81 Rupp, L. and D. Britain (2019). Verbal ‐s. In Linguistic Perspectives on a Variable English Morpheme. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 25–128.
82 Salzman, Z., J. Stanlaw, and N. Adachi (2012). Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. 5th edn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
83 Schüppert, A. and C. Gooskens (2012). The role of extra‐linguistic factors in receptive bilingualism: Evidence from Danish and Swedish pre‐schoolers. International Journal of Bilingualism 16(3): 332–347.
84 Slobe, T. (2016). Creepy‐ass cracker in post‐racial America: Don West’s examination of Rachel Jeantel in the George Zimmerman murder trial. Text & Talk 36(5): 613–635.
85 Slobe, T. (2018). Style, stance, and social meaning in Mock White Girl. Language in Society 47(4): 541–567.
86 Smokoski, H. L. (2016). Voicing the other: Mock AAVE on social media. MA thesis, CUNY.
87 Spears, A. K. (1992). Reassessing the status of Black English (review article). Language in Society 21: 675–682.
88 Stewart, W. A. (1967). Sociolinguistic factors in the history of American Negro dialects. Florida FL Reporter 5(2): 11ff.
89 Thomas, E. (2007). Phonological and phonetic characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5): 450–475.
90 Trudgill, P. (1995). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. 3rd edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
91 Vajta, K. (2013). Linguistic, religious and national loyalties in Alsace. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 220: 109–125.
92 Varis, P. and J. Blommaert (2015). Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and new social structures. Multilingual Margins: A Journal of Multilingualism from the Periphery 2(1): 31.
93 Vassberg, Liliane Mangold (1993). Alsatian Acts of Identity: Language Use and Language Attitudes in Alsace (No. 90). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
94 Wakelin, M. F. (1977). English Dialects: An Introduction. Rev. edn. London: Athlone Press.
95 Weldon, T. L. (2003). Revisiting the creolist hypothesis: Copula variability in Gullah and Southern Rural AAVE. American Speech 78(2): 171–191.
96 Weldon, T. L. (2004). African American English in the middle classes: Exploring the other end of the continuum. NWAV (E): 2004 Meeting, Ann Arbor, MI.
97 Wiese, H. (2010). Kiezdeutsch: ein neuer Dialekt des Deutschen. In Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (Issues on Sprache und Gesellschaft, Language, and Society). Edited by the Federal Centre for Political Education.
98 Wiese, H. (2012). Kiezdeutsch: Ein neuer Dialekt entsteht. Munich: C. H. Beck.
99 Wiese, H. (2014). Voices of linguistic outrage: Standard language constructs and discourse on new urban dialects. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 120: 2–25.
100 Winford, D. (2017). Some observations on the sources of AAVE structure. In C. A. Cutler, Z. Vrzic, and P. S. Angermeyer (eds.), Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas: In Honor of John V. Singler, 53: 204–224. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
101 Wolfram, W. (2003). Reexamining the development of African American English: Evidence from isolated communities. Language 79(2): 282–316.
102 Wolfram, W. (2007). Sociolinguistic folklore in the study of African American English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(4): 292–313.
103 Wolfram, W., P. Carter, and B. Moriello (2004). Emerging Hispanic English: New dialect formation in the American South. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8: 339–358.
104 Wolfram, W. and N. Schilling‐Estes (2005). American English: Dialects and Variation. Oxford: Blackwell.
105 Wolfram, W. and E. R. Thomas (2002). The Development of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell.
106 Wolfram, W. and E. Thomas (2008). Development of African American English. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
107 Wolfram, W. and B. Torbert (2006). When linguistic worlds collide (African American English). In W. Wolfram and B. Ward (eds.), American Voices. Oxford: Blackwell.
3 Defining Groups
KEY TOPICS
How to define a speech community – regions, users, and norms
How to define a community of practice – interactions
Social network features and configuration
Social identity and group membership
How beliefs about groups of speakers and their languages shape how we speak
Language is both an individual phenomenon and a societal phenomenon. We look at the language of individuals and take into account their personal experiences, attitudes, and motivations for using language in different ways. But these individuals do not live in a vacuum, they are members of social groups, communities, cultures, and societies, so we are also concerned with how language use is influenced by membership in social groups. The material we cover in this chapter revolves around the underlying question of, how can we define and demarcate social groups? There are two broad aspects to this; what is meaningful for language users in terms of their sense of belonging and identification, and what is a meaningful way for sociolinguists to conceptualize and operationalize groups for the study of language use. As we’ll see in the following sections, sociolinguists talk about groups in different ways, and these contribute different things to sociolinguistic research and our understanding of language variation.
We must remain aware that the groups we refer to in various research studies are often groups we have created for the purposes of our research using this or that set of factors. They are useful and necessary constructs but we would be unwise to assume that speakers themselves would also define their group membership along the same lines.
Further, we must be careful about our interpretation of the data from these groups. It is difficult to draw conclusions about individuals on the basis of observations we make about groups that we have defined for our research purposes. Furthermore, to say of any member of such a group that he or she will always exhibit a certain characteristic behavior is to offer a stereotype. We talk about such stereotypes as being part of essentialism, the idea that people can be placed into fixed social categories and that all members we assign to a category share certain traits which we see as the essence of this category. What sociolinguists (and social scientists) seek to do is not to make such generalizations, but to discover patterns in data which link social factors with language use without ignoring variation within groups and the specific practices and experiences that make up individual identities.
After our discussion of speech communities, social networks, and communities of practice, 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. The final section of this chapter then moves on to look at how people view these social groups and the ways of speaking associated with them, looking at language attitudes, language ideologies, and perceptual dialectology studies.
Speech Communities
Sociolinguists have offered different interpretations of the concept of the speech community. We are faced with the dilemma of wanting to study groups of language users but lacking a clear definition of what comprises a group. We will discover that just as it is difficult to define such terms as language, dialect, and variety, it is also difficult to define speech community, and for many of the same reasons. Nevertheless, this concept has proved to be invaluable in sociolinguistic work in spite of a certain ‘fuzziness’ as to its precise characteristics.