Clinical Sociolinguistics

Abstract

The interaction between language and society has been one of the major concerns of linguistic science over the last 40 years, but until recently the findings of sociolinguistics have not been applied to speech and language disorders. In this chapter we outline some of the areas of research subsumed under the heading of sociolinguistics, and show how they have been applied to communication disorders in recent times. However, the area of sociolinguistic concern is a broad one; covering language variation and change at the micro‐ and macro levels, language planning, bilingualism, discourse, and pragmatics. Some of these topics are dealt with in other chapters in this volume (see Chapters 9 by Hua & Wei, 1 by Müller, Guendouzi, & Wilson, 5 by Perkins and 6 by Wilkinson), therefore this chapter is more narrowly focused, mainly on the variationist paradigm developed in the early work of such researchers as Labov (e.g. 1963, 1966, 1972a, 1972b) and Trudgill (e.g. 1972, 1974) among many others. Variationist sociolinguistics developed partly out of the long‐standing dialectology tradition (concerned with preserving the older forms of regional speech), and partly in reaction to the dominant paradigm of generative linguistics with its emphasis on the “ideal speaker‐listener” and on the exclusion of variation in linguistic output in preference for describing the invariate underlying linguistic competence. The first major studies in this new field of sociolinguistics appeared in the 1960s (for example, Labov, 1963, 1966). These scholars investigated linguistic variation at various levels (although phonology has been the main area of study) and looked for correlations between the patterns of variation found and both linguistic and non‐linguistic factors. In order to do this, sociolinguists devised the unit of analysis termed the variable (see Wardhaugh, 1998 for further details). A linguistic variable has two or more variants ; for example, in many dialects of English there is a variable (h) which has the variants [h] and [Ø] (i.e., the [h] may be pronounced or omitted). The use of these dimensions can be correlated with non‐linguistic variables, for example, style, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, socio‐economic status, or age. Each of these social variables will also consist of variants: style can be divided into varying degrees of formality or casualness; socio‐economic status into categories such as lower, middle, and upper; gender into agender, cis men, cis women, gender expansive, non‐binary, trans men, trans women, agender, non‐binary or other gender identities; and age into different bands according to the focus of investigation. Findings, therefore, give the degree of correlation between the usage of a linguistic variant (e.g. prestige [h] or non‐prestige [Ø] for the (h) variable described above) and the speaker's socio‐economic status, the style of the speaker's interaction, their gender or age. Such correlations, of course, are not causative, but may be considered predictive. Sociolinguists have also taken the study of language variation to a more macrolinguistic level, including bi‐ and multilingualism. Bilingualism as a term covers both societal bilingualism (a society where two languages are spoken, but where speakers themselves are not necessarily bilingual), and individual bilingualism (see further in Edwards, 2005). The study of individual bilingualism encompasses measures of degree of proficiency and dominance in the relevant languages by speakers, patterns of code switching (i.e. switching in and out of different languages for stylistic or other effects), interaction between languages (e.g. using the grammatical structure of one language with lexis from another, or borrowing a single lexical item perhaps to fill a word gap in one of the languages), and an investigation of the domains of usage of the two languages (e.g., one language may be restricted to family use rather than extended to wider or official usage). Clearly, all these features may be of importance for a speech‐language pathologist, and we return to issues of assessment with bilinguals later. Many other aspects of sociolinguistic research have had to be omitted from this introduction for reasons of space, but readers unfamiliar with the area are recommended to consult contributions to Ball (2005). Sociophonetic variation is covered in more detail in Docherty and Khattab (Chapter 37 in this volume).

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