31.1310, Review: Sociolinguistics: Cornips, de Rooij (2018)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1310. Thu Apr 09 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1310, Review: Sociolinguistics: Cornips, de Rooij (2018)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Lauren Perkins, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Joshua Sims
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Thu, 09 Apr 2020 21:39:18
From: Irene D'Agostino [irenedagostino at yahoo.it]
Subject: The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36538277


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-1747.html

EDITOR: Leonie  Cornips
EDITOR: Vincent A. de  Rooij
TITLE: The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging
SUBTITLE: Perspectives from the margins
SERIES TITLE: IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society 45
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Irene D'Agostino, Università degli Studi di Firenze

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The volume collects papers from two workshops organized at Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in 2011 and 2013, and from a colloquium
(2014). It deals with a very current and interesting topic for
sociolinguistics research and provides large conceptual thinking.

Papers are partitioned into three major parts: Part I, Interpersonal
relations, place, and belonging; Part II, Parodic performances from the
margins; Part III, Agency in linguistic place-making. 

Each part is introduced by a commentary. 

The introduction by the editors Cornips and de Rooij (Chapter I) offers a
theoretical synopsis about topics on which the entire work is based. 

AIMS AND TOPICS

The central question of the book is “how people position themselves toward
others and how do they include or exclude those others using linguistic and
cultural resources?” (p.3).

While trying to investigate an individual’s reaction to the centralization
process and sociocultural dynamics that lead to the emergence of
(sociocultural) peripheries, researchers basically respond to the set of
classical sociolinguistic issues i.e. which is the origin and the development
of linguistic forms as social representations? Which are the linguistic forms
of social ties? (see Tani, p.16). Each contribution deals with the possibility
to show and define a linguistic group or community based on the
“socio-symbolic function of representation that commute a mental construction
[…] in a practical social reality endowed with its own existence” (Tani,
p.15). 

Moving from different case studies and fieldwork, every chapter presents a
series of major theoretical themes: the link between space, mobility, and
language; a critical reworking of the concept of identity and Agency; the
center-periphery dynamics; the concept of standard variety; and the
development of language-culture community.

All of these themes converge emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of the
approach that involves sociolinguistics, sociocultural anthropology and
linguistic anthropology. In fact, the aim announced in the introduction is to
develop “sociolinguistics studies of centralization-peripheralization that
take their subject matter to be the total linguistic fact” (p.1). The very
theoretical basis is the reappraisal of the notion of place/space that comes
to be a foundational, unifying element of the disciplines that deal with
language from a socio-etho-antropological perspective. The concept of lived
place socially constructed allows us to deeply rethink two such classical
categories of sociolinguistic studies as place and belonging.   

As far as the topic of place is concerned, we are no longer confronted with a
type of physical space (urban or rural) delimited by borders (political or
physical) that could be represented on a map, but with a larger and more
complex category. From a classical linguistic perspective, a point on a map
correspond to a language variety. 

The epistemological development of the discipline has led to a deep revision
of these notions. Gradually, one has come to a “despacelized” concept of
territories (see Nicolai, 2003) i.e. spaces and territories are considered
beyond their physical (or administrative) definition and they become spaces
and territories “lived” by those who cross them. Moreover, the idea of “local”
becomes unstable and the association between language and territory, due to
the introduction of the speakers within the equation a language = a territory,
is problematized.

Linguistic use is what powerfully undermines every linguistic ideology
established within the ontology of language variety and linguistic spaces.
Traditionally, sociolinguistics builds its theoretical system on the idea that
“speakers and languages are fixed to places” (p. 242); at present, instead, it
considers a different idea about the relationship between speaker, space and
community and assumes that space is constructed by speakers and their language
activities. 

The emergence of this new idea is clearly due to the mobility that
characterizes contemporaneity and to the ascertainment that individuals moving
in the space maintain a strong need to recreate, wherever they are, a sense of
belonging. In the perspective of place-making theory, sense of belonging
refers to the practice of creating an identitary bond with a place, a group, a
community that can be distant in time and space. Linguistics phenomena are
what give shape and indicate place and boundaries. Place and boundaries became
linguistically, socially and culturally constructed objects. Therefore,
establishing a specific socio-demographic contour has become a priority with
regard to the comprehension of linguistic contact and the presence or creation
of specific linguistic variety. 

As a result, linguistic varieties are no longer interpreted as ideological
objects, but as empirical objects that take place in historic-material
contexts and through discursive practice. Some of the foundational concepts of
linguistic geography are not set aside, but fitted out with new meanings:
frontiers, borders and space lose their materiality to become evidence and
obligations relating to the perception of phenomena and they are objectified
from social actors representations. They don’t exist per se but they are
determined by a peculiar history. 

Editors of this book also highlight the necessity to problematize concept of
belonging (p. 6-7) that replaces the ambiguous one of identity (p.7) and
evokes dynamism and multidimensionality of a process through which speakers
perform to construct their image corresponding to the trajectories and
movements accomplished during their existences through physical space and
social group. 

Furthermore, “belonging” can gather the relational and multidimensional nature
of the identification process and allows us to see that this process “is
intersubjectively rather than individually produced and interactionally
emergent rather than assigned in a priori fashion” (see Bulchotz-Hall 2005).
But mostly, the concept of belonging in the context of the theory of
place-making leads to relating  individuals’ processes of identification with
the group and the place and to showing how they take shape through linguistic
and discursive interactions where they position themselves and others. 

The other big aim of the volume deals with the study of (linguistic)
peripheries, as it claims in the introduction: “Rural as well as urbanized
peripheries that are supposed to be less ethnically mixed have, until now
received relatively little attention” (p.2). People living in peripheries
didn’t stay immune from globalization processes, and indeed they currently
represent interesting examples of dis-identification or identification
processes and new hybridations. 

SUMMARY

Chapters in the first part of the book, introduced by Jürgen Jaspers (“The
boundaries of belonging. A commentary”), analyze how speakers, through their
daily linguistic and narrative work, constitute and keep alive a strong sense
of belonging in face of events that preclude or compromise it. 

Jaspers’ introduction is an interesting comment concerning formation and
emergence of groups and local linguistic varieties: it reflects on the concept
of standard and on the formation of national language. Within this theoretical
framework, he accomplishes a detailed excursus involving the Herderian concept
of link between language and collectivity to show the trajectory followed by
sociolinguistics in order to reach a revaluation of marginalized and
peripherical groups, and a reconsideration of disciplinary terminology that
has hidden the reification of a “different set of linguistic resources” (p.19)
in linguistic and systematic varieties. For this reason, rather than using
separate language names, it is preferable to use the notion of contact zone
that can make clear the speakers’ movement between places, institutions and
groups. 

Chapter III by Bambi B. Schieffelin uses linguistic data from an ethnographic
fieldwork “focused on the rapid social and linguistic changes taking place in
Bosavi, which included the radical disrupting of local senses of place and
places-making” (p.37). Referring to Vygotsky, Schieffelin illustrates how
community’s children organize their everyday experience through the mediation
of linguistic activity that becomes a way to know the community world and the
specific culture to which they belong, highlighting the role of language in
creating a sense of place: through the affection to place, children come to
realize their identity.

Chapter IV by Auer and Cornips focus on Cité Duits, a linguistic variety used
by locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood
in the village of Eisden in Belgian Limburg. Cité Duits is a language variety
combining elements from German, Belgian Dutch and Maasland dialect and
represents an example of symbolic language originating from an expressive and
identitary need. The research accurately analyses the development of a
language related to a particular place and to the expressive needs of a
specific group, represented by the coal miners’ community. A large part of the
chapter is dedicated to a strictly linguistic analysis of the variety: it
demonstrates, highlighting the bond between transnational space, that we are
dealing with a mixture that settled into a genuine linguistic variety; at the
same time, it emphasizes the peripheral status of the place and group that
produced several place making activities. 

Chapter V presents research conduct by Anna Banaś in a group of Japanese
immigrant women in Amstelveen. The author analyzes the use of three salient
linguistic variables selected by Japanese women to show how members of a group
use (even unconsciously) specific linguistic structures to establish
boundaries between themselves and others and to build cohesion within the
group. This process leads to the creation of an identity, that on the one hand
determines a sense of belonging and on the other generates a differentiation
movement vis-à-vis others. 

In the second part, starting from a “center-periphery analytic frame” (p.115)
one analyzes how minoritized speakers using parody, humour and ritualized
linguistic acts, subvert peripheralization to which they are subject. The
introductory chapter, written by Kathryn A. Woolard, illustrates the concept
of center-periphery used in sociolinguistic analysis since the 1960s. This
model subverted the classical conception that argues a linear development of a
nation from the center to the peripheries, and from the inside out. On the
contrary, center-periphery theorists claimed that we are dealing with a
spatial metaphor rather than essences: what we call periphery is not such
because of any characteristics of its own, but rather because of its
relationship with the center and center could not exist without periphery. In
a process of co-construction center and periphery structure each other and,
consequently, equations like: center=urban=modern and periphery=rural
area=traditional cease to be valid.

This framework is functional in understanding how power relations act within
centralization and nationalization processes, leading us to reflect on the
creation of national languages and on the rapport they conduct with minority
or local languages. 

We constantly get involved in discussions on the pervasively Global English
that can be considered a new center in relation to countless peripheries
scattered throughout the world; on the other hand the role of center-periphery
dynamic is highly topical when we reflect on such concepts as  identity and
belonging and on the revitalization of particularistic and vernacular 
linguistic usages and eventually on the acknowledgement of minority languages
of newly arrived immigrants (Tani, p.89).

In the three chapters of the second part, plays, parody and humour are
analyzed as strategies used to resist and contest processes of
peripheralization. Even if some linguistic practices seem to go beyond
everyday usage, they actually are techniques and instruments used by speakers
to reaffirm or defy a belonging taken for granted, to give new face to the
community limits or to an idiom. As Woolard highlights, observing experiences
included in this part of the volume, humoristic and parodistic techniques can
also become instruments utilized by local/peripheral actors/groups to
renegotiate their own and their group’s position as opposed to centers fitted
with symbolic power. 

Chapter VII by Lotte Thissen analyzes place-making and belonging processes
accomplished through linguistic practices during the carnival celebration in
Maasniel, Limburg, that is the conflict between Limburg and Holland generated
during the event that combine the nationwide celebration of Sinterklaas with
the carnival celebration. The village was annexed to the city of Roermond in
1959, promoting a sense of strong Limburgian identity in comparison with the
rest of Netherlands. Thissen argues that the encounter is reflected in using
Bakhtinian carnivalesques manners to centralize the carnival celebration and
dialect use, while peripheralizing Sinterklaas celebration and the use of
Dutch. 

In Chapter VIII, Irene Stengs analyzes performances played by Andre Rieu the
World’s King of the Walz. The subject is “the reflexive use of local language
as performance” (p.149) and language-cultural practices during Andre Rieu ’s
Vrijthof concerts’, that have a stake in performing periphery and in
engendering a reversal of center-periphery relation. Stengs explores the way
in which Rieu, a native inhabitant of Maastricht, performs the periphery and
highlights the incorporation of English during the performances as a
fundamental linguistic resource to indicate himself like a global-cum-local
performer and to negate the Hollanders-centered perspective.

Chapter IX by Tanja Petrović examines texts of the facebook page Koe ima po
grad (What’s up in town), about Lescovac, a city in Southeastern Serbia.
Vernaculars of this region are perceived as peripheral and not appropriate to
public use. Petrović’s analysis shows us how using the dialect of Leskovac and
combining it with specific discursive genres “provide a way to re-localize the
dialect” (p.195) and generatehim a place-making dynamic “in which the image of
the city of Leskovac is created outside the fixed frame set by dominant
language ideologies” (ivi).

The third part, introduced by the comment of Barbara Johnstone, focuses on
Agency in linguistics place-making. Actually, reflection on agency constitutes
a topic that comes up also in the remainder of the book and in all the
research experiences in it. If one of the principal aims of the volume is
contributing to the comprehension of processes of socio-symbolic construction
of group and places, then one cannot forget that, interpreted in this light,
every linguistic act is a type of social action that reproduces or modifies
social structure (see Ahearn 2001). As pointed out by Johnstone, Agency “is a
big part of the story about why linguistic variation persist” (p. 210): in
understanding and explaining linguistic changes especially when one considers
that the question of Agency “may be posed in ways other than in terms of the
autonomous subject or authorial subject […][We] may have to think of the ways
in which agency is constituted by the norms, practices, institutions, and
discourses through which it is made available” (Ahern, 2001:115). Dynamics
dealing with Agency are not determined by a subject acting free from a
socio-cultural community, but by an individual that accomplishes practices
that, deriving from structural principles (i.e. habitus), permit facing and
generating new situations with, in turn, unexpected outcomes (see Ahearn
2001). However, the speaker’s agency both arises in unselfconsciously
maintaining some linguistic features indicating where he comes from and in
using some of those features in claiming places and identities linked to those
places (p. 208). Johnstone points out that the three papers have the merit of
showing that variation and speakers’ linguistic activities can be put in place
with a certain degree of reflexivity i.e. agentivity, and thus becoming an act
of identity through which people proceed to preserve, modify, and build their
existential spaces.

Chapter XI is  research conduct by Malene Monka backspace, who worked on
differences in linguistic changes which occur in the communities of Vinderup
in Western Jutland and Tingley in Southern Jutland. She studied the
convergence toward Standard Danish in the two communities that share similar
characteristics, i.e. distance to urban center, number of inhabitants. The
research started in 1978; in 2006 and 2010 informants were interviewed again,
showing different outcomes in linguistic change. Monka claims the process of
place-making illuminates the results of the research: thus, different
evolution in the use of vernacular in the two municipalities can be explained
only if one considers that a place is not merely a container for facts but an
ongoing place-making process in which dialect plays a prominent role (p.228). 

In  Chapter XII, Pia Quist examines “the ways in which the marginalization of
the minority speaker in segregated urban spaces enters into everyday
linguistic practices” (p.240), discussing some of the fundamentals of
sociolinguistics theory like space, contact and linguistics policies. The
focus is the analysis of practices of place naming through which young people 
ideologically manage spaces and transforming neighborhood into “their place”,
through an analysis of alternative place naming in graffiti, street signs in
some Copenhagen neighborhoods and in a hip-hop danish song. Alternative place
naming is a resource for “claiming ownership to a place” (p.249) and an
instrument to contest “established discourses about their local places” (ivi).
 

The last chapter (XIII), a study by Kathryn A. Remlinger, combines an
ethnographic and socio-historic study with a micro-linguistic and semiotic
analysis to examine the role of tourism in discursive representations of
identity in the remote region of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP), focusing on
a specific variety of American English whose specific and recognized features
have been commodified to sell the idea and the sense of a place. Remlinger
wants to demonstrate that the dialect and its structures were submitted to a
process of enregisterment (see Agha 2007) that indicates some cultural values
associated with the dialect and with a regional persona make possible a
commercialization of structures submitted to an enregisterment process used to
sell some touristic products. Commodified products also communicate identity
and cultural values and help to understand Yooper identity: dialect defines
social identity and social identity defines dialect. 

EVALUATION

The volume has many merits, first of all, the ability to put in dialogue
theoretical topics and fieldwork in a profitable and consistent manner;
secondly the new formulations of notion of belonging and identity. Even with
respect to the recent critical reworking of identity/belonging (see e.g
Bulchotz and Hall 2005), the volume adds a revision of the notion in relation
to physical space and geography, which constitutes an essential step toward
the epistemology of the entire discipline that has “always been concerned with
place” (Johnstone, 2003: 203). 

In addition, the practical-theoretical approach to the pair belonging/place is
fundamentally coherent with the emergent nature of the concept of
identity/belonging and with the reality of the  contemporary world
characterized by increasingly frequent displacements and the existence of a
virtual but pervasive space such as the internet. As the editors write: “Place
that one experiences can be places that one is in direct physical contact with
but they can also be places known from memory or even places that are the
product of individual or collaborative imagination” (p.8). In fact, the idea
of identity locally constructed, i.e. in discourses and interactions (see
Bulchotz and Hall 2005), enlarges the very idea of space and maybe could
reverse the roles in the equation space=language.

The text is remarkable and relevant for the disciplines to which it is
addressed because it succeeds in dealing from a contemporary and ethnographic
perspective with several of the topics that define sociolinguistic and
dialectological studies. 

The volume has also the merit of  transforming the notion of place-making in a
veritable theory that is capable of containing the large majority of the key
concepts of sociolinguistics, and thanks to the various field work,
demonstrates the possible applications. 

Analyzing parodistic and humoristic use of minority and peripheral language to
subvert its own position vis-à-vis the standard or the language of the center,
gains interest also with regard to linguistic post-colonial studies. The
specific linguistic practices, in addition to being an effect of the contact
between minority or ethnical languages and standard or official language, are
also the outcome of the endeavor to renegotiate a position of
“marginalization/peripheralization-centralization” (p.8). Another important
merit of the book consists in the exploration of the linguistic process of
identification and disidentification (p.2) showing how social, cultural and
political dynamics are the primary generators of new linguistic varieties. 

Finally, the editors announce “the volume wants to bring the study of
peripheries to the center of sociolinguistic research” (p.2), challenging at
once two of the fundamental principles of sociolinguistic research, namely the
concept of standard and the concept of linguistic boundaries. The move to
focus on speaker as a concrete person gives to both the concepts of standard
and linguistic boundaries a new capacity that can be further explored. 

The volume is an excellent example of work that successfully connects
theoretical knowledge and the practice of the disciplinary area to which it is
addressed.

REFERENCES

Johnstone, Barbara. 2003 “Language and place”, in The Cambridge handbook of
sociolinguistics, ed by Mesthrie, R. Nell, pp.203-217, Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge

Nicolaï, Robert. 2003 “Frontières”, in Sociolinguistique du contact.
Dictionnaire des termes et concepts, ed. by Simonin, J. & S. Wharton pp.
199-217, Lyon :Ens Editions 

Tani, Ilaria. 2015, Lingua e legame sociale. La nozione di comunità
linguistica e le sue trasformazioni, Quodlibet, Macerata

Bulchotz, Mary & Hall, Kyra. “Identity and interaction: a sociocultural
approach”, Discourse Studies 7(4-5), October 2005

Agha, Asif. 2007, Language and Social Relations, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge

Lalu, Premesh. 2000, “The grammar of domination and the subjection of agency:
colonial texts and modes of evidence, in Historical Theory 39(4) pp.45-68

Ahern, Laura M. 2001, “Language and Agency”, in Annual Review of Anthropology,
30, pp. 109-137


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Irene D'Agostino PhD, is a linguist from Florence. She studied in Florence and
Paris. She mainly deals with sociolinguistic, dialectology and theory of
language. Her research interests concern the study of speakers identity and
linguistic variation.<br />At present she is teacher in high school.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1310	
----------------------------------------------------------