Research methods in sociolinguistics

The second issue of volume 47 (2024) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to the effects of speaking differently from a norm. Across such diverse fields as sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, experimental linguistics, and interactional analysis we call for papers on empirically based studies of reactions towards speakers and/or speech that in some way or another is perceived as outside of a norm, for instance non-standard speech, dialect, ethnolect, L2 accent, or speech impairments. The issue will be edited by Nicolai Pharao and Pia Quist. Inviting contributions based on empirical work in linguistics, the aim of this NJL special issue will be to expand the perspective within sociolinguistics on language attitudes and ideologies to studies that employ new methodologies, whether they use quantitative and/or qualitative measures, or consist of mainly experiments or ethnographic observations, etc. We also invite contributions that focus on the question of how norms are locally constituted and (re)shaped in everyday interaction through ideological moves as observed in empirical data. In the context of this special issue, we apply a broad understanding of the concepts of effect and norm, and contributions may employ different specifications. We understand effect in a broad sense as reactions by receivers in a given research setting, whether that is in experiments, interviews, or recordings of group conversations. The concept of norm is also understood in broad terms as expectations and standards that make people react and behave in a certain way. These may be linguistic standard norms connected to standard ideologies and power inequalities, but they could also be locally defined norms within a group or more locally in a conversation. Studies of attitudes towards non-standard language typically show low degrees of tolerance towards linguistic variation, including dialect variation, the use of multiethnic youth styles, and foreign accents (Garrett 2010, Coupland and Kristiansen 2011, Grondelaers and Kristiansen 2013). As argued by Kristiansen (2009), for instance (see also Labov 1972), negative attitudes towards non-standard speech affect speakers' linguistic choices, prompting them to accommodate to the standard norms and thus resulting in language change. Other studies have found that overtly stigmatized forms may be covertly upgraded (see Labov 1966), leading to questions about the coexistence of multiple norms and how best to capture them empirically.

The chapter is organized around sociolinguistic variables with potentially multiple linguistic influences. The main point of this chapter is that for any variable investigated, especially morphological variation, the researcher must deter- mine what linguistic factors influence the variation. For the variables examined here, the background research is summarized, a research problem is presented, and then the empirical evidence for arriving at a cogent explanation is set out. Through these different examples of language variation patterns, the relative influence of morphological, phonological, and lexical factors is assessed. The first language variation patterns are copula absence (e.g., She ∅ out late) and past-tense wont2 (e.g., We wont going yesterday) from Warren County, NC (Hazen 2000). Next are the language variation patterns drawn from the work of the West Virginia Dialect Project in Appalachia, including potential linguistic influences on was contraction (e.g., We’s out last night), suffixal -ing (e.g. We were walki[n]), and coronal stop deletion (e.g., past → pas’ ).

This paper discusses the observation of language attitudes in interaction and argues that these approaches provide invaluable insights for the study of language attitudes. In the first half of the paper, the three different kinds of discourse-based methods of analysis that scholars have used to analyse language attitudes (content-based approaches, turn-internal semantic and pragmatic approaches, and interactional approaches) are discussed. In the second half, then, the third of these approaches is used to illustrate such an analysis with four stretches of conversation in different contexts. In the end, the argument is put forward that discourse-based approaches in general and interactional approaches in particular should be viewed as at least as fundamental to language attitude research as more commonly used quantitative methods of analysis, since the former can provide the researcher with insights that the latter do not.

Self-recordings, when speakers record themselves without a researcher present, are attractive for potentially eliciting a wider range of styles than is obtained through interviews. To compare the stylistic differences between self-recorded speech and interview speech, we present an analysis of sibilant production among four speakers in both contexts. Our results show that the contrast between self-recordings and interviews can be a reliable predictor, with differences often surpassing those between interview speech and read speech. We suggest that self-recordings may be stylistically different enough from interviews to justify overcoming the
practical challenges of their collection, integrating the self-recording into standard sociolinguistic methodologies, at least for studies of intraspeaker variation and the description of variable phenomena.