Advances in Sociophonetics

28 William Labov

3. Where ethnicity emerges

Some recent studies indicate situations where ethnicity and foreign language back-

ground do emerge as significant factors in community studies. Boberg (2004) finds

strong differentiation of Irish, Italian and Jewish speakers of English in Montreal.

He attributes this to the minority status of English, where distinct ethnic neighbor-

hoods are separated by French-speaking areas and exposure to general Canadian

English is limited. Wagner (2013) reports small differences between Irish- and

Italian-American girls in the contact in a Philadelphia high school. Here the ethnic

effect appears to be mediated by the fact that the Irish group favored the stance of

“toughness” associated with linguistic features like the backing of centralized (ay0)

in light, fight, etc. These linguistic effects of ethnicity do not run counter to the

major theme of this article: the fact that children reject those features of their par-

ents’ language that deviate from the speech community in which they are raised.

4. Conclusion

We then have gained some idea of what is to be learned, and how the language

learner looks outward to master the broader community patterns. The study of lin-

guistic variation is sometimes pursued as a way of showing how different people are

from one another. And it is perfectly true that the larger our data base becomes, the

more often will statistical analysis reveal subtle differences among subgroups of the

population. I have tried to turn the focus away from those minor subdivisions and

ask us to account for the uniformities that result from the outward orientation of

the language learning faculty. Though we have much to learn from micro-analysis,

we have more to learn from our efforts to grasp the larger pattern.

References

Bickerton, Derek. 1981. Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.

Boberg, Charles. 2004. “Ethnic patterns in the phonetics of Montreal English”. Journal of Socio-

linguistics 8. 538–568.

Durkheim, Emile. 1895. Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan.

Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2009. “Stability and change across a dialect boundary: the low vowels of

southeastern New England”. Publications of the American Dialect Society 95.

Kerswill, Paul & Anne Williams. 2000. “Children, adolescents and language change”. Language

Variation and Change 8. 177–202. DOI: 10.1017/S0954394500001137

Holmes, Janet. 1969. “Sociolinguistics and the individual”. Te R e o 12. 41–47.