Sociolinguistics of the Arabic-speaking World: Session 3, 13 July

Keith Walters

Plan for today1. Assignment for next Monday2. Quick review of Monday’s discussion3. Small group discussions about today’s

readings4. Some common fallacies in

sociolinguistic argumentation5. Background on the variationist

paradigm6. Today’s readings

Assignment for July 171) Read Boussofara-Omar (2003), which

deals with diglossic switching and Myers Scotton’s model of codeswitching.

2) Read Bentahila (1983), a very early article. Pay special attention to the data and how he discusses it. In class, we’ll discuss more recent ways of discussing social motivations for CS.

Both are posted on Canvas in the file for Monday, July 17. As is clear, we’ll be thinking about codeswitching and diglossic switching.

Quick Review from Monday1) Some of the most interesting research going

on right now in Arabic sociolinguistics deals with language ideologies.

2) Constructs used in these discussions include iconicity, fractal recursivity, erasure, (indirect) indexicality, stance, and enregisterment.

3) Discourses of Arab nationalism end up relying on the Arabic language—and more particularly the fushaa faute de mieux—as the unifier and symbol of “the Arab nation.”

4) These discourses erase the variability within and across varieties of Arabic, including the fushaa, and ignore the fact that the Arab world has always been and will continue to be multilingual, with both indigenous languages and languages of wider communication found there.

5) Robust Mashraq/Maghreb language ideologies problematize many ideological claims made about Arabic as unifier of the Arab world.

6) As we’ll continue to see, much of the real action in terms of Arabic currently is thanks to (a) satellite television , which grants speakers of Arabic new kinds of access to other dialects of Arabic and other ways of using the fushaa, and (b) the New Media, where language users are literally taking the language in their own hands and writing the dialect to an extent and in ways never seen before.

7) These changes in technology are accompanied by changes in attitudes, especially among younger users of Arabic.

8) As we’ll discuss today, the displacement of peoples is also currently a force in Arabic-speaking communities.

Check-in1) How was today’s reading?2) How much of the info in these articles was

new to you?3) Did these perspectives call into question

anything you’d assumed, been taught, or experienced?

4) Which aspects of the articles did you find especially interesting?

5) Which aspects of the articles would you like to know more about or discuss further?

Some common fallacies in sociolinguistic argumentation

1) We can never make assumptions about actual behavior on the basis of report data.

Compare:Based on our survey,

1) 75% of the women use French while 35% of the men use French.

2) 75% of the women reported using French while 35% of the men reported using French.

While 2) is the better (and more accurate) way to report the data, what do we know about actual lg. use from the survey? NOTHING

2) Correlation, even statistically significant correlation, does not equal causation.

Compare:1) Because the female speakers were more

educated, they preferred the standard variant.

2) Given that the female speakers were more educated, we should not be surprised that they preferred the standard variant.

2) Correlation, even statistically significant correlation, does not equal causation.

Compare:1) Because the female speakers were more

educated, they preferred the standard variant.

2) Given that the female speakers were more educated, we should not be surprised that they preferred the standard variant.

3) Attributing intentionality is risky business.

a) When the research participant is conversing with an intimate in an unstructured setting, however, this same speaker uses more turn-initial DMs (especially oh and well) to indicate a higher level of involvement with the contributions made by the other interlocutor. (claim about the speakers)

VS.b) …indicating a higher level of involvement

with the contributions made by the other interlocutor. (claim by the analyst)

Variationist Sociolinguistics (as it was later called)

Also referred to as•Labovian sociolinguistics•Language Variation and Change [LVC]•Quantitative sociolinguistics•Secular linguistics•Sociolinguistics•Linguistics

Questions for a theory of language change (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968)

1) Constraints: What constraints lg. change linguistically?

2) Transitions: How do people keep communicating even though lg. is changing?

3) Embedding: How are changes embedded in their ling. & social matrix?

4) Evaluation: How can change be evaluated—wrt structure, communicative efficiency, etc.?

5) Actuation: Why this change here? now? but not elsewhere?

It is apparent that we want a theory of lg. change to deal with nothing less than the manner in which the linguistic structure of a complex community is transformed in the course of time so that, in some sense, both the lg. and the community remain the same, but the lg. acquires a different form. (Footnote to this sentence begins: "The community has also changed, of course….")

(WLH, 100-102)

Variation theory is the intellectual heir of1) historical/comparative linguistics, which

sought to understand the history of various lg. and the principles behind lg. change and which gave rise to

2) (traditional) dialectology, which sought to map regional dialect boundaries (isoglosses).

In many ways, both are products of the rise of 19th-century European nationalism (one people=one nation=one language).

Variation theory saw itself as a reaction againstChomskyan linguistics with its focus on•idealized native speakers•language as a purely cognitive phenomenon•synchrony (or diachrony as a series of

synchronic states)•native speaker intuitions•hypothetical or “made-up” data•linguistic competence (ignoring performance)•reducing variation to “free variation”

Traditionally, its concerns have been language variation and change across1) time2) social space3) geographic spaceIt assumes all diachronic change grows out of synchronic variation, an assumption that represented a completely new way of thinking about lg. change.

Labov’s early methods1. Isolate linguistic variablesExample: (r); Variants: [r], øExamples: car, floor, park, fourth2. Conduct taped sociolinguistic interviews with a sample of speakers stratified by extralinguistic variables (sex (m/f) and social class (LWC, UWC, LMC, UMC), etc.)3. Manipulate their behavior during the interview to elicit the widest possible range of their stylistic continuum

CASUAL CAREFUL READINGPASSAGE

WORD LIST MINIMALPAIRS

speech outsidethe interview: to 3rd parties, speech about childhood, speech thatovercomes theObserver'sParadox, etc.

speech to theinter-viewer inresponse toques-tions

reading aloudapassage designed tocontain the max. no. of tokens of the vbls. invariousenviron-ments

list of words, allcontaining thevbl(s) inquestion

selected pairscontaining thevbl(s),juxta-posed toencouragemaximum differen-tiation ofvariants

4. Assign a numerical value to each variant:r=1; ø =2 (or vice versa)5. Listen to tapes of interviews, noting each

possible occurrence of a variable and the token that occurs.

6.For each speaker, calculate an index score: number of times each variant occurs x value for each token, divided by the total number of tokens.

7. Aggregate speakers by the extralinguistic variables (e.g., sex, class)

What those using these methods found: Sociolinguistic patterns

Richard Schmidt (1974): First variationist study in ArabicSociostylistic variation in spoken

Egyptian Arabic: A re-examination of the concept of diglossia. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Brown University.

Niloofar Haeri (1997)& the diglossic variable (though there are “garden variety” sociolinguistic variables in diglossic communities as well)

A Tunisian example: LVC & social change

1) The garden variety variable and its variants:

imaala ‘raising’ in Qurba, Tunisiavariable: (ɛ:)variants: [ɛ:], [ɪ:], [ɨ]examples: /smɛ:/ ‘sky’, /mi.yɛ:/,

/bIl.gdɛ:/ ’well’ (adv.)2) No literacy-based prompts? Why not?

The results

(See file: Imaala in Qurba)

Not surprisingly, Arabic and the Arab world have been constructed as exceptional by many Western variationists wrt gender and whether women or men lead in sound change, largely because of these analysts’ assumptions about sound change and sex/gender.

Where variationist sociolinguistics has gone: 3 waves (Eckert, n.d.)

What? Who?1st Big picture, broad, abstract

demographic categories, focus—social dialects

Labov

2nd Ethnographic methods to examine participant-designed categories

Eckert, (Milroy)

3rd The social meaning of variables; focus is styles & construction of personae, not variables

Eckert & students

Koinéization The process of creating a koiné—that was

helpful, huh?koiné: (< Gk. ‘common’, that is, common

dialect), a lg. variety that has arisen out of the contact between two or more mutually intelligible varieties

koinéization: the process by which a new variety of a language emerges from the mixing, leveling, and simplifying of different dialects. Also known as dialect mixing and structural nativization.

Some specific questions about today’s readings1. In the review article, what “camps” emerge

in the society of lg. in society in Arabic?2. Which parts of the Arab world are

represented? Why might that be? Why might so much of the work be only dissertations?

3. Why is it necessary to distinguish—at least in Arabic—between a standard form (=MSA) and a local (or supralocal) prestige form of a variable?

4. What challenges do variationists face in studying situations like the one in Gaza?

ReferencesBell, Allan. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language

in Society 13, 145-204.Eckert, P. (n.d.) Third wave variation studies.

https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/thirdwave.htmlHaeri, Niloofar. (1997). The sociolinguistic market of Cairo:

Gender, class, and education. London: Kegan Paul International.

Walters, K. (1988). Dialectology. In Frederick Newmeyer (Ed.), Language: The socio-cultural context, volume IV, Linguistics: The Cambridge survey (pp. 219-239). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 219-239.

Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William, & Herzog, Marvin. (1967). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W.P. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (eds.). New directions for historical linguistics: A symposium. (pp. 97-195). Austin: UT Press.