Introduction: Sociophonetic perspectives on language variation 3
sociolinguistics. The case studies proposed (covering both Germanic – English and
German – and Romance languages – French and varieties of the Italo-Romance
domain) will appeal to the international audience. The originality of many of the
issues treated and the methodologically sound approaches by which some theo-
retical nodes of the discipline are addressed make this volume a valuable resource
for scholars interested in speech variation, social uses of language, and phonologi-
cal representations.
- Setting the stage: Variationism and sociolinguistics
In reading William Labov’s paper, entitled “The Sociophonetic orientation of the
language learner”, one immediately realizes that the sociolinguistic version of
functionalism has departed drastically from the internalist view of the language.
It is stated in the article that “the individual does not exist as a unit of linguistic
analysis” and that the individual patterns of variation have to be addressed not per
se, but “to the extent to which they respond to wider community patterns”. This
Copernican revolution in language studies is not new, as the author points out; its
roots are to be found in the critiques of the autonomy of idiolects of Weinreich,
Labov, and Herzog (1968). However, the paper reframes the question by analyz-
ing the strategies of phonological learning which allow the speaker/hearer to cope
with the idiosyncratic constructs attested in the speech input.
The paper provides evidence that children may or may not adopt the features
of parental language, depending on how these features match the features of the
speech community. Children may reject the patterns of parental language and con-
form to the patterns of the surrounding community instead, especially in richly
stratified societies whose members belong to different social and dialectal groups.
Linguists are aware of this cross-generational effect because – as the author says –
they often experience these mismatches in the speech of their own children.
The paper by Labov is of interest for the study of non-pathological attrition
under sociolinguistic pressure (Köpke 2004) as well as issues/questions of language
contact in general. Language attrition studies are most often concerned with adult
learners (typically, post-pubescent migrants) and the focus of the analysis is gener-
ally on the effects of “transitional” (or intra-generational) bilingualism generated by
an L1-to-L2 gradual shift. On the contrary, the paper by Labov is strictly concerned
with the speech of children as opposed to adult parental speech, thus adopting an
intergenerational perspective. Moreover, the study deals with internally varied lin-
guistic communities, where no specific variety seems to play the role of the “domi-
nant” language. Labov’s study suggests that the range of variation that a speaker
may experience not only depends on input variability, but also on a smoothing