time the language of the wider society displaces the minority language mother tongue.
There are many different social factors which can lead a community to shift from using one
language for most purposes to using a different language, or from using two distinct codes
in different domains, to using different varieties of just one language for their
communicative needs. Migrant families provide an obvious example of this process of
language shift.

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In Indonesian context, people tend to use Indonesian as a national language to
communicate with other people who have different language. In this context, Inndonesian
becomes a uniting language. It influences people to shift their language to communicate. At
offices and at schools Indonesian is the only language used, so it trigers people to shift their
language. In countries like England, Australia, New Zealand and the USA, the school is one of
the first domains in which children of migrant families meet English. They may have
watched English TV programmes and heard English used in shops before starting school,
but at school they are expected to interact in English. They have to use English because it is
the only means of communicating with the teacher and other children. For many children of
migrants, English soon becomes the normal language for talking to other children –
including their brothers and sisters. Because her grandparents knew little English, Maniben
continued to use mainly Gujarati at home, even though she had learned English at school
and used it more and more frequently at work. In many families, however, English gradually
infiltrates the home through the children. Children discuss school and friends in English
with each other, and gradually their parents begin to use English to them too, especially if
they are working in jobs where they use English.

Furthermore, people movement from an area to another area such as transmigration,
migration, and ubanitation also influences language shift. There is pressure from the wider
society too. Immigrants who look and sound ‘different’ are often regarded as threatening by
majority group members. There is pressure to conform in all kinds of ways. Language shift
to English, for instance, has often been expected of migrants in predominantly monolingual
countries such as England, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. Speaking good English has
been regarded as a sign of successful assimilation, and it was widely assumed that meant
abandoning the minority language. So most migrant families gradually shift from using
Gujarati, or Italian or Vietnamese to each other most of the time, to using English. This may
take three or four generations, but sometimes language

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shift is completed in just two generations. Typically migrants are virtually monolingual in
their mother tongue, their children are bilingual and their grandchildren are often
monolingual in the language of the ‘host’ country. We can observe the shift by noting the
change in people’s patterns of language use in different domains over time.

Language shift is not always the result of migration. Political, economic and social changes
can occur within a community, and this may result in linguistic changes too. As Iran
struggles to achieve national unity, Farsi, the language of the largest and most powerful
group, the Persians, can be considered a threat to the languages of the minority ethnic
groups. Iran is a multi-ethnic country of 74 million people, and in principle minority ethnic
languages are protected by the Iranian Constitution. But the reality is that they are not
taught in schools, and speakers of even the largest minority language, Azeri, are shifting to
Farsi in a number of domains. Farsi has official status and it dominates the public space in
Tabriz, and this sends a clear symbolic message about its significance and relevance in Iran,
and about the irrelevance of Azeri from the perspective of the government. In a recent
political speech, the Governor of East Azerbaijan code-switched frequently and rapidly
between Farsi and Azeri, even when addressing an Azeri audience. Though it is in no
immediate danger, the long-term prognosis is not good for Azeri unless some assertive
action is taken to maintain it. In Oberwart, an Austrian town on the border of Hungary, the
community has been gradually shifting from Hungarian to German for some time.

In the 1920s, Oberwart was a small place and the peasants used Hungarian to each other,
and German with outsiders. As Oberwart grew and industry replaced farming as the main
source of jobs, the functions of German expanded. German became the high language in a
broad diglossia situation in Oberwart. German was the language of the school, official
transactions and economic advancement. It expressed formality and social distance.
Hungarian was the low language, used in most homes and for friendly interaction between
townspeople. Hungarian was the language of solidarity, used for social and affective
functions. It soon became clear that to ‘get on’ meant learning German, and so knowledge of
German became associated with social and economic progress. Speaking Hungarian was

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increasingly associated with ‘peasantness’ and was considered old-fashioned. Young people
began to use German to their friends in the pub. Parents began to use German instead of
Hungarian to their children. In other words, the domains in which German was appropriate
continued to expand and those where Hungarian was used contracted. By the 1970s, God
was one of the few addressees to whom young people still used Hungarian when they said
their prayers or went to church.

The patterns of language use for any individual in Oberwart in the 1970s depended on their
social networks. Who did they interact with? Table 3.1 shows that interactions between
older people and ‘peasants’ (those working in jobs associated with the land) tended still to
be in Hungarian. These are in the top left-hand side of the table. Towards the right and
bottom of the table are interactions between younger people and those working in jobs
associated with the new industries or in professional jobs. Here German predominates. The
pattern in the table suggests that German will gradually completely displace Hungarian in
Oberwart, unless something unexpected happens.

The examples discussed so far in this chapter have illustrated that language shift often
indicates the influence of political factors and economic factors, such as the need for work.
People may shift both location and language for this reason. Over the last couple of
centuries, many speakers of Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, for instance, have shifted to
England, and consequently to English, primarily in order to get work. They need English
both for their job success and for their social well-being – to make friends. But we find the
outcome is the same when it is the majority group who do the physical moving.

When colonial powers invade other countries their languages often become dominant.
Countries such as Portugal, Spain, France and Britain have generally imposed their
languages along with their rule. This has not always resulted in linguistic subjugation and
language shift. Multilingualism was too well-established as normal in countries like India
and Papua New Guinea, and in many African countries. It was not possible for a single alien

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and imported language to displace and eradicate hundreds of indigenous vernacular
languages. But when multilingualism was not widespread in an area, or where just one
indigenous language had been used before the colonisers arrived, languages were often
under threat. In this context, English has been described as a ‘killer language’. Where one
group abrogates political power and imposes its language along with its institutions –
government administration, law courts, education, religion – it is likely that minority
groups will find themselves under increasing pressure to adopt the language of the
dominant group.

8.2 Language Death and Loss

Needless to say, this report conceals a much more complex reality. Firstly, the name
Ayapaneco for the language was given by outsiders; the two men actually call it Nuumte
Oote (‘True Voice’). Secondly, no one actually knows why the two men do not speak to each
other. There may be cultural reasons for their behaviour, e.g. an ‘avoidance relationship’, as
appropriate in some Australian Aboriginal cultures. Thirdly, and most relevantly for the
discussion in this chapter, the reasons for the disappearance of Ayapaneco can more
accurately be linked to factors such as the increasing urbanisation of the population, and
the political decision to introduce compulsory education in Spanish, rather than to the lack
of communication between these two old men.

Nevertheless, it is generally true that when all the people who speak a language die, the
language dies with them. Sometimes this fact is crystal clear. In 1992, when Tefvik Esenç
died, so did the linguistically complex Caucasian language Ubykh. Manx has now completely
died out in the Isle of Man – the last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, died in 1974. Despite
recent attempts to revive it, most people agree that Cornish effectively disappeared from
Cornwall in the eighteenth century when Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole died in 1777. Less
than half of the 250–300 Aboriginal languages spoken in Australia when the Europeans
arrived have survived, and fewer than two dozen are being actively passed on to younger

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generations. Many disappeared s a direct result of the massacre of the Aboriginal people, or
their death from diseases introduced by Europeans. In Tasmania, for instance, the whole
indigenous population of between 3000 and 4000 people was exterminated within seventy-
five years. Their languages died with them. These are cases of language death rather than
language shift. These languages are no longer spoken anywhere.

A community, such as the Turkish community in Britain, may shift to English voluntarily
over a couple of generations. This involves the loss of the language for the individuals
concerned, and even for the community in Britain. But Turkish is not under threat of
disappearing because of this shift. It will continue to thrive in Turkey. But when the last
native speaker of Martuthunira, Algy Paterson, died in 1995, this Australian Aboriginal
language died with him. Indeed it was predicted that almost all Australian Aboriginal
languages would be extinct by the year 2000, a prediction which fortunately has not been
completely fulfilled. When a language dies gradually, as opposed to all its speakers being
wiped out by a massacre or epidemic, the process is similar to that of language shift. The
functions of the language are taken over in one domain after another by another language.
As the domains in which speakers use the language shrink, the speakers of the dying
language become gradually less proficient in it.

Annie is experiencing language loss. This is the manifestation, in the individual’s
experience, of wide-scale language death. Because she uses English for most purposes, her
vocabulary in Dyirbal has shrunk and shrunk. When she is talking to her grandmother she
keeps finding herself substituting English words like cook in her Dyirbal, because she can’t
remember the Dyirbal word. She can’t remember all the complicated endings on Dyirbal
nouns. They vary depending on the sound at the end of the noun, but she uses just one
ending -gu for all of them. For other words she simply omits the affix because she can’t
remember it. Her grandmother complains vociferously about her word order. Annie finds
herself putting words in the order they come in English instead of in the order her

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grandmother uses in Dyirbal. It is clear that Annie’s Dyirbal is very different from
traditional Dyirbal.

Because English is now so widely used in her community, it seems unlikely that Dyirbal will
survive in a new form based on the variety Annie speaks. It is on its way to extinction. When
Annie’s generation die, it is pretty certain Dyirbal will die with them. The process of
language death for the language comes about through this kind of gradual loss of fluency
and competence by its speakers. Competence in the language does not disappear overnight.
It gradually erodes over time. With the spread of a majority group language into more and
more domains, the number of contexts in which individuals use the ethnic language
diminishes. The language usually retreats till it is used only in the home, and finally it is
restricted to such personal activities as counting, praying and dreaming. The stylistic range
that people acquire when they use a language in a wider range of domains disappears. Even
in the contexts where the language is still used, there is a gradual reduction in the
complexity and diversity of structural features of the language – speakers’ sound rules get
simplified, their grammatical patterns become less complex and their vocabulary in the
language gets smaller and smaller.

In the wider community, the language may survive for ritual or ceremonial occasions, but
those who use it in these contexts will be few in number and their fluency is often restricted
to prayers and set speeches or incantations. In many Maori communities in New Zealand,
for instance, the amount of Maori used in ceremonies is entirely dependent on the
availability of respected elders who still retain some knowledge of the appropriate
discourse. Maori is now used in some communities only for formal ceremonial speeches,
prayers for the sick and perhaps for a prayer to open a meeting.

8.3 Factors contributing to language shift and death

Mastering a language can be achieved by practicing and using it intesifly on the daily bases.
On the other hand, when it is not used for a long time, people usually lose their ability.

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Accordingly, a language can be unspoken by people because of this unability. Furthermore,
there are also other factors influencing language shift and death, they are four factors
economy, social, and politics, demographics, and attitudes.

Economic, social and political factors

What factors lead a community to shift from using one language to using another? Initially,
the most obvious factor is that the community sees important reasons for learning the
second language. The reasons are often economic, but they may also be political – as in the
case of Israel which is discussed below. Obtaining work is the most obvious economic
reason for learning another language. In English-dominated countries, for instance, people
learn English in order to get good jobs. This results in bilingualism. Bilingualism is always a
necessary precursor of language shift, although, as stable diglossic communities
demonstrate, it does not always result in shift. The second important factor, then, seems to
be that the community sees no reason to take active steps to maintain their ethnic language.
They may not see it as offering any advantages to their children, for example, or they may
not realise that it is in any danger of disappearing. Without active language maintenance,
shift is almost inevitable in many contexts. For example, where a migrant minority group
moves to a predominantly monolingual society dominated by one majority group language
in all the major institutional domains – school, TV, radio, newspapers, government
administration, courts, work – language shift will be unavoidable unless the community
takes active steps to prevent it. Very often, without consciously deciding to abandon their
ethnic language, a community will lose it because they did not perceive any threat. At first it
appears very important to learn the majority language in order to achieve social and
economic success. The minority language seems safe because ‘we all speak it’. Yet, without
conscious maintenance, it can and usually does disappear in as few as three generations.

The social and economic goals of individuals in a community are very important in
accounting for the speed of shift. Rapid shift occurs when people are anxious to ‘get on’ in a
society where knowledge of the second language is a prerequisite for success. Young

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upwardly mobile people are likely to shift fastest. It has also been noticed that the shift to
another language may be led by women or by men depending on where the new jobs lie and
the gender roles in the society. Young women in Oberwart, for example, led the shift to
German there, because they were the ones taking most advantage of the new jobs offered
by industrial changes. Newly arrived migrant women in New Zealand, on the other hand,
often have less education than their husbands. They tend to stay home, at least initially,
maintaining the minority language. When they get work, it is often in low-paid jobs such as
night-cleaning or in bakeries. There they work with others from their own ethnic group and
so they can use their ethnic language in the work domain too.

Demographic factors

Demographic factors are also relevant in accounting for the speed of language shift.
Resistance to language shift tends to last longer in rural than in urban areas. This is partly
because rural groups tend to be isolated from the centres of political power for longer, and
they can meet most of their social needs in the ethnic or minority language. So, for example,
because of their relative social isolation, Ukrainians in Canada who live out of town on
farms have maintained their ethnic language better than those in the towns. Although some
younger urban people now speak Maori as a second language, the communities in New
Zealand where Maori survives as a language of everyday communication are relatively
inaccessible rural areas, populated almost entirely by Maori people. In these communities,
there are older native speakers who still use the language to talk to each other in their
homes and in the streets, as well as for formal Maori speech events. In fact, before television
became widespread, the school was the only domain where English was regularly used in
these communities. Everyday interactions between Maori people were in Maori. Maori was
used at church, in the shops, for community meetings and in the pub. Improved roads, bus
services, television in every home – and even in the pub – has changed all that. Richard
Benton, a sociolinguist who surveyed the use of Maori in New Zealand in the late twentieth
century, summed up the situation by saying that even in these isolated communities Maori
is now a language which can only be used between consenting adults!

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Shift tends to occur faster in some groups than in others. The size of the group is sometimes
a critical factor. In Australia, the areas with the largest groups of Maltese speakers (Victoria
and New South Wales) had the lowest rates of shift towards English. Spanish has survived
well in the USA due partly to the large numbers of speakers. By contrast, members of a
migrant family in an urban area where no one else speaks their mother tongue face a much
more difficult task. With few opportunities to use their mother tongue, language
maintenance is much more difficult. To maintain a language you must have people you can
use it with on a regular basis. Crystal’s family had nowhere they could use Spanish except in
the home, and no one they could talk to in Spanish except each other. They were both
isolated and ‘odd’ in the eyes of others. Maintaining a language is near impossible under
these conditions. Crystal’s solution to her integration problem was to marry a monolingual
New Zealander.

Intermarriage between groups can accelerate language shift. Unless multilingualism is
normal in a community, one language tends to predominate in the home. German
immigrants in Australia are typical. Despite its multicultural composition, Australia is
predominantly a monolingual society. When a German-speaking man marries an
Englishspeaking Australian woman, English is usually the dominant language of the home,
and the main language used to the children. The same pattern has been observed in many
other communities. In Oklahoma in the USA, for instance, in every family where a Cherokee
speaker has married outside the Cherokee community, the children speak only English. A
mother whose English is not strong, or who consciously wants to pass on the minority
language to her children, may slow down the process of shift to English by using the
language to the children. And there are some strongly patriarchal groups where the father’s
support for the use of the minority language in the home proves effective – many Greek and
Italian fathers in Australia, for example, and Samoan fathers in New Zealand, actively
encourage the use of their languages in the home. Maori men have also expressed concern
that their sons should learn Maori, since they will need it to speak formally on the marae in

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later life. But once the children of mixed marriages start school, it takes a very determined
parent to succeed in maintaining the minority language in the home – especially if the other
parent doesn’t speak the minority language well – or at all.

Attitudes and values

Language shift tends to be slower among communities where the minority language is
highly valued. When the language is seen as an important symbol of ethnic identity, it is
generally maintained longer. Positive attitudes support efforts to use the minority language
in a variety of domains, and this helps people resist the pressure from the majority group to
switch to their language. The status of a language internationally can contribute to these
positive attitudes. Maintaining French in Canada and the USA is easier because French is a
language with international status. It is obvious to French–Americans in Maine, for instance,
that French is a good language to know. It has international prestige. Immigrant Greeks are
proud of the contribution of Greek to Western philosophy and culture, and this awareness
of the importance of their language helps them resist language shift to English. For similar
reasons, we would expect a language with the international status of Spanish to have a
better chance of resisting shift than languages with few speakers such as Maori or Dyirbal.
But even the high status of Spanish as a world language could not offset the attitudes of the
local community to Crystal’s family’s ‘oddness’. Pride in their ethnic identity and their
language can be important factors which contribute to language maintenance, provided
there is a strong community to support and encourage these attitudes.

8.4 How can a minority language be maintained?

There are certain social factors which seem to retard wholesale language shift for a
minority language group, at least for a time. Where language is considered an important
symbol of a minority group’s identity, for example, the language is likely to be maintained
longer. Polish people have regarded language as very important for preserving their
identity in the many countries they have migrated to, and they have often maintained Polish

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for three to four generations. The same is true for Greek migrants in places like Australia,
New Zealand and the USA. If families from a minority group live near each other and see
each other frequently, this also helps them maintain their language. Members of the Greek
community in Wellington, New Zealand, for instance, belong to a common church, the Greek
Orthodox church, where Greek is used. They have established shops where they sell
foodstuffs imported from Greece and where they use Greek to each other. There are Indian
and Pakistani communities in Britain who have established the same kind of communities
within cities, and you can often hear Panjabi or Gujarati spoken in their shops. In the USA,
Chinese people who live in the Chinatown areas of big cities are much more likely to
maintain a Chinese dialect as their mother tongue through to the third generation than
those who move outside the Chinatown area. Another factor which may contribute to
language maintenance for those who emigrate is the degree and frequency of contact with
the homeland. A regular stream of new migrants or even visitors will keep the need for
using the language alive. Polynesian migrants from the islands of Niue, Tokelau, Tonga and
Samoa arrive in New Zealand regularly. New Zealand Polynesians provide them with
hospitality, and the new arrivals provide new linguistic input for the New Zealand
communities. The prospect of regular trips back ‘home’ provides a similar motivation to
maintain fluency for many groups.

Samoan men in New Zealand, for instance, often expect to return home to take up family
and community responsibilities at a later stage in their lives. Greek migrants also see a trip
back to Greece as a high priority for themselves and their children. Most Greek New
Zealanders regard a trip back to Greece as essential at some point in their lives, and many
young Greek girls take the trip with the express aim of securing a good Greek husband.
Clearly this provides a very strong incentive to maintain proficiency in Greek.

These researchers have identified a number of factors that can influence language
retention (Tabouret-Keller 1968; Dressler & Wodak-Leodolter 1977; Gal 1979; Dorian
1980, 1981; Timm 1980):

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Institutional support

Is the group’s language used in local education? Government? Churches? Media? Where I
grew up, education was available in either English or French. There were no Dutch
“Saturday schools,” where Canadian children of immigrants get a day (or half day) a week
of instruction in their parents’ language. And there was no Dutch Reformed church in town.

Power and prestige of languages

How prestigious is the group – in their own eyes, and in the eyes of the larger society? One
of my parents’ languages, English, was also a language of school and work, so I was exposed
to a lot of it. It was also the language of all the cool stuff around me – movies, music, books,
TV. And it was the language of upward mobility. So it made sense to my parents that English
would be the language that my brothers and I would grow up using. In a sense, it
overpowered Dutch. (In Lidia’s case, neither Spanish nor Polish played a big role in work or
school, so neither language had an unfair advantage. She grew up in a classic “one parent,
one language” bilingual family situation, then picked up French and English at school and in
the community.)

Demography

How big is the group and other language groups around it? How dispersed are the
speakers? Are people marrying out of the group, or having a lot of children? Are new
migrants continuing to arrive? In my case, there weren’t that many Dutch-speaking people
in small-town Québec. My dad had already married out. Most of my Dutch relatives lived far
away, and there was no “Dutch-town” neighborhood to hang out in (although that would
have been cool). Pendakur and Kralt (1991), working from census data, show that
living in a large linguistic or ethnic enclave (such as a Chinatown) encourages retention of
immigrant languages.

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Community choices

Often, an accumulation of individual choices about assimilation and change lead to a speech
community shifting to a new language. Even among Canadians who learned Dutch as their
first language, only 12 percent still speak it at home (Statistics Canada 1989). Sometimes it
seems that Dutch people as a whole have decided that English is the language of their
future–in the Netherlands, citizens strongly support English as the second language taught
in schools, and if you go there you’ll hear a lot of very competent English. English is now
becoming the preferred language of Dutch academics, none of whom seems to feel that this
will lead to the extinction of Dutch from other domains of language use.

8.5 Summary
People use a particular language because of social status, membership of a community,
social and political issues and geographical matter. Moreover, people tend to shift their
language or even dialect because of nativeness, formal-informal situation, and relationship.
As a matter of the fact, these factors influence the existence and change of languages.
Accordingly, there should be ways to handle the consequences in the term of language

revival efforts.

What is more, there is a tendency of universal or common language usage at public are such
as at work. It matters for the minority language. If it happens continuously, people will
leave the indigenuous language and prefer mastering the universal language because
business and daily needs. In this case, it also becomes factors of language shift and
extinction.

8.6 Exercises
Exercise 1
1. What is the difference between language shift and language death?

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2. When language shift occurs in a diglossia situation H sometimes displaces L, while in

other contexts L displaces H. Can you think of examples of each of these processes?

Exercise 2
1. If you have a friend or acquaintance who belongs to an ethnic minority with a distinct

language, they may be willing to share their family history with you. It is very important
to be polite and not to put any pressure on someone who is reluctant, however. They
may have good reason to feel unwilling to share experiences which may have been
painful. If they are willing to talk to you, find out whether they themselves migrated to
the country you live in, or whether it was their parents or grandparents who made the
journey. When did they arrive, and why did they come? Try to trace the language
history of each generation. What languages do their grandparents/parents/brothers
and sisters speak in different domains? Does your friend still speak the ethnic
language? If so, who to and in what contexts?
2. People are often unaware of the range of ethnic minority groups living in their area.
How could you find out how many minority ethnic groups there are in the area where
you live?

Exercise 2 (Indonesian Context)
1. A linguist argues that Lampung language will extinct in a next generation. What do you

think about it?
2. Seeing the phenomena of bilanguage and the global challenges, what factors do most

influence language shift of mother tongue language nowadays?
3. In Indonesian context, some schools require students to use a particular local language

every Friday in order to preserve the local language. Is it an efective way to preserve
the local language? Why?

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Referensi:
Herk, Gerrard Van. 2012. What is Sociolinguistics?. New York: Willey Blackwell.
Holmes, Janet & Wilson, Nick. 2017. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (5th edition). New

York: Routledge.
Holmes, Janet. 2013. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (4th Edition). New York: Longman.
Mesthrie, R., Swann, J., Deumert, A., & Leap, W.L. 2004. Introducing Sociolinguistics.

Edinburg: Edinburg University Press.
Wardaugh, Ronald & Fuller, Janet. 2015. An Introduction to Sociolinguistcs. UK: Willey

Balckwell.

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CHAPTER 9

LANGUAGE CHANGE

“Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed,
but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied.

Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation”
(Noam Chomsky)

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INTRODUCTION

Language is dinamic, so it can change all of the time. In the context of English, it it is not
hard to find the changes in it. For English speakervery easy to demonstrate to English
speakers that languages change over time. At the point where English spelling became
relatively fixed by printing, the printers recorded the pronunciations current at the time. So
the k in knit and knife was not ‘silent’ in the fifteenth century, and knight not only began
with a [k], it had a fricative sound in the middle represented by the letters gh. Similarly, if
you look up a good etymological dictionary you will find that the word nice once meant
‘precise’, and before that it meant ‘fastidious’ and earlier still it meant ‘ignorant’. Reading
Shakespeare turns up many words, such as hie (‘hurry’), stilly (‘softly’) and arrant
(‘thorough’), which have disappeared or, more treacherously, changed their meaning.
Entertain, for instance, meant ‘keep occupied’, so entertaining the invading troops in
Shakespeare’s time referred not to the efforts of singers and comedians, but to the success
of the local army in keeping the foreigners at bay. Even since Jane Austen’s time the
meanings of words have changed. In her books, a ‘pleasing prospect’ refers to a landscape
more often than an expectation, and to be ‘sensible’ means to be aware or perceptive.

Talk of language change, like the discussion between the young people at the beginning of
this section, often treats language as an entity independent of its speakers and writers. In
reality, it is not so much that language itself changes as that speakers and writers change
the way they use the language. Speaker innovation is a more accurate description than
language change. Speakers innovate, sometimes spontaneously, but more often by imitating
speakers from other communities. If their innovations are adopted by others and diffuse
through their local community and beyond into other communities, then linguistic change is
the result.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Students are able to explain language change in the terms of variation
2. Students are able to explain the relation of social status and language change
3. Students are able to explain the relation of gender and language change
4. Students are able to explain the relation of interaction and language change
5. Students are able to explain factors influemcing language change

9.1 Variation and Change

Language varies in three major ways which are interestingly interrelated –over time, in
physical space and socially. Language change – variation over time – has its origins in
spatial (or regional) and social variation. The source of change over time is always current
variation. So the regional and social variants described in the previous three chapters
provide the basis for language change over time. We will see how this works.

Similarly, a sound change occurs when one sound is replaced in people’s speech by another
over a period of time, or when a sound disappears. The process is the same. In New Zealand,
for example, words like new and nuclear were once pronounced nyew [nju:] and nyuklear
[nju:kliə] by everybody. Right now, there is variation in the community. About 20 years ago
a new variant was introduced. Young New Zealanders started using an American
pronunciation without the [j] in some words: i.e. [nu:] and [nu:kliə]. Over time, it seemed
possible that the pronunciation without [j] would displace the [j] pronunciation in most
people’s speech. But there is still variation and the reasons seem complicated by factors like
the relative frequency of particular lexical items. Vowel pronuciations change too. In
England, the vowel in words like trap and clap has changed over the last seventy-five years
to become much more open. So current speakers of RP pronounce this vowel more like
people from Yorkshire.

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