Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change

Preface

When Eve Danziger invited me to give the 2009 Page-Barbour lectures, I was embarrassed as much as honored. I found that my predecessors in this series included those who had influenced me most deeply in the unlimited ambition of my early years. The list is so long that it would be claiming too much to name them here. But thinking of what I might say, I could only imagine an audience of these lecturers and of what I have to offer them. Now that my efforts to understand the world had focused on language and language change, how could I demonstrate that in the fifty years since I had read what they had to say, I had not wasted my time?

I was not worried about capturing the interest of the audience. Whenever I show that the dialects of American English are becoming more different from each other over time, the finding is so contrary to expectation that the audience demands an explanation. It is not only a challenge to our appreciation of the power of the mass media to control our behavior, but more profoundly, a challenge to our understanding of language as a means of communication. Even further, it puts into question our confidence in the rationality of human nature.

Any such accounting must also overcome the problem of communication between the linguist and the public at large. In no other form of human behavior is there such a great gap between reality and public discussion of it. Most of the sound changes I will discuss are inaudible and unknown to those affected by them. When language changes do rise to the level of social awareness, the stereotypes used to stigmatize them have only marginal relation to what is actually said in everyday speech. As a result, the field linguist interested in these changing patterns cannot focus overtly on the object of interest, since most people will reject the new forms once they become aware of them. In many areas of culture or technology, some older people will embrace and welcome the new. But in thousands of sociolinguistic interviews, no one has ever been heard to say, I really like the way that young people talk today; it's so much better than the way we talked when I was young. Most of us adhere to what one may call the Golden Age Syndrome: the belief that language once existed in a state of perfection, and any change is a decline from that state, to be resisted.

Much of the dialect diversity in America is the result of the growing divide between mainstream white dialects and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Here the problem of communication is even deeper, and much of this book will be devoted to showing that the speech of African Americans is a coherent, well-formed, and different system, a fact obvious to all linguists but not at all to the general public. People who cannot detect a shred of racial bias in their own thinking will be profoundly biased in their reactions to African American speech. The ways in which race affects our views of language will intersect with our general effort to appreciate the role of rationality in linguistic matters.

I hope that my efforts to cross the gap between linguistic description and general literacy will lay the foundation for this effort to identify the driving forces in linguistic change. This foundation is only a first step, since the larger social forces plainly call for an interdisciplinary accounting. My own work on language stratification and language change is relevant to academic groups in fields beyond linguistics, as is evident from the fact that this invitation comes from a distinguished anthropologist. I have had fruitful interactions with many areas of psychology and sociology. These lectures reach out to historians and political scientists as well, areas in which my competence is more limited, even accidental. The word politics in the subtitle is indeed a central theme of the work, and we will see that the issues to be discussed are highly politicized. The argument will conclude with an effort to account for the striking coincidence between the Blue States of the 2004-8 elections and the major example of dialect divergence: the Northern Cities Shift.

Turning then to my imaginary audience of predecessors, I hope to persuade them that there is some profit in studying the instability of English, the means of communication that they used in their lectures, and that an explanation lies in the political nature of the animal that uses it.

Among my many intellectual debts that might be mentioned here, I will cite only one, to my colleague and wife, Gillian Sankoff, who has pondered these matters with me over three decades, and corrected innumerable errors of fact and logic in these lectures.

1 ABOUT LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE CHANGE

This book is about language, about language change in particular, and especially about the changes that are now taking place in the dialects of North American English. It is also about the political causes and consequences of those changes. What is said here about language and linguistic change has a firm foundation in four decades of research on American English. On the other hand, I am not an expert in politics. For this area, I have drawn from the work of a wide range of historians, political scientists, and cultural geographers to make the necessary connections.

Some Commonsense Views of Language That Are Wrong

People tend to believe that dialect differences in American English are disappearing, especially given our exposure to a fairly uniform broadcast standard in the mass media. One can find this point of view in almost any discussion of American dialects, as for example in a recent exchange on Dr. Goodword's Language Blog.¹ A contributor, Bruce, wrote:

The accents I do hear from people from around the country seem to be disappearing. People from New Orleans interviewed on TV or Radio seem to sound like me, as do many of those I hear from New York and elsewhere. I used to hear distinctive accents from people from Minnesota for example and those also seem to be going.

Dr. Goodword responded:

Bruce is absolutely right. Regional accents are dying out…the original dialects in this country were the results of the accents of the various immigrants who came to this country looking for a better life. They all landed on the east coast, which is why all the accents are currently in the east. However, as they migrated to the west, all these accents merged into one, so there are no distinctive regional dialects west or north of southern Ohio (maybe southern Illinois and a bit in northern Minnesota).

This overwhelmingly common opinion is simply and jarringly wrong. The research reported here will demonstrate that the reverse is actually the case. New sound changes in progress are driving the regional dialects of English further and further apart, so that people from Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, and New York speak more differently from each other now than they did in the middle of the 20th century. I would not expect most readers of this book to accept this statement lightly, and I will do my best to put enough evidence before you to make it believable. We will be dealing with sounds that are not easy to describe in print, but I will try to direct your hearing so that you can begin to observe some of these new sound changes around you in everyday life.

This book is a product of sociolinguistic research, in which we interview people in communities across the country and record conversation that comes as close as possible to the speech of everyday life. This approach produces surprising results that often run counter to preconceived intuitions and opinions. The growing divergence of dialects is only one case where our findings are contrary to accepted opinion. It will also appear, in spite of public perception, that there is no such thing as Brooklynese (chap. 3). Chapter 4 will demonstrate that popular descriptions of Ebonics bear little relation to what African American people actually say.

What We All Know about Language and What We Don't Know

In the chapters to follow, I assume no knowledge of linguistics, though many readers will be quite at home in that field. Even without any knowledge of linguistics, your own knowledge of language will be an important resource in the discussion to come. Most linguists begin their introductory classes by saying, You already know more about your language than any other subject you will ever study. You may not know that you know this, since most linguistic knowledge is implicit, hidden from conscious view. Most of what linguists do is to make that knowledge explicit, asking direct questions such as "Can you say Service is bad around here anymore?," or more commonly asking themselves, "Can I say Service is bad around here anymore?" This is a useful and productive procedure, and most progress in linguistic theory is built upon it. Yet other aspects of language are hidden from these introspective procedures, and can only be found by observation of what people say. This is the case for many kinds of linguistic variation.

The main topic of Chapter 2 is such a case of variation, taken as an example of the uniform way in which our language shifts and changes from one time to another. It is the alternation between Good morning and Good mornin’."² Some features of this variation are open to introspection. As a native speaker of English, I know that I can say either Morning or mornin’. And if I ask myself, "Can I say Flushin’, Long Island?, the answer is accurately No. The results of observation confirm this: no one has been heard to say Flushin’, Long Island. On the other hand, introspection fails if I ask myself whether I am more likely to use the -in’ variant in Good morning or in I'm working on it. Here the answer would probably be, It all depends; both are possible. Yet all studies of what people actually say find that the -in’ form is much more likely in progressive verbs like workin’ than in nouns like morning and ceiling (Labov 1989; Houston 1991; Roberts 1993). And if I ask, "Is Sarah Palin more likely to say Good mornin’ than Barack Obama?, most people will answer, Yes." But as we will see, that answer is incorrect. It turns out that most of our introspective judgments about language are right, but a small percentage are dead wrong. The problem is that we don't have a clue as to where those errors are located. The data that will be used throughout this book will therefore be drawn from sociolinguistic studies that don't have that kind of uncertainty. They draw upon recorded sociolinguistic interviews that last an hour or more. These interviews are not like survey questionnaires. Rather, they are shaped like conversation, often touch on personal topics of great importance, and approximate— but never quite reach—the style that people use in speaking to their friends and family in everyday life. Because actual behavior is variable in the items we are interested in, this requires the systematic study of variation—how individual speakers vary from one style to another, and how speakers’ language patterns vary from one social group to another.³

The Two Main Strategies of Linguistic Research

Among the paths that linguists follow in pursuit of a better understanding of human language, we can trace two main branches.

THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR. One way of understanding language follows a search for the features that are common to all languages, a universal grammar.⁴ This is the goal set for linguistics by Noam Chomsky (1968). However this common human language faculty may have originated, it must have remained constant during all of human history. We know this by the fact that children of any genetic subgroup can learn any language as their first language equally well. By definition, this universal grammar has a null footprint in time.

UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE CHANGE. The other route toward a greater understanding of language focuses on linguistic change. We ask how the great differentiation of language families, languages, and dialects came about. We would like to know how any given language or dialect came to be, and more generally, what are the root causes of language change and diversity? The subject matter of this study is quite large: every aspect of language that is changing or has changed in the past. Historical linguistics attacks the problem through the written record of past changes; in recent years, the study of linguistic change and variation has focused on changes taking place around us, changes still in progress.

The study of language change will tell us about ourselves, what kind of people are we, and how we have evolved. Darwin was well aware of this. In the Descent of Man (1871) he famously wrote that the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. He then laid out 15 such parallels having to do with the effects of long continued use, such as:

•    We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to communities of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely

•    and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues.

•    We see variability in every tongue, and new words are continually cropping up;…

•    single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct.

But when Darwin came to the crucial question of natural selection, he had to argue,

•    The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

As much we admire and follow Darwin, no linguist supports this view. The general consensus is that there is no progress in linguistic evolution. Writing on language and evolution, Joseph Greenberg summed up the consensus:

Taking linguistic change as a whole, there seems to be no discernible movement toward greater efficiency such as might be expected if in fact there were a continuous struggle in which superior linguistic innovations won out as a general rule. (1959)

The parallels between linguistic and biological evolution seem so strong that it is indeed puzzling to find that the crucial link of natural selection should be missing. Language change across the centuries has turned a single group of Proto-Indo-European dialects into a family of mutually unintelligible languages, including Russian, Hindi, Greek, Albanian, French, German, English, and Icelandic. Linguistic change has not made it easier for speakers of those languages to communicate.

Before we begin a search for the causes of language change and diversity, it should be said that the mere fact of diversity is not a challenge to our understanding. When two groups of speakers become separated over time by migration to distant parts, and communication between them is drastically reduced, we expect their linguistic systems to diverge. The many sources of variation in vocabulary, grammar, and phonology will inevitably lead them to drift apart, and any degree of convergence requires an explanation.

On the other hand, we are not surprised when neighboring dialects converge. Many studies of European dialects show how the dialect contact leads to reduction of dialect diversity in the form of dialect leveling (Trudgill 1986). In fact, if these neighbors begin to speak more differently from one another, we are surprised and puzzled. It follows that when two speech communities are in continuous communication, linguistic convergence is expected and any degree of divergence requires an explanation.

Is Language a Property of the Individual or the Group?

This bears on our most general view of what the language faculty is and how it varies. Many linguists believe that language is a property of the individual mind, and it is only natural for each individual to have constructed a different language of their own. The sociolinguistic view, which guides my own thinking, is that we are programmed to learn to speak in ways that fit the general pattern of our community. What I, as a language learner, want to learn is not my English or even your English but