Toward a Speech Communities Approach: A Review Article

2018 ◽  
Vol 78 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-202
Author(s):  
Luca D’Anna
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Arabic Linguistics ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Prolonged Contact ◽  
Dialectal Arabic ◽  
Arabic Speaking

Abstract The present paper offers a review of Stefano Manfredi’s Arabi Juba: un pidgin-créole du Soudan du Sud (2017), discussing the potential benefits of its methodological approach for the field of Arabic linguistics and dialectology. Manfredi’s volume represents the latest and most comprehensive description of Juba Arabic, a pidgin / creole spoken in South Sudan. It includes a socio-historical introduction describing the conditions from which the speech community that gave rise to Juba Arabic first emerged, followed by nine chapters that provide a detailed description of the language at the phonological, morphological and syntactical levels. The paper also discusses how Manfredi’s approach goes in the direction of a linguistics of speech communities invoked by Magidow (2017) and how it might represent a model for future grammars of dialectal Arabic. Manfredi (2017), in fact, provides a multidimensional description of Juba Arabic, in which the diverse nature of its speakers (monolinguals native speakers vs bilinguals L2 speakers with different L1s) and the prolonged contact with its lexifier language (Sudanese Arabic) give origin to acrolectal and basilectal varieties. Manfredi analyzes internal variation from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, resorting to the concept of “dynamic synchrony” to describe ongoing processes of language change. The linguistic situation of the Arabic-speaking world after the end of the colonial period, on the other hand, witnesses a more and more intense contact between different Arabic dialects and an increased influence from MSA, through mass media and growing rates of literacy. The situation of language contact that results from these circumstances needs more refined conceptual tools in order to be effectively described. For this reason, and in light of Magidow (2017), this review article argues that the approach adopted by Manfredi might be successfully imported in the field of Arabic dialectology.

The Development of Metropolitan Languages in Post-Colonial Contexts: Language Contact and Language Change and the Case of Portuguese in Maputo

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-213
Author(s):  
Christopher Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Contact Linguistics ◽  
The Social

This article explores briefly some phenomena of potential indigenization of the Portuguese spoken in Mozambique. Data for the study has been taken from work that is currently underway in Maputo, Mozambique, that was originally initiated to investigate contact varieties of Portuguese and to probe their educational implications. Speech samples comprise formal interviews and non-formal encounters from a socio-demographically representative sample of informants. The article first provides an inventory of some non-standard European Portuguese variants that are found in this data, and subsequently focusses upon a discussion of what contribution different linguistic processes make to indigenization, specifically the role played by processes of second language acquisition in a context of massive and diffuse language contact and change. Special attention is also paid to the social contexts in which different manifestations of language contact are found, and the importance of linguistic ideology for the form that language contact takes in particular cases is explored. The article concludes with the suggestion that the salient characteristics of types of non-native speech community such as Maputo require a reconceptualization of models and methods of contact linguistics and second language acquisition, and that this in turn carries implications for the terms of reference and analysis to which indigenization need be related.

A multilocality study of a sound change in progress: The case of /l/ vocalization in New Zealand and Australian English

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara M. Horvath ◽  
Ronald J. Horvath
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Spatial Models ◽  
Field Method ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Place And Space ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Australian English ◽  
Place Effects

It is usual to study a number of linguistic variables in a single speech community. The present study, however, focuses on a single phonological variable in a number of speech communities—the vocalization of /l/ in nine Australian and New Zealand cities—in order to (1) strengthen and extend the quick and anonymous field method by designing an instrument to include all relevant phonological environments; (2) demonstrate the strategic potential of moving from a unilocality to a multilocality sociolinguistics; (3) conceptualize a variationist isogloss that extends rather than displaces the core methodology of sociolinguistics; and (4) propose a conception of geography that offers mechanisms (space and place effects) to help distinguish language change processes that are universal from those that are not. Place and space represent a system of contrasts within geography. Place effects refer to the ensemble of sociolinguistic conditions within a speech locality, whereas space effects refer to the relationship between speech localities. Place effects provide a potential explanation for why spatial models fail to account adequately for the facts: that is, why some places resist the spread of innovation while other places welcome innovation.

Relatedness as a Factor in Language Contact

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Bowern
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Contact Models ◽  
Theory Of Language

Contact-induced change among related languages has been considered problematic for language reconstruction. In this article, I consider several aspects of the theory of language change and ways in which contact might interact with language relatedness. I show that models of language change which extrapolate dialect-contact models to languages and subgroups are problematic, and fail to take into account the unevenness of degrees of difference between languages across families. That is, diffusability clines that apply to speech communities and dialects do not appear to be in evidence for languages and subgroups. I further show that many claims about relatedness as a factor in language contact are confounded by other factors that are distinct from language relatedness, such as geographical proximity. Claims about effects of language contact appear to reduce to the type of interaction that speakers participate in, rather than structural facts about their languages. I argue that our current toolkit for reconstruction is adequate to identify contact features. Finally, I provide a typology of cases where contact might be expected to be problematic for subgrouping.

scholarly journals Contact-induced sound change: analysis of the alveolar lateral fricative in Yami

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li-Fang Lai ◽  
Huiju Hsu
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Strongly Correlated ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Network Integration ◽  
Change Analysis ◽  
Austronesian Language ◽  
Orchid Island

Language change manifests itself in various ways. The majority of studies on language change in Yami, an endangered Austronesian language spoken on Orchid Island, Taiwan, have centered on the rapid language shift from Yami to Mandarin within the speech community (Chen 1998, Li and Ho 1988, Lin 2007, Rau 1995). The present study, however, aims to explore whether the sound change of [ɮ] to [l] in Yami (e.g., soli [ʂuɮi] > [ʂuli] 'taro') is triggered by language contact between Mandarin and Yami. Three variables were considered: Mandarin competence, Mandarinspeaking frequency, and social network integration. The results showed that the three variables were strongly correlated with sound change. Participants possessing advanced Mandarin competence, higher Mandarin-speaking frequency, and/or weaker social network integration into the Yami community (i.e., greater exposure to Mandarin) tended to exhibit the highest rate of sound change, which might be attributed to a cross-linguistic influence from Mandarin to Yami through extensive language contact.

scholarly journals Contact-induced change in Jaffa Palestinian Arabic: The case of (ʕ)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uri Horesh
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
West Bank ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Palestinian Arabic

One of the most salient features of Arabic is pharyngeality. It is prevalent in its phonemic inventory both in primary articulation – voiced /ʕ/ – and voiceless /ħ/ – and in secondarily articulated phonemes known commonly as “emphatic” consonants.<br /><p>As a result of the 1948 occupation of Palestine by Zionist forces, Jaffa, and much of the Arabic-speaking population of Palestine elsewhere, has transformed from a monolingual speech community into a bilingual one, having acquired Modern Hebrew as its L2. While many Palestinian towns and villages have remained segregated, Jaffa has become a “mixed town,” in that Palestinians and Jewish Israelis have been living there side by side for the past 65 years. One of the linguistic consequences of this bilingual (or indeed multilingual) cohabitation is structural borrowing (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988). Of particular interest to this study are the variable lenition and/or deletion of the voiced pharyngeal fricative among native speakers of Arabic, who are also L2 speakers of Hebrew.</p><p>In order to test the hypothesis that structural change, especially in the phonology of Jaffa Palestinian Arabic, has been under way as a result of contact with Hebrew, sociolinguistic interviews were carried out in both Jaffa itself and in the West Bank communities of Ramallah and Jerusalem. The latter two were used as a control group, as West Bank speakers nowadays are much less exposed to Hebrew than their Jaffa counterparts.</p><p>Since the structural change in question has more than one possible “application” in the variable rule paradigm, various quantitative models have been applied to assess the effect of contact on language variation and change in this instance. The bar bar graph above illustrates a simple crosstabulation of speaker and the dependent variable across the two speech communities, with two different types of application: full deletion and any type of lenition of the pharyngeal. We see that both the high-contact Jaffa speech community and the low-contact West Bank community have garden varieties of lenition, but the Jaffa community, especially younger speakers, tend more to apply the full lenition rule.</p><p>When isolating the Jaffa community and conducting a multivariate analysis of the data from that community alone using Rbrul (Johnson 2009), having recoded the dependent variable as a continuous one on a scale from 0 (total deletion) to 4 (full pharyngeal realization), the best models emerge with several social and linguistic factors contributing the most to the application of the variable rule. Most salient among the social factors appears to be language of schooling, whereby speakers who were schooled predominantly in Hebrew tend, unsurprisingly, to lenite their pharyngeals more than those educated in Arabic. The most salient linguistic factor (though this is yet to be refined) is position of the variable in the word; coda position prefers lenition over onset and consonant clusters.</p><p>The paper addresses additional fine-grained explanations and hypotheses regarding language contact and its effects on phonological change both within the Jaffa community and across Palestine in general.</p><p><strong> </strong></p>

Linguistic and Cultural Shifts of the Aranadan Tribe in Kerala

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Robert ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Tribal Community ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Cultural Shifts

Language and cultural shifts are the major causes of endangerment of any community, which begins from minor switching of practices and verbal repertoires and ends with a whole change of community, and finally culminates in the community losing its own identity.  Language shift usually takes place in a bilingual or multilingual speech community. It is a social phenomenon, whereby one language replaces another in a given society due to underlying changes in the composition and aspirations of the society. This process transitions from speaking the old to the new language. This is not fully a structural change caused by the dynamics of the old language as a system. The new language is adopted as a result of contact with another language community. The term language shift excludes language change which can be seen as an evolution, and hence the transition from older to newer forms of the same language. Contact between two or more cultures often leads to different sociological processes such as acculturation, cultural change, cultural genocide, and cultural shift. Cultural shift occurs when a community gives up its own socio-cultural practices like customs, rituals and traditional beliefs, and is characterized by changes in cultural symbols, rules of behavior, social organizations, or value systems. It differs from the process of cultural change in which a community’s culture can evolve independently. Shifts may take place at the level of an individual speaker who gradually forgets or shifts to another language and consequently this language spreads to an entire community. This phenomenon can be seen among the Aranadans, a primitive tribal community found mainly in the Malappuram district and in other Northern districts such as Kasargode and Kannur of Kerala, owing to their irreverence towards the preservation of their own language and culture. The socio-ecological, psychological and educational factors impact their language and cultural shifts. This paper illustrates and clarifies the reasons for the language and cultural shifts of the Aranadan tribal community.

Persona management and identity projection in English Medieval society: Evidence from John Paston II

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan M. Hernández-Campoy ◽  
Tamara García-Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Microscopic Investigation ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Individual

AbstractHistorical sociolinguistics has favoured the interest in tracing heterogeneity and vernacularity in the history of language, reconstructing the sociolinguistic contexts and directions of language change as well as socially based variation patterns in remote speech communities. But this treatment of language variation and change macroscopically, longitudinally, unidimensionally and focused on the speech community as a macro-cosmos can be revealingly complemented with other views microscopically, cross-sectionally, multidimensionally and privileging individuals and their community of practice as a micro-cosmos. This conveys a shift from the study of collectivity and inter-speaker variation to that of individuality, intra-speaker variation and authenticity. The aim of this paper is to show results of the microscopic investigation of intra-speaker variation and the use of stylistic choices as linguistic resources for persona management within the micro-cosmos of late Medieval England, through the application of current multidimensional socio-constructionist models to historical corpora of written correspondence. The study is carried out through the analysis of the behaviour of the orthographic variable (TH) in the letters written by members of the Paston family. In addition to tracing language change, the data obtained from private letters provide us with the possibility of reconstructing the sociolinguistic values in medieval times. Ultimately, this study’s contribution is to account for the social meaning of inter- and intra-speaker variation in the sociolinguistic behaviour of speakers at the individual level as a linguistic resource for identity construction, representation, and even social positioning in interpersonal communication.

Social Network Approach in African Sociolinguistics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Beyer ◽  
Henning Schreiber
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Western World ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Communicative Interaction ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
The Social

The Social Network Analysis approach (SNA), also known as sociometrics or actor-network analysis, investigates social structure on the basis of empirically recorded social ties between actors. It thereby aims to explain e.g. the processes of flow of information, spreading of innovations, or even pathogens throughout the network by actor roles and their relative positions in the network based on quantitative and qualitative analyses. While the approach has a strong mathematical and statistical component, the identification of pertinent social ties also requires a strong ethnographic background. With regard to social categorization, SNA is well suited as a bootstrapping technique for highly dynamic communities and under-documented contexts. Currently, SNA is widely applied in various academic fields. For sociolinguists, it offers a framework for explaining the patterning of linguistic variation and mechanisms of language change in a given speech community. The social tie perspective developed around 1940, in the field of sociology and social anthropology based on the ideas of Simmel, and was applied later in fields such as innovation theory. In sociolinguistics, it is strongly connected to the seminal work of Lesley and James Milroy and their Belfast studies (1978, 1985). These authors demonstrate that synchronic speaker variation is not only governed by broad societal categories but is also a function of communicative interaction between speakers. They argue that the high level of resistance against linguistic change in the studied community is a result of strong and multiplex ties between the actors. Their approach has been followed by various authors, including Gal, Lippi-Green, and Labov, and discussed for a variety of settings; most of them, however, are located in the Western world. The methodological advantages could make SNA the preferred framework for variation studies in Africa due to the prevailing dynamic multilingual conditions, often on the backdrop of less standardized languages. However, rather few studies using SNA as a framework have yet been conducted. This is possibly due to the quite demanding methodological requirements, the overall effort, and the often highly complex linguistic backgrounds. A further potential obstacle is the pace of theoretical development in SNA. Since its introduction to sociolinguistics, various new measures and statistical techniques have been developed by the fast growing SNA community. Receiving this vast amount of recent literature and testing new concepts is likewise a challenge for the application of SNA in sociolinguistics. Nevertheless, the overall methodological effort of SNA has been much reduced by the advancements in recording technology, data processing, and the introduction of SNA software (UCINET) and packages for network statistics in R (‘sna’). In the field of African sociolinguistics, a more recent version of SNA has been implemented in a study on contact-induced variation and change in Pana and Samo, two speech communities in the Northwest of Burkina Faso. Moreover, further enhanced applications are on the way for Senegal and Cameroon, and even more applications in the field of African languages are to be expected.

scholarly journals The Impact of Culture and Gender on the Production of Online Speech Acts among Jordanian Facebook Users

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Relevant Research ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The Impact

This study of speech acts offers deep insights into the social structure and gender differences of any speech community. Most relevant research on online speech acts has shed much light on Western speech communities, neglecting the speech act behavior of Arabic speaking communities. This study aimed to examine the influence of gender differences and the Jordanian cultural norms on the use of speech acts in Facebook Status Updates (FSUs). A total of 1718 FSUs were collected over a period of 2 months. Then, they were categorized according to Searle’s speech acts taxonomy. Results showed that women made an average of 6 updates to their Facebook status, while men averaged four. In addition, the results revealed that females and males differ in their linguistic repertoires. Male participants were inclined to use more assertive speech acts, whereas females were more likely to use expressive speech acts. Islam and tribalism are factors that were found to play an important role in defining the cultural norms of the Jordanian speech community.

A note on language contact: Laz language in Turkey

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 856-860
Author(s):  
Mehmet Akkuş
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Morphological Alterations ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Endangered Language ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Induced Changes ◽  
Turkish Language

Classified as an endangered language, the Laz language is spoken in a restricted area by a small number of speakers. The contact between Turkish and Laz is intense and unidirectional in that the latter is only restrained to communication among family members in small speech communities. Contact-induced change, which is an inevitable outcome of Turkish-Laz contact, is investigated by placing special emphasis on loanwords. This paper, thus, addresses the contact between Turkish and the Laz language at lexical level and aims to examine whether the existence of Turkish nouns as loanwords in the Laz language is due to contact-induced language change with a culture-heavy loanword transmission or to gradual language loss. The data analysis reveals that these alterations can be divided into four major categories which are i) treatment of vowels, ii) treatment of consonants, iii) direct insertion, and iv) loanblends. The results show that nouns that are transmitted from Turkish into the Laz language undergo phonological and morphological alterations. The contact-induced change in the Laz language is probably due to historical process, lack of knowledge of the Laz language among the young generation and the dominance of Turkish language in social and educational setting. The study is original as it is the first attempt to examine the contact-induced change at lexical level in addition to studies by İmer (1997) and Kutcher (2008) investigating contact between Turkish and the Laz languages. The findings of the study are limited to contact-induced changes taking place in nouns transmitted from Turkish into the Laz language. Therefore, further research is needed to shed light on changes in other lexical categories like adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and so on.

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