32.3986, Review: Sociolinguistics: Rickford, Sankoff (2021)

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Subject: 32.3986, Review: Sociolinguistics: Rickford, Sankoff (2021)

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Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2021 20:11:24
From: Katharina Tupper [katharina_tupper at sil.org]
Subject: Variation, Versatility and Change in Sociolinguistics and Creole Studies

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1338.html

AUTHOR: John Russell  Rickford
AUTHOR: Gillian  Sankoff
TITLE: Variation, Versatility and Change in Sociolinguistics and Creole Studies
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Katharina Tupper, SIL International, Africa region

SUMMARY

This book is the paperback edition of the hardcopy version published in 2019
(for a review of the previous publication see
https://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-494/). It contains fifteen papers
representing Rickford’s sociolinguistic research over more than four decades,
arranged in chronological order.  Twelve are revised and updated versions from
earlier publications, whereas chapters 1, 13 and 14 are published in the
current form for the first time. The book is intended for students and
researchers interested in sociolinguistics and Pidgin and Creole studies. In
his introduction Rickford describes the growing gap between variationist
sociolinguistics and the analysis of grammatical variation in Creole studies,
and his desire for more cross-fertilization between those fields. In the first
and final chapters he emphasizes the importance of sociolinguistic fieldwork.

In Chapter 1 Rickford describes how he started his fieldwork in 1974 at a time
when the political situation in Guyana was influenced by independence from
Britain in 1966 and conflicts between communities of East Indian and African
background. His choice of research site was influenced by his purpose to
replicate Bickerton’s work on implicational scales (Bickerton 1975) and by
considerations of accessibility. Access to  the speech community was helped at
first with his contact’s friends and neighbours. Rickford was able to extend
his network later when the Hindu pandit of the local temple gave him an
interview and connected him with other people. Getting beyond the first
sociolinguistic interview and revisiting interviewees for more formal
interviews requires sensitivity to the interviewees’ needs and takes time.
Rickford discovered that it is important to include onlookers to individual
interviews as a component of the research process. In the long run, his
network grew and relationships deepened. He received more requests for help
from members of the community and helped as well as he could. As primary
recording instruments and techniques Rickford used spontaneous interviews,
controlled interviews, expatriate re-interviews, and participant observation.
He follows Labov (1972) in distinguishing clearly between the informal and
controlled sections of the interviews. Tokens of casual style were taken from
spontaneous interviews, those for careful style from the controlled
interviews. To complement tokens of careful speech, he added expatriate
re-interviews. His corpus consists of seventy hours of recordings from
twenty-four research participants, selected as a representative stratified
sample from a total of seventy-five interviewees.

In Chapter 2 Rickford and co-author Elizabeth Closs Traugott explore the
contrast between overtly negative attitudes towards non-standard varieties and
the positive connotations for their speakers. They used a variety of means:
analysing mass media, government announcements, and other public sources, as
well as interviewing men and women in the street and conducting systematic
sociolinguistic surveys. In the mass media and in literature, Creole languages
are often depicted as a broken form of the lexifier language and are connected
with low moral standards and a low socio-economic background. Sociolinguistic
surveys show that the attitudes of individual speakers towards Creole are more
nuanced. In a Matched Guise survey in Guyana, Rickford (1985) found that
attitudes connected with job opportunities and friendship correlated with the
social class of the interviewees. The authors also give an example from
Trinidad and Tobago (Mühleisen 1993) and conclude that attitudes towards
non-standard varieties differ from country to country. They depend on whether
the Creole developed under conditions of oppression and on the current
political context.

In Chapter 3 Rickford examines whether Creole languages limit the intellectual
capacities of their speakers and whether they are adequate to express a wide
variety of contents. He approaches the question of adequacy from two
directions: the macro-analytical framework of the “four charges to language”
(Slobin 1979) and the micro-analytical approach of examining individual texts.
While Slobin’s criteria of clarity, feasibility, efficiency, and
expressiveness provide a useful framework for describing linguistic resources,
they need to be complemented to better understand whether these resources are
adequate to fulfil different functions. Rickford claims that in the
argumentative, descriptive, and narrative texts he examined, the use of Creole
intensifies the expression of meaning. He concludes that for the analysis of
adequacy both macro- and micro-analytical approaches are necessary, conceding
that analysis of other text genres might yield different results.

In Chapter 4 Rickford claims that sociolinguistic interviews are not
sufficient to assess speaker competence. He proposes to add recordings of
group conversations and elicited data as well as translation tests between
English and Creole. He illustrates his point by comparing implicational scales
from Bickerton (1973b: 661) with his own Cane Walk data. He shows through the
translation tests that speakers master linguistic structures they do not
produce orally themselves. Combining the methods provides a clearer
understanding of active and passive competency of the linguistic repertoire.
This puts the analysis of language choices and their social meaning on a
firmer foundation.

In Chapter 5 Rickford describes the connections between sociolinguistics and
Pidgin and Creole studies. Creole studies have always included sociolinguistic
topics such as the social history of the speech community, variation, social
status, and the impact of language policy on education. Likewise,
sociolinguists have been aware of findings in Creole studies and used examples
in their work. Research into the origins of Creole languages has highlighted
the importance of social factors in describing the emergence and changes of a
language. Sociolinguistic models and methods of analysis like the Acts of
Identity model (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985), the continuum concept, the
implicational scale framework (DeCamp 1971), and Labovian quantitative models
were either developed with Creole data or successfully applied to them.
However, in more recent years interaction between sociolinguistics and Creole
studies has weakened, as Rickford’s comparison of introductory textbooks to
Creole studies shows.

In Chapter 6 Rickford explains what implicational scales are and how they have
been used in sociolinguistics and Creole studies. DeCamp (1971) first used
implicational scales in linguistics, analysing six linguistic features in
speech samples from seven Jamaican speakers. Bailey (1973) and Bickerton
(1973a, b) re-interpret the implicational scales diachronically as waves of
change over space and time. Implicational scales have also been used in Second
Language Acquisition research (see Nagy et al. 1996, Bayley 1999, Pienemann
1998). Rickford regrets that implicational scales have not been used much in
recent sociolinguistic studies, other than in Newman (2010). He recommends,
firstly, avoiding empty cells and weak goodness-of-fit measures, secondly,
using frequencies rather than binary values in cells, and, thirdly,
interpreting the implicational patterns.

In Chapter 7, Rickford and co-author Angela E. Rickford describe how the
introduction of non-standard varieties of English into the school curriculum
can improve performance in Standard English of Creole speaking students. They
describe the benefits and weaknesses of Contrastive Analysis as a teaching
method. However, rather than aiming to develop bi-dialectalism, the authors
promote versatility in their students to use their full linguistic repertoire,
both standard and non-standard. They give numerous examples from published
poems in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and from the Caribbean,
with suggestions of how to use them in English class. They conclude that not
only in the education sector, but also in all other sectors of society,
negative attitudes towards non-standard varieties need to be overcome. This
can be achieved by improving the linguistic versatility of all members of
society, so that speakers of non-standard varieties can fully participate in
society.

In Chapter 8 Rickford describes the highlights of Le Page’s work and discusses
how to build on his legacy. He sees Le Page’s main theoretical achievements in
his description of the socio-history of Jamaican Creole and in the Acts of
Identity model (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). The strengths of the model,
according to Rickford, are its focus on social factors and on communities of
practice. Its weaknesses are said to be its statistical reliance on cluster
analysis, the assumption that speakers can vary their way of speaking without
limitations, and ignoring internal linguistic constraints. Other influential
works of Le Page are his publications on the options of language policy in
newly independent countries (Le Page 1964) and a re-evaluation of the UNESCO
(1953) monograph on “The use of vernacular languages in education”
(Tabouret-Keller et al. 1997). Rickford encourages the reader to build on Le
Page’s legacy by combining theoretical, applied, and descriptive research, and
by further developing Le Page’s approaches.

In Chapter 9 Rickford emphasises the need to consider linguistic as well as
social factors to explain variation. Only if speakers are linguistically free
to choose between variants can the variants carry social meaning. He
illustrates this claim with results from various studies on Guyanese
first-person subject pronouns. This point develops one of Rickford’s
criticisms of the Acts of Identity model, which focuses on the social aspects
of variation as acts of identity but does not take into account linguistic
constraints.

In Chapter 10 Rickford and his co-author Robin Melnick challenge the claim
that in Creole Englishes questions are marked by intonation, rather than by
inversion of subject and auxiliary. Using quantitative variable-rule analysis,
they compare results from Creoles in Barbados, Guyana, and Jamaica, AAVE,
Appalachian English, Samaná English (Dominican Republic) and African Nova
Scotian English (Canada). In all varieties, inversion or non-inversion
correlates with the question types such as yes/no, wh-, auxiliary types, and
subject length. As linguistic constraints on subject-aux question inversion
are similar across English and Creole varieties, Rickford and Melnick conclude
that question formation cannot serve as a diagnostic tool for the origins of
AAVE.
 
In Chapter 11 Rickford discusses the need to analyse stylistic variation in
varied sociolinguistic corpora. He claims that research on situational and
metaphorical style-shifting is relatively scarce. He observes that existing
sociolinguistic corpora do not provide sufficient data because they are often
limited to sociolinguistic interviews with one interviewer and one
interviewee. Only occasionally is a change in the interview situation recorded
in which the interviewee shifts to a more vernacular style. To redeem the
situation, Rickford proposes intentionally recording a variety of situations
with different sets of participants. He discusses a number of studies which
have followed this approach, highlighting the work of Sharma on British Asian
English (see Sharma & Rampton 2011). For the analysis of stylistic variation,
sociolinguistic corpora need to be coded. Rickford proposes starting with
Hymes’ SPEAKING paradigm (Hymes 1974) and including taxonomies from Preston
(1987). However, the desire for completeness and depth needs to be weighed
against feasibility.

Chapter 12 examines how inadequate understandings of language have contributed
to injustice in the courts, education, housing, and job interviews. Rickford
and co-author Sharese King analyse the records and media coverage of George
Zimmerman’s trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin. The testimony of the main
witness for the prosecution was not taken into account, principally because
the AAVE she spoke was unintelligible to the members of the white jury. As a
result, they concluded that her testimony was not reliable, leading to the
acquittal of George Zimmerman and, ultimately, to the birth of the Black Lives
Matter movement. The authors describe other areas such as education, housing,
the job market, and doctor-patient-communication in which speakers of
vernacular varieties are at a disadvantage. They challenge linguists to stay
aware of language-related injustice and to strive to reduce it. They suggest
relevant research, double-checked transcriptions of court proceedings, help
with the acquisition of the standard dialect, advocacy for the reduction of
stereotypes, the introduction of interpreters and vernacular-speaking jurors
in court, and the implementation of multilingual education. 

In Chapter 13 Rickford calls for new approaches to modelling social class in
sociolinguistic research. He criticises sociolinguists who either ignore
social class, define it in a naive way, or misuse multi-index scales. In a
particular context, multi-index prestige scales and socioeconomic indexes of
occupational status are useful for defining social class as a variable.
However, in other contexts they may not reflect the realities of the speech
community under scrutiny. Rickford proposes analysing the social class system
of the speech community, on the basis of sociological approaches of Evaluated
Participation and Conflict models. He illustrates his point with his findings
on social class in his Cane Walk research (Rickford 1979). Interviews with
members of the speech community revealed that there are two classes: Estate
class (EC) and Non-Estate class (NEC). EC members are typically workers on the
sugar plantations whereas NEC members are shop-owners, tradesmen and teachers
in the settlement, and white-collar workers on the plantations. The difference
between the two classes is that NEC members have a higher and more stable
income and therefore higher upward social mobility. Rickford then discusses
which theoretical model best describes the social stratification in the Cane
Walk community. He concludes that the situation is best represented by a
Weberian model of classes, grouping together people with the same economic
opportunities. Finally he shows that the use of pronoun variants in Cane Walk
speakers correlates with the Estate Class/Non-Estate classes. 

In Chapter 14 Rickford describes shared and conflicting norms in the speech
community of Cane Walk. The widely accepted definition of a speech community
as a community with a common linguistic repertoire and shared norms of
language use goes back to Labov (1968: 250-251). Rickford finds in his
research that research participants throughout the community share a number of
norms, such as their appreciation for ‘rowing’ (“a noisy dispute”) and the
perceived correlation between speech variety and job quality in a matched
guise test. However, they diverge along class lines in their attitudes towards
“talking nansi” (nansi = West African trickster)  and their assessment of
different speakers as friends in the matched guise test. More thorough
investigation reveals that, on the language-on-the-job scale, interlocutors
differ along class lines in their evaluation of whether language reflects or
contributes to social status. This shows that the set of shared norms as a
boundary line of a speech community is difficult to define. To predict when to
expect relative concord or conflict, Rickford proposes the principles of
“antagonistic cooperation” and “oppositional divergence”. The chapter also
contains the transcription of a nansi story in “Creolese” and its translation
into standard English. 

Chapter 15 closes the book with an enthusiastic ode to sociolinguistic
fieldwork. Rickford describes the joy and awe when research participants share
their life experiences with him. As examples he describes two situations, one
from Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, and the other from Redding, California.
The final words of the final chapter of this book are: “Go and enjoy” (p.
356).

EVALUATION

Indeed, I enjoyed reading Rickford’s book. His writing style is
well-structured and it is easy to follow his train of thought. He illustrates
his points with personal experiences, for instance when he describes in
Chapter 1 how important it is to take into account bystanders in individual
sociolinguistic interviews. His personal experiences not only illustrate his
points but also help the reader to get to know the author as a person.
Rickford communicates a deep appreciation for his extended family, his
teachers, and the people he has worked with during his career. This comes out
in his acknowledgements, in his treatment of Le Page’s work in Chapters 5 and
8, and in the respectful way he describes his research participants. 

The goal of the book is to challenge researchers in at least three areas:
firstly, to combine a variety of methodologies from sociolinguistics and
Creole studies; secondly, to use their findings for the development of
sociolinguistic theory; and thirdly, to give back to the community by applying
their knowledge and skills to social issues. Rickford models this behaviour in
his work. For one, he uses a wide range of methodologies including qualitative
implicational scaling (see Chapters 1, 4, and 5), quantitative variationist
analysis (see Chapters 5 and 10), or a combination of both (see Chapter 6). He
is aware of models in linguistics, sociology, and sociolinguistics, and
connects them with his data, for instance in his conclusion in Chapter 13 that
social class in Cane Walk is best represented by a Weberian model of classes,
or when he explains the dynamics of conflicting and shared norms in a speech
community with the principles of “antagonistic cooperation” and “oppositional
divergence” in Chapter 14. Finally, he is involved in the educational sector
by promoting the use of non-standard English varieties in school curricula
(see Chapter 7) and in the judicial system by advocating for a fair treatment
of speakers of non-standard English varieties (see Chapter 12).

The different chapters of the book hang well together. The overall schema is
provided by the chronological ordering of the papers, but there are many
cross-references between chapters resulting from recurring methodologies and
key themes. Another factor is that many papers are based on data from
Rickford’s Cane Walk corpus. The detailed index illustrates the spread of
keywords over the whole length of the book and helps readers find fields of
particular interest. Each chapter has its own updated list of references, for
instance, recent guides on fieldwork methods in Chapter 1, although for a more
general overview I would have liked a complete list of references at the end
of the book.

A number of chapters inspire further research. The topics that stand out to me
are attitudes towards Pidgins and Creoles (Chapter 2), the versatility
approach in language arts (Chapter 7), social class (Chapter 13), and concord
and conflict in the speech community (Chapter 14). Conflicting attitudes
towards Pidgins and Creoles prevent primary education in the mother-tongue.
The question is how negative attitudes towards Creoles can be overcome so that
Creoles will be used in the multilingual classroom. Social class is often
defined by variables such as income, education, and job prestige in
sociolinguistic research in Western contexts. In contrast, Rickford
establishes social class in the Cane Walk community through ethnographic
research methods. Sociolinguists should be open to re-defining social class
depending on the speech community they are working with. The  concept of the
speech community is not clear-cut, depending on where one draws the line
between overlapping and conflicting norms. Rickford’s approach of
“antagonistic cooperation” and “oppositional divergence” could be applied to
dialectology questions when ethnic groups claim to speak different dialects,
based on sociological rather than linguistic factors.

REFERENCES

Bailey, Charles-James N. 1973. Variation and Linguistic Theory. Arlington, VA:
Center for Applied Linguistics. 

Bayley, Robert. 1999. The primacy of aspect hypothesis revisited: Evidence
from language shift. Southwest Journal of Sociolinguistics 18.2: 1-22. 

Bickerton, Derek. 1973a. On the nature of a Creole continuum. Language 49:
640-669. 

Bickerton, Derek. 1973b. The structure of polylectal grammars. Report of the
Twenty-Third Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies,
edited by Roger W. Shuy, Waschington, DC: Georgetown University Press.  pp
17-42

Bickerton, Derek. 1975. Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 

DeCamp, David. 1971. Toward a generative analysis of a post-Creole speech
community. In Hymes, Dell. 1971. Pidginization and creolization of languages.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 349-370.

Hymes, Dell. 1971. Pidginization and creolization of languages. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations of Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. 
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. 

Labov, William. 1968. The reflection of social processes in linguistic
structures. In: Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.). 1968. Readings in the sociology of
language. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 240-251.

Labov, William. 1972. The design of a sociolinguistic research project. Report
of the Sociolinguistics Workshop held by the Central Institute of Indian
Languages in Mysore, India, chapter II. 

Le Page, Robert B. 1964. The national language question: Linguistic problems
of newly independent states. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Le Page, Robert B. and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of Identity:
Creole-based approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 

Mühleisen, Susanne. 1993. Attitudes towards Language Varieties in Trinidad. MA
thesis, Freie Universität Berlin.

Nagy, Naomi, Christine Moisset and Gillian Sankoff. 1996. On the acquisition
of variable phonology in L2. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in
Linguistics 3.1: 111-126. 

Newman, Michael. 2010. Focusing, implicational scaling, and the dialect status
of New York Latino English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14: 207-238.  

Pienemann, Manfred. 1998. Language processing and Second Language development:
Processability Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Preston, Dennis R. 1986. Fifty some-odd categories of language variation.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 57: 9-47. 

Rickford, John Russell. 1979. Variation in a Creole continuum: Quantitative
and implicational approaches. PhD dissertation, Linguistics, University of
Pennsylvania. 

Rickford, John Russell. 1985. Standard and non-standard language attitudes in
a Creole continuum. In: Wolfson, Nessa and Joan Manes (eds). 1985. Language of
Inequality. The Hague: Mouton, pp 145-160. 

Sharma, Devyani and Ben Rampton. 2011. Lectal focusing in interaction: A new
methodology for the study of superdiverse speech. Queen Mary’s OPAL 22. 

Slobin, Dan I. 1978. Psycholinguistics. 2nd edition. Glenview, IL: Scott,
Foresman.  

Tabouret-Keller, Andrée, Robert B. Le Page, Penelope Gardner-Chloros and
Gabrielle Varro (eds.). 1997. Vernacular literacy: A re-evaluation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.     

UNESCO. 1953. The use of vernacular languages in education. Monograph on
fundamental education VIII. Paris.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Katharina Tupper works with SIL Cameroon as a sociolinguistic consultant. She
obtained her MA in Linguistics from the University in Manchester in 2012. She
has conducted sociolinguistic surveys since 2000 in Togo, Benin, Chad and
Nepal. She has also taught sociolinguistis at the Institute for the
Development of Languages and Translation in Africa (i-DELTA) in Nairobi and
Yaoundé. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, dialectology and
ethnography.





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