LING432A/ANTH432A

Instructor: Alicia Beckford Wassink	Location: EE1 025
Office: Padelford A217	Time: 1:30-3:20pm
Office Hours: MW 3:30-4:30 and by appt.
Office Phone: 616-9589	Quick Links:
Dept. Phone: 543-2046 (Dept. of Linguistics Office)	Project Ideas and Examples of past term projects
Instructor’s Email: wassink@u.washington.edu

Students will be introduced to methods of studying the relationships between language variation and social structure and to the major findings of sociolinguists who have examined these relationships. The course will focus largely (but not exclusively) on quantitative methods developed in the tradition of variationist sociolinguistics, pioneered by William Labov, that are designed to reveal the way language change is rooted in synchronic variation. The class will study reports of research which focus variously on everyday social interaction, on larger scale patterns of social dialect variation, and on patterns of code choice in bidialectal and bilingual communities. Relationships between language and social class, language and gender, and language and ethnicity will be discussed. Others topics covered will be language and style and larger scale social, educational, and political issues associated with the process of language standardization.

Course prerequisites: LING200, LING400 (for linguistics majors) or equivalent (ENGL370). Recommended prerequisite: LING450

I will happily accommodate special needs that students bring to my attention. For help with accommodations contact Disabled Student Services: 448 Schmitz, (206) 543-8924, http://www.washington.edu/students/gencat/front/Disabled_Student.html

Evaluation:

1. 25%--Presentation: Students will be responsible for leading (in pairs or small groups) discussion of one topic from the syllabus below (topic is student’s choice). Groups must meet with instructor prior to their presentation to discuss the content and format of the presentation.

2. 30%--Periodic Quizzes: There will be three short in-class quizzes on material covered in readings and lecture. Quizzes will be announced one week in advance.

3. 45%--Data Collection Project: All students will carry out a small-scale piece of original sociolinguistic research in a local community with which they are familiar. The design and results of this project will be presented in a paper (10-15 pages for undergrads, 15-20 for grads including transcriptions and write-up) due at the BEGINNING of the final examination period scheduled for this course: 2:30 p.m. Monday, Mar. 14, 2005. No extensions will be granted, so please don't ask!

Required reading:

1.) Course text: Chambers, J.K. (2002) Sociolinguistic Theory. Blackwell

2.) Required coursepack, available at Ave Copycenter

Further reading:

Useful supplementary reading:

Wardhaugh, R. (2003) Introduction to Sociolinguistics (fourth edition). Blackwell.

Recommended additional texts (many of the course readings come from these books, and they are otherwise excellent compilations of "classic" readings in sociolinguistics):

Coupland, N. and Adam Jaworski (1997) Sociolinguistics: a reader and coursebook. New York: St Martin's Press Inc.

Trudgill, P. and Cheshire, J. (1998) The sociolinguistics reader, vol. 1: multilingualism and variation. New York: Arnold

Necessary Equipment:

One good quality cassette recorder, preferably with external microphone, and some cassette tapes. Some equipment is available from the sociophonetics lab.

*No microcassette tapes, please.

For your information…

Following are some of the principal journals in sociolinguistic research:

Language in Society, Cambridge University Press

Language Variation and Change, Cambridge University Press

Journal of Sociolinguistics, Blackwell

Journal of English Linguistics, Sage

English World-Wide, John Benjamins

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Mouton de Gruyter

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Multilingual Matters

SYLLABUS

( “*” indicates a reading for which you are responsible for an excerpted portion, and need not read the work in its entirety. Boldface indicates required readings. Reading the others is strongly encouraged, particularly if you are a Linguistics major, but only required if you are presenting on that topic. You will, in any case, be responsible for all material discussed in lecture; whether from required or optional readings.)

Meeting	Date				Topic			Come to class prepared to discuss…
Sociolinguistics…scope, methods and goals:
1	M 1/3				Introduction and orientation. Aims and scope: a broad and a narrow conception of sociolinguistics			Students' interests, and how we might incorporate these.
2	W 1/5				Sociolinguistics and adjacent fields; language as emblematic			Chambers pp. 1-12; Hymes 1974; Fishman 1972
3 (WK 2)	M1/10				Methods and goals: The "linguistic variable"; Variation and linguistic theory --choose presentation topics--			Chambers pp. 12-33; Labov 1972* ("Study of language in its social context")
Sociodemographic variation:
4		W 1/12				"Speaker variables": social class (phonological variation)		Chambers pp. 34-52
5 (WK 3)		M 1/17				NO CLASS—Service Day in honor of MLK
6		W 1/19				Social class, cont.		Labov 1972 ("Social Stratification of (r)
7 (WK 4)		M 1/24				Speaker variables: social network		Chambers 66-100; Milroy & Milroy 1978
8		W 1/26				Social network, cont.		Labov 1972 ('Linguistic consequences ....' )
9 (WK 5)		M 1/31				Speaker variables: Gender Interactions between variables		Eckert, 1998; Chambers pp. 102-45
10		W2/2				Gender, cont.		Eckert 1988; Gal 1997
11 (WK 6)		M 2/7				Geographic mobility; dialect levelling		Chambers 52-65, Bortoni 1991; Nichols 1998
Style and Register:
12			W 2/9				Terms of Address; Individual variation: style and register, hypercorrection		Fasold 1993*; Palakornkul 1975; Bell 1997
Official, standard and non-standard varieties:
13 (WK 7)			M 2/14				Prescriptivism and language policy Linguistic prestige, 'Standard' and 'Non-standard' varieties		Haugen 1997, Bello 1847
Dialectal Variation and language ideology:
14			W 2/16				Ethnicity and language conflict		Fishman 1997
15 (WK 8)			M 2/21				NO CLASS—Presidents’ Day
16			W 2/23				North America's regional, ethnic, and social dialects		Wolfram and Schilling-Estes, 1998
17 (WK 9)			M 2/28				The case of African American English (AAE), aka Ebonics		Wolfram 1998; Smitherman 1998
18			W 3/2				The structure and origins of AAE		Rickford & Rickford 2000
Variation in the linguistic repertoire of bi- and multilingual speakers:
19 (WK 10)				M 3/7			Multilingualism and code-switching		Fasold 1990; Milroy and Li 1995
20				W 3/9			Multilingualism and code-switching, cont.; Diglossia		Ferguson 1959

Readings (in order of their use in class):

1. Hymes, D. (1974) The scope of sociolinguistics. In Coupland, N. and Adam Jaworski (1997) Sociolinguistics: a reader and coursebook, pp. 12-22. New York: St Martin's Press Inc.

2. Fishman, J. (1972) The sociology of language. In Giglioli, P.P. (ed.) Language and social context. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 45-58.

3. Labov, W. (1972) The study of language in its social context. In Giglioli, P.P. (ed.) Language and social context. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 283-98 (Note: you are not required to read the entire article!!).

4. Labov, W. (1972) The Social stratification of (r) in New York City department stores. In Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania, pp. 43-69.

5. Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1978) Belfast: Change and variation in an urban vernacular. In P. Trudgill, (ed.), Sociolinguistic patterns in British English. London:Edward Arnold, pp. 19-36.

6. Labov, W. (1972) The linguistic consequences of being a lame, Language in the inner city, ch. 7. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania, pp. 255-292.

7. Eckert, P. (1998) Gender and sociolinguistic variation. In Coates, J.(ed.) Language and Gender: a reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 64-75.

8. Eckert, P. (1988) Adolescent social structure and the spread of linguistic change. Language in Society, 17(3), pp. 183-207.

9. Gal, S. (1997) Peasant men can't get wives: language change and sex roles in a bilingual community, Language in Society, 7(1), pp. 1-16.

10. Bortoni, S. M. (1991) Dialect contact in Brasilia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 89. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 47-59

11. Nichols, P. C. (1998) Black women in the rural south: conservative and innovative. In Coates, J.(ed.) Language and Gender: a reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 55-63.

12. Fasold, R. (1993) Address Forms, The sociolinguistics of language, ch 1. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 1-38. (Note: You will only be held responsible for pp. 1-16.)

13. Palakornkul, A. (1975) A sociolinguistic study of pronominal usage in spoken Bangkok Thai. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 5, pp. 11-41.

14. Bell, A. (1984) Language style as audience design. In Coupland, N. and A. Jaworski (1997, eds.) Sociolinguistics: a reader and coursebook, pp. 240-50. New York: St Martin's Press Inc.

15. Haugen, E. (1997) Language standardization. In Coupland, N. and A. Jaworski (1997, eds.) Sociolinguistics: a reader and coursebook, pp. 341-52. New York: St Martin's Press Inc.

16. Bello, A. (1847) Prologue: Grammar of the Spanish Language. In López-Morillas, F. M. (1997, ed.) Selected writings of Andrés Bello. London: Oxford University Press.

17. Fishman, J. A. (1997) Language and ethnicity: the view from within. In The handbook of sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 327-343.

18. Wolfram, W., & Schilling-Estes, N. (1998) American English, ch. 4. Dialects in the US: past, present and future. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 90-123.

19. Wolfram, W. (1998) Language ideology and dialect: understanding the Ebonics controversy. Journal of English Linguistics, 26(2), pp. 108-121.

20. Smitherman, G. (1998) Ebonics, King, and Oakland: Some folk don’t believe fat meat is greasy, Journal of English Linguistics, 26(2), pp. 97-107.

21. Rickford, J. R. & Rickford, R. J. (2000) History, Spoken Soul: the story of Black English. New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 129-160

22. Fasold, R. (1990) Societal multilingualism. Sociolinguistics of society, ch 1. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 1-33.

23. Milroy, L. and Li Wei (1995) A social network approach to code-switching: the example of a bilingual community in Britain. In, One speaker, two languages: cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching (L. Milroy and P. Muysken, eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 136-157.

24. Ferguson, C.A. (1959) Diglossia. In Giglioli, Pier Paolo (1972, ed.) Language and social context. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 232-251.