Variation in Less Commonly Studied Languages

Monday, 18 January 2010, Colloquium

James N. Stanford, Dartmouth College.

Abstract

Field research of indigenous minorities and other less commonly studied languages has led to countless new insights in many areas of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, typology, anthropological linguistics, and other areas. Moreover, the language endangerment discourse (e.g., Krauss 1992; Krauss 2010) has brought about active engagement in the description and documentation of diverse languages. In variationist sociolinguistics, however, such languages remain underrepresented. As a result, we face a significant gap in our understanding of how language varies and changes. After all, many contemporary principles of variation and change have been based on majority languages or well-known minorities (e.g., Labov 1994, 2001). A wider, more balanced perspective will require greater focus on variation in diverse languages (Stanford & Preston 2009), and recent work is already illustrating the benefits of such an approach. Drawing from the author’s fieldwork with Sui (China) and Hmong (U.S.) as well as others’ work on diverse languages, this paper investigates six ways in which indigenous minority languages can provide insights about variation and change:

  1. The role of gender/sex in variation: Perspectives from Sui and Hmong

  2. Less commonly studied linguistic variables: Moving beyond traditional sociophonetic variables into “socio-tonetics” for tonal languages

  3. Classic notions of social stratification contrasted with clans and clanlects (Stanford 2009; Bowern 2008)

  4. Acts of Identity (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985) and Communities of Practice contrasted with “Acts of Loyalty” and “Communities of Descent” for societies with lineage identities

  5. Perspectives on “speech community” in a Sui village where 19 different clanlects are in daily contact, and the notion of “standard” between Hmong dialects

  6. Child dialect acquisition: Does the classic “peer influence” model of dialect acquisition hold in diverse cultures?