Styles, standards and meaning

Style, in the study of variation and change, is intimately linked with broader questions about linguistic innovation and change, standards, social norms, and individual speakers’ stances. This article examines style when applied to lesser-studied languages. Style is both (i) the product of speakers’ choices among variants, and (ii) something reflexively produced through the association of variants and the social position of the users of those variants. In the context of the languages considered here, we ask “What questions do we have about variation in this language and what notion(s) of style will answer them?” We highlight methodological, conceptual and analytical challenges for the notion of style as it is usually operationalised in variationist sociolinguistics. We demonstrate that style is a useful research heuristic which – when marshalled alongside locally-oriented accounts of, or proxies for “standard” and “prestige”, in apparent time – allows us to describe language and explore change. It is also a means for exploring social meaning, which speakers may have more or less conscious control over.

Stylistic variation in read Arabic

The study of variation in Arabic vernaculars has come a long way since its beginnings as a misguided endeavor to compare features in these contemporary dialects to cognate features in Standard Arabic (Classical or Modern) and view any differences as results of language change. We now recognize that the dialects and Standard Arabic have had different trajectories in different places and over a long period of time. The current study attempts to assess variation in a local variety of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and explore the methodological and theoretical advantages to consider what we already know about variation in the vernacular spoken by the same community whose reading in the Standard we are investigating. The paper draws a distinction between Prescribed MSA and a local variety thereof, as attested in recordings of a text read aloud by speakers of a Palestinian dialect, which were collected as part of a broader battery of sociolinguistic interviews in the speakers’ two dominant languages, Arabic and Hebrew. This is a pilot study, in which variationist methods of quantification and contextual analysis were employed, with the hope for setting the stage for more elaborate studies on the various stylistic repertoires available to speakers of Arabic.

Style variation in the second formant

Baba Malay speakers perceive words ending with [al], [aɾ], and [as] as kasar ‘coarse’, and their counterparts ending with [ɛ] as halus ‘refined’. The contrast is neither phonetic, phonological or morphological. Instead, it may be mitigated by sound symbolism operationalized by F2. The frontness of [ɛ] is associated with a smaller articulatory space in the oral cavity, and hence refinedness, as compared to the more backwards coarse forms. This study employs a matched-guise perceptual task. Refined forms are elicited from speakers. The F2 in the relevant endings is adjusted twice upwards and twice downwards in steps of 100Hz. Listeners rate these guises on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being most associated with ‘refined’ values. Results show that the higher F2 is, the more likely listeners are to associate the guise with ‘refined’ values.

Prestige norms and sound change in Māori

Māori, the threatened language of the indigenous people of New Zealand, has been undergoing revitalisation since the 1970s. The MAONZE project (Māori and New Zealand English) has studied sound change in Māori by comparing the speech of historical elders, present-day elders and young speakers. Here we analyse the read speech from nine present-day elders and twelve young speakers and compare it with the results from our previous analysis of their conversational material to investigate whether style shift occurs in more careful Māori speech. Pronunciation change was restricted to the backing of long /u:/, a sound whose fronting had been stigmatised and of which older female speakers seemed to be particularly aware. We conclude that, although there is some indication of style-shift in the read material, ‘first wave’ (Eckert 2012) sociolinguistic methodology is not appropriate for Māori speakers whose notion of class and prestige differ from that of previously articulated sociolinguistic norms.

Stylistic variation in Hebrew reading tasks

One of the core assumptions of the sociolinguistic interview methodology is that read speech tasks may be used to elicit more standard variants from a speaker. This link between reading and standardness, however, is a socially constructed relationship that may differ across cultures. Standard language ideologies in Israel differ from those in well-studied English speaking communities, and exhibit a complex tension between the notions of standardness and correctness. Drawing on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews of 21 Hebrew speakers, this paper analyzes the variation in two Hebrew morpho-phonological variables. The results show a pattern of use that differs from the cline typically observed, which suggests that Hebrew speakers have a specialized reading register that recruits distinctive stylistic resources. These findings highlight the nature of reading as a stylistic performance that may manifest differently according to local language ideologies.

Modelling stylistic variation in threatened and under-documented languages

The centrality of style is uncontested in sociolinguistics: it is an essential construct in the study of linguistic variation and change in the speech community. This is not the case in the language-obsolescence literature, where stylistic variation among endangered-language speakers is described as an ephemeral, or “marginal” resource, and where speakers exhibiting “stylistic shrinkage” become “monostylistic”. This argument is invoked in variationist theory too, where “monostylism” is presented as support for the tenets of Audience Design (Bell 1984). This article reports on a study that adopts variationist methods in a context of severe language endangerment. Evidence from two linguistic variables in Francoprovençal demonstrates the presence of socially meaningful stylistic variation among the last generation of fluent speakers, offering counter-evidence to classic claims. This evidence is used to argue that accounts of stylistic variation in language obsolescence are not sufficiently nuanced and should be reconsidered in light of recent research.

Style, identity and language shift

This study is an examination of style-shifting in the speech of a single interviewer conducting sociolinguistic interviews in Garifuna (Arawak), an endangered language spoken in Belize and along the eastern coast of Central America. It provides a case study of intraspeaker variation in the context of language shift, exploring how the models and principles of intraspeaker variation hold in the social context of language shift scenarios, and framing language shift scenarios as particular contexts of performativity where cultural identity is highlighted. The focus of the paper is on the agentive use of a single phonetic variable in Garifuna as employed by the individual across speech events, as an example of how a linguistic form may become iconized in the context of language shift.

Attitudes towards Belhare, Nepali and English

This paper reports on a sociolinguistic study of the Belhare speech community which is a part of the Belhare language documentation project funded by the Language Commission of the government of Nepal in 2018. This article presents sociolinguistic information on Belhare, a lesser known speech community originally settled in Dhankuta, east Nepal. The main contribution of this paper is to examine domains of language use, language use among generations, attitude towards Belhare, Nepali and English, Belhare speakers as multilingual speakers, languages resources and language proficiency among children.