JAZAK ALLAH2

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PROJECT OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS

TOPIC:

NEWSPAPER BRINGS VARIATIONS IN OUR

LANGUAGE

SUBMITTED TO:

DR.KAZIM SHAH

SUBMITTED BY: NAME ROLL #

SABA NOSHEEN 2382

FARAH ILYAS 2366

HAFIZA AKHTAR 2378MSC.APPLIED LINGUISTICS

2ND SEMESTER

DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS

G. C UNIVERSITY FAISALABAD


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

In the name of Almighty Allah who is most merciful, and who give me strength to

write the report in a different way.

We extend our heartiest thanks to our teachers, class fellows, and seniors and juniorsdwho assist us on every occasion to enable us to write this. Our parents, classmates,

friends come next in the list of those whom I have to thank.

I pay special homage to the following persons.

1-Dr.KAZIM SHAH

Lecturer of Applied Linguistics

Government College University, Faisalabad Campus

2-DR.RASHID MEHMOODLecturer of Applied Linguistics, Head of department


3-DR.ASIM



4-SIR JAVAID IQBAL



5-MISS RABIA YASMEEN



6-SIR FAZL-E-HAQ



Last but not least, We wish to express our humble obligations to our Parents, who

always raise their hands for our success and give us confidence and an atmosphere

that initiates us to achieve high academic goals. We offer our profound obligations to

our beloved Brothers and Sisters for their encouragement, help and moral support

throughout the study period.

SABA NOSHEEN, FARAH ILYAS,HAFIZA AKHTAR


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Dedicated To

Our FamilyWithout whomWe are nothing,&. Our TeachersWho made usWhat we are!!!


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Change is static and everything is ever changing able

Phenomenon


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Table of Contents

Sr # Description Page noAcknowledgement iv

Dedication v

Preface vi

Executive Summary vii

Chapter No 1 BACKGROUND 1

1.1 Linguistics 1

1.2 Sociolinguistics 2

1.3 Language 2

1.4 Language variation 2

1.5 Social variations 51.6 Factors responsible for social variations 8

1.7 Media 17

1.8 Media history 17

1.9 Role of media in language variations 19

Chapter No 2 EARLIER LINGUISTSS WORK 19

2.1 Research background 19

2.2 Their objectives 31

2.3 Their method 32

2.4 Finding 49

Chapter No 3 RESEARCH(OUR)

3.1 Research method 663.2 Population sample 71

3.3 Data collection 77

3.4 Data analysis 83

3.5 Conclusion 96

3.6 Bibliography 97

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, includingcultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effectsof language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in thatthe focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while thelatter's focus is on the language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to aconsiderable degree with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to LinguisticAnthropology and the distinction a between the two fields has even been questionedrecently.

It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certainsocial variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level ofeducation, age, etc.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicityhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_statushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicityhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_statushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing


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and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals insocial or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place(dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects thatsociolinguistics studies.

Individuals differ in the manner in which they speak their native tongue, althoughusually not markedly within a small area. The differences among groups of speakersin the same speech community can, however, be considerable. These variations of alanguage constitute its dialects. All languages are continuously changing, but if thereis a common direction of change it has never been convincingly described. Variousfactors, especially the use of written language, have led to the development of astandard language in most of the major speech communitiesa special official dialectof a language that is theoretically maintained unchanged.

INTRODUCTION

Linguistics investigates the cognitive and social aspects of human language.The field is divided into areas that focus on aspects of the linguistic signal, such assyntax (the study of the rules that govern the structure of sentences), semantics (thestudy of meaning), morphology (the study of the structure of words), phonetics (thestudy of speech sounds) and phonology (the study of the abstract sound system of a

particular language); however, work in areas like evolutionary linguistics (the study ofthe origins and evolution of language) and A psycholinguistics (the study of

psychological factors in human language) cut across these divisions.

The overwhelming majority of modern research in linguistics takes a predominantlysynchronic perspective (focusing on language at a particular point in time), and agreat deal of itpartly owing to the influence of Noam Chomsky aims atformulating theories of the cognitive processing of language. However, language doesnot exist in a vacuum, or only in the brain, and approaches like contact linguistics,Creole studies, discourse analysis, social interactional linguistics, and sociolinguisticsexplore language in its social context. Sociolinguistics often makes use of traditionalquantitative analysis and statistics in investigating the frequency of features, whilesome disciplines, like contact linguistics, focus on qualitative analysis. While certainareas of linguistics can thus be understood as clearly falling within the social sciences,other areas, like acoustic phonetics and neurolinguistics, draw on the natural sciences.

Linguistics draws only secondarily on the humanities, which played a rather greaterrole in linguistic inquiry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ferdinand Saussure isconsidered the father of modern linguistics.

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society,including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, andthe effects of language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology oflanguage in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on thelanguage, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society.Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historicallyclosely related to Linguistic Anthropology and the distinction between the two fields

has even been questioned recently
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_classhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntaxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semanticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonologyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_linguisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguisticshttp://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/synchronichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomskyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_phoneticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolinguisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Saussurehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(sociology)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmaticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Anthropologyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_classhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntaxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semanticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonologyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_linguisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguisticshttp://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/synchronichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomskyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_phoneticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolinguisticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Saussurehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(sociology)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmaticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Anthropology


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LANGUAGE

What is language? All of us know what language is, just like we know the palm of ourhands. We all acquired a language early in life. There is no human being, ordinarilyspeaking, who does not have a language of his or her own. There are societieswhich do not have a written language, but there is no society which does not have aspoken language.

The word language is often used to refer to several kinds of human activity, such asthe language of music, language of circus, and so on. However, in its ordinary sense,it primarily focuses on the oral and written medium that we use to communicate withone another. We use it especially to refer to human language and thus we tend todistinguish between language and other forms of communication.

A general definition characterizes language as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by

means of which members of a society interact with one another.

LANGUAGE VARIATION

Before we review various aspects of language variation in more detail, I want to makesure we've got some basic terms and concepts down. So, here goes...

SOME IMPORTANT TERMINOLOGY

Internal Variation: the property of languages having different ways of expressing thesame meaning. Importantly, this refers to within language, not across language,

differences. An example of internal variation in English is "ask" vs. "aks".

Language variety: This is a general term that may be used at a number of levels. So,we can use the term to distinguish between English and French, but we can also usethe term to distinguish between two varieties of English, such as New York CityEnglish vs. Appalachian English.

Dialect: This is a complex and often misunderstood concept. For linguists, a dialect isthe collection of attributes (phonetic, phonological, syntactic, morphological,semantic) that make one group of speakers noticeably different from another group ofspeakers of the same language.

Language use varies in many dimensions. Three major dimensions are thefollowing:

1. Regional: dialect variation.2. Social: sociolect or class dialect variation.

3. Functional: register or functional style variation.

Variations

Phonetic Variation


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Textbook, Language Files, is actually a bit unclear regarding the difference betweenphonological and phonetic variation.

Though it doesn't come out and say so specifically, your book treats phoneticvariation as variation in pronunciation that don't affect the phonemic level of the

grammar. Two examples are provided. Here's the case of New York alveolarconsonants.

In some New York City dialects, alveolar consonants are systematically producedwith contact between the tongue tip and the upper teeth (i.e. they are dento-alveolar),while in so-called standard dialects, the alveolars are not dental. So, in New YorkEnglish, the [t] word "two" is produced with contact between the tongue tip and theteeth. In so-called standard English, this isn't the case. Alveolar consonants are notalways realized as dentals.

So, why is this a case of phonetic variation? The answer is basically this. At the

phonemic level, there is really no difference between NY English and standardEnglish. Both have the exact same set of alveolar consonant PHONEMES. What'sdifferent is that the place of articulation differs ever so slightly between the twodialects. NY English speakers always produce their alveolar consonants with contact

between the tongue tip and the upper front teeth. Standard English speakers only dothis sometimes, as in words like [tenth].

In short, the difference is not found at the phoneme level but rather at the allophonelevel. This is what your book is referring to by this example of phonetic variation

between NY English and standard American English.

Phonological Variation

Now let's turn to the case of phonological variation. This situation is a little different.Here, the variation in pronunciation represents variation at the level of the phoneme orat the level of phonotactic constraints on things like syllable shape. How so? The

book gives a few useful examples. Here's one:

I have a difference in my dialect between the vowel in the word "caught" andthe vowel in the word "cot". For me, these are a minimal pair. The first,"caught" has a lax, mid, rounded, back vowel (its phonetic symbol is a

backwards "c"), while the latter is the low, back, unrounded vowel [a]. In afew dialects of American English, this difference has been neutralized, akalost. That is, these two different phonemes have merged. Specifically, peoplewho speak these dialects pronounce the vowel in "caught" as an [a]: [kat], thusrendering the two words "caught" and "cot" homophonous.

Why is this a case of phonological and not phonetic variation? Because, the result ofthis kind of variation is the loss of a phonological contrast. Whereas in my dialectthese vowels are allophones of two different phonemes, the dialects that don't havethis difference have lost a contrast. Another way of putting this is to say that thedialect that has lost the backwards "c" vowel that I still have in my dialect, has one

less vowel phoneme than my dialect has. What's most important here is that we


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understand that the difference is relevant at the level of the phoneme. This is whatyour book classifies as an example of phonological variation.

So, the big picture is that the variation means that the phoneme system is different inthe two varieties. In the case of NY alveolars above, the allophones of the alveolar

consonant phonemes are different, but both dialects still have the same alveolarphonemes in the same words. Here's another interesting example:

In some African American dialects, the sequences Cr and Cl (C stands forconsonant) are prohibited in unstressed syllables. So, "professor" is"pofessor". This is a case of phonological variation because in SAE, the word

professor has an /r/ as the second phoneme of the word, but in AAE, /r/ issimply not allowed to appear in this position.

This is a case of phonological variation because we are able to identify a particulardifference in phonotactics between AAE and SAE. AAE doesn't allow Cl and Cr

clusters, while SAE does. This literally means that there is a significant difference inthe phonological rules of the two dialects Specifically, the inventory of possiblesyllable types differs from one to the other.

Morphological Variation

Examples of morphological variation should be fairly easy for you to identify. Yourbook notes the case of northern England and Southern Wales, where the -s suffix isused as a general present tense marker. In many other dialects of English, -s isreserved for marking the present tense in third person singular forms only.

I likes him.We walks all the time.

Another example comes from Appalachian English, which has a number of past tenseforms that are non-standard. "Et" for "ate", "hEt" for "heated". These are all examplesof morphological variation.

Syntactic Variation

As the name suggests, syntactic variation involves syntactic differences amongdialects. Keeping close to home, it is common in many Southern dialects to find theword "done" used as an auxiliary, as in " she done already told you" or " I done

finished a while ago." In SAE, this isn't the case. And, in fact, many times people whowant to imitate Southern American English speech often pick up on this rather salient

property.

Double modals (combinations of auxiliaries) are also common across parts of theSouth. Examples are: "I might could do it" or "They useta could do it" or "He mightwould if you asked him nice enough."

These are examples of syntactic variation. Another famous example is the use of so-called double negatives, as in "I didn't see nobody."


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Semantic Variation

Often times, what people studying variation talk about when they discuss semanticvariation is the different meanings that particular words have from dialect to dialect,or the different words that are used for the same thing in different dialects. We might

more accurately refer to this as the study of lexical semantic variation. That's a fancyway of saying that we are studying variation in the meanings of words.

So, an example of a single word meaning different things is the compound "knockedup". In England it means 'rouse from sleep'. Here in the States it means "to make

pregnant".

Examples of different words being used for the same thing also abound. I rememberwhen I first went to college that someone asked me if I liked frappes. I literally had noidea what he was talking about. It turns out that frappe is a common term for "milkshake" in New England. Obviously, it wasn't a common term in the New York area

that I was from.

Other examples are words like "soda". For me, this is a general term for soft drink.For speakers of other dialects, "soda" may mean seltzer water or club soda only. Insome of these dialects, the general term for soft drink is "pop". In yet other dialects,the general term is "coke", while for me, "coke" refers to only a specific brand of cola.

By the way, when you go to the store, what do you get your groceries in? A bag or asack? In my dialect, it's a bag. But when I lived in Montana, I quickly learned that youget your groceries there in a sack.

SOCIAL VARIATION

Variation in language, as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, may depend on differentfactors. On the one hand, language can vary according to the situation in which thespeech act takes place and according to the relation between the speakers (style1).Varieties may also be associated with specific functions in particular situations(register2). On the other hand, language varieties may be characterized by thegeographical and the social background of the speaker. A variety associated with thegeographical location in which it is used is called regional varietyorregional dialect,whereas variation in language due to social factors is referred to as social variation or

social dialect .Social variation studies developed from traditional dialectology when scientistsunderstood the complexity of language variation. In the late 18th century,dialectologists treated variation in language as a result of the geographical origin ofthe speaker. In the 1950s, sociolinguists started to concentrate on social factors`relevance to language variation. They agreed that the dialectologists point of viewwas too restricted, and that geographical location was not enough to account forlinguistic variation. Firstly they pointed out that a language is subject to constantchange, i.e. the mobility of the speakers of different dialects of one specific language,and the resulting interaction between these dialects cause modification or substitutionof linguistic features. Secondly they started to investigate differences in society which

proved to be relevant to variation in language. It becomes obvious that the currentsociolinguistic approach to language variation is in two ways more complex than the


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dialectologists view, as not only the aspect of constant change is taken intoconsideration but also the influence social factors have on language varieties.In the first chapter, tise paper will begin by explaining what is meant by a variety of alanguage. In addition, the paper will give the reader a general idea of what is thefocus in this field of scientific investigation. The first subsection will be dealing with

the concept of the linguistic variable, describing its function in sociolinguisticstudies, followed by a range of examples illustrating variation on all linguistic levels.After having introduced the term social variablein the second subsection, the paperwill give a few concrete examples, in order to illustrate social factors relation tolinguistic variation and to shortly discuss the problem ofsocial stratification. The

paper will also touch upon the relation between linguistic variation and the individuals act of identification.The second chapter will describe the sociolinguistic research work. Here, the differentstages of the procedure will be explained, discussing the main problems anddifficulties that may emerge during sociolinguistic investigation.

THE SOCIOLINGUISTS INTEREST IN THE FIELD OF SOCIALVARIATIONEvery single language has a repertoire3 of varieties, including a standard varietywhich is the result of deliberate intervention by society. A language undergoes

standardization4 in order to create a standard language whichserves as an orientationfor linguistic norms.A non-standard variety of a particular language may differ fromthe standard language on all linguistic levels. It may be characterized by differences in

pronunciation, grammar and in vocabulary. A variety differing from the standardvariety in pronunciation only is often called accent, whereas variation in grammar andvocabulary may be referred to as dialect. A linguistic variety differs from the standardvariety on at least one of these levels. It is shared by a speech community which isdefined by the use of certain linguistic features and by a common attitude towards thevariety 5. The members of a particular speech community may not all know nor usethe entire repertoire of "their language", but they are aware of the norms about theselection of varieties," [...] so we may define a variety of a language as a set of linguistic items with similar[regional or] social distribution." (Hudson 21996, p.22)The sociolinguist concerned with the relation between social and linguistic featuresconfines himself to the investigation of a restricted number of variables. Heconcentrates on a certain social variable and identifies its variants which appear to

promote the usage of a certain variant of a linguistic variable instead of another. "The

choices among the variants of a linguistic variable are influenced by both social andlinguistic forces"(Fasold 1990, p.272). The fieldworker has to deliminate the speechcommunity which he will be focusing on from other communities, and it is necessaryto know who is using the relevant features in which context. He will then prepare a

procedure in order to elicit relevant data confirming his hypothesis about the relationbetween linguistic and social variables in this particular speech community.

LINGUISTICS VARIABLESIn the study of language variation linguistic, variables function as scientists tools,enabling them to investigate, recognize and analyse particular speech patterns. Avariable can be seen as a set of alternative features, called variants, which can be

substituted for one another without changing the meaning of the word. It was WilliamLabov who introduced this concept to sociolinguistic studies:


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"[...] a linguistic variable is a [linguistic] item [...] that has alternate realizations, asone speaker realizes it one way and another a different way [...]" (Wardhaugh 1997,

p.140). It is the scientists aim to find a sociolinguistic explanation of the preferred useof one variant instead of another, and to relate the variation in language to certainsocial factors.

A linguistic variable can have a number of variants which differ from one another ona phono-logical level. There is, for example, the present progressive form of verbswhere the -ing- suffix is realized differently by different speakers. The variable (-ing)has the two identifiable variants [-ing] and [-in]. Some linguists might argue that thedifference between the two realizations of the -ing-variable is a morphologicaldifference. (Hudson 1996, p.43) There are other phonological features like the (h)variable at the beginning of words which may be realized in two clearly distinct ways.The word home, for example, does either begin with an audible [h] or it is pronounced[h=]. The non-occurrence of this phoneme is called zero-pronunciation .(Wardhaugh 1997, p.138) Other phonological features may show quantative variation(ibid.), i.e. the scientist has to distinguish between different degrees of, for example,

frontness or backness in the realization of a vowel. A clear-cut distinction between thevariants is not possible and the identification of the relatively differing variants ismuch more complicated. This is also the case when a variable shows multi-dimensional variation, that is when more than one characteristic of the pronunciationof a vowel has to be taken into consideration. The variants of a particular vowel-variable may not only differ in their degree of frontness or backness but at the sametime in their degree of lip-rounding or -unrounding and tenseness or laxness. Thescientist has to decide which pronunciation features are taken into account whengraduating the variants.As I have already indicated, morphological variation can also be relevant to studies oflinguistic variation. Investigators have looked at the presence or absence ofmorphemes, for instance, at the third person singular -s in the present tense form ofverbs. The variable (thinks),for example,may be realized as either [thinks]or [think].The non-occurence of the -s-suffix would be regarded as a non-standard realization ofthe variable.Again one could argue that this is rather a phonological difference. "[...]differences in either pronunciation or in morphology [...] are in any case hard to keepseperate [...]" (Hudson 21996, p.43).Variation on the level of syntax has been investigated for negated sentences, amongother things. The sentence (He hasnt got any money either) is a syntactic variablewhich has the possible variants [He hasnt got no money either](double negation6)and [He hasnt got no money neither](multiple negation7). It is rare for differences in

syntax to be investigated by sociolinguists because syntactical features seem ratherunsensitive to variation and are difficult to recognize in ordinary speech.Sociolinguists have also looked at the varying usage of lexical items. Investigating thesocial distribution of certain synonyms, however, is very rare as significant data ismost difficult to elicit. Lexical variation is rather relevant in investigating differentregisters.As has been elaborated throughout this section, linguistic variation is investigated onall linguistic levels. Though scientists mainly concentrate on the realization of

phonemes as, for one thing, pronunciation features do occur most frequently whennatural language is being investigated. Secondly, pronunciation is most sensitive tovariation; an individual speaker never pronounces one word twice in exactly the same

way. Thirdly, pronunciation is, in contrast to the grammar and the vocabulary of alanguage, less liable to standardization and at the same time individually marked.


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Moreover, phonological features are more quickly adopted than changes in grammaror vocabulary8.

SOCIALVARIABLESA social variable can be defined as a social factor with an influence on language

variation which, analogous to the linguistic variable, can occur in various ways. If thechoice of one particular variant of a linguistic variable instead of another is notattributed to regional differences or differences in style or register, sociolinguists tryto explain the variation by quantifiable factors in society which are known orexpected to be influencing language. There is a wide range of social differences

between speakers which have been found to relate to linguistic variation. Thefollowing remarks will be confined to three very influential social variables: socio-economic status, sex and race.1. The Speakers Socio-Economic StatusThe social variable of socio-economic status was found to influence the realization of,for example, the (-ing) variable at the end of present progressive verb-forms. In his

1974-Norwich-study, Peter Trudgill investigated the occurrence of either [-ing] or [-in`] with a number of speakers. Dividing the group of speakers into social classes, hefound out that the higher the socio-economic status of the speaker (and the moreformal the style), the more probable the occurrence of the standard variant [-ing]. Incasual style, the least formal speech style, the speakers who were related to the lowestclass did use the non-standard variant [-in`] in virtually one hundred percent of thecases.Trudgills procedure was designed to find evidence for how speakers social status andthe degree of formality in their speech relate to the use of the (-ing) variable. Beforestarting to conduct this investigation, Trudgill had to divide his selection of speakersinto groups which were to represent five differerent social classes. According to theiroccupation, income, education, place of residence and their fathers occupation heassigned the participants either to the middlemiddleclass, the lowermiddleclass, theupperworkingclass, the middleworkingclass or to the lowerworkingclass. Thequestion often raised in this context is, if it is appropriate to stratify society in thisway, reducing various social factors to a single scale and assuming that the resultingconcept of socio-economic status is universally valid. It is obviously difficult todefine groups of people on the basis of their social background in general. WilliamLabov who established social stratification in his New York study argued thatdifferent social factors are relevant to different linguistic variables.9 Scientists agreethat the criteria taken into consideration to provide a representative stratification of

society must be chosen with regard to the variable under investigation.10

The secondcomplex of Trudgills study was the aspect of speech style. As he was looking forevidence for the relation between formality in speech and the use of the (-ing)variable, he had to elicit different degrees of formality. The participants used the mostformal style while reading prepared wordlists paying most attention to their

pronunciation. The most casual speech was produced in natural conversation, talkingto, for example, family members or friends. The two intermediate speech styles were

produced while reading out a reading-passage respectively while talking to theinterviewer. This style stratification, too is one of the methods developed by WilliamLabov.2. The Speakers Sex

One of the first quantative studies of social variation which was carried out by JohnFischer in 1958 in New England, is concerned with the (-ing) variable, relating the


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choice of variants not only to social class but also to the speakers sex. He carried outthis investigation among school children, forming two seperate groups, one group ofgirls and another of boys. These two groups were again divided according to socialstatus. Fischer found out that the lower class boys used the most the non-standardvariant [-in`] while the middle class girls clearly preferred the RP- standard variant [-

ing]. The choice between the two variants did not only depend on the speakers sexand their location on the social scale, but also on the degree of formality of thesituation. In other words, the children adjusted their pronunciation of the variable inquestion to the situation in which the speech act took place. They payed least attentionto the use of the RP-variant in casual speech while talking to their class mates, forinstance. One could speculate that girls rather aspire to be associated with highersocial status than boys do. What is obvious, though, is that the (-ing) variable hassocial significace not only for the fieldworker, but for the speakers as well.The (-ing) variable is generally regarded as a social marker in the English speakingworld, i.e. it carries social information about the speaker. People are aware of markerswhich show class- and style stratification. Using the variant [-in], which is

stigmatized in parts of the English speaking world, associates ones pronunciationwith lower-class speech. A social marker can become a stereotype as soon as it isconciously varied in order to identify oneself with a certain group of speakers.3. The Factor of RaceWilliam Labovs New York City study, which was carried out in 1972, illustrates thefactor of race and its relation to the use of a certain linguistic features. Together withother scientists, Labov investigated the speech of Afro-American adolescents which

proved to be different from the speech of "white" Americans and others by variousfeatures. Labov found out that the variable (is), i.e. any present tense form of the verbto be, with its variants [is] and [is=_] is the most distinctive feature, and that "white"speakers prefer [is] in most of the cases whatever their social status. For the "black"speakers it appeared that the more they identified with the "black community", themore frequent was the use of the variant [is=_]. This manner of identification with acertain group of people by means of a specific linguistic feature was investigated byLabov among Afro-American teenagers in Harlem. He divided his selection ofspeakers into four groups, identifying "core members" of a gang called "the Jets","secondary members", "peripheral members" and "non-members" (Hudson 1996,

p.185). He found out that the closer the speakers relation to the gang, the more oftenoccurred the socially marked variant [is=_]. Even the non-members occasionally usedthis stereotype identifying themselves with the "black community", but at the sametime they distanced themselves from the gang, using it less often than any of the

members. This study illustrated that linguistic variables may be employed for thepurpose of identification with a particular group or speech community which isdefined by a particular social variable.

Figure 1: The linguistic variable, exemplified in an analysis of (t)


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The sociolinguistic variationist enterprise begins on the premise that dialect variationis far from free or haphazard, but is governed by what Weinreich, Labov and Herzog(1968) called 'orderly heterogeneity' - structured variation. This 'structure' ismanifested in a number of ways, most notably in the regular patterns found whensociolinguists correlate social structure with linguistic structure. One typical patternfound for dialect features that are stable (i.e. not undergoing change) is exemplified inFigure 3. Figure 3 shows the correlation of the absence of third person present tensemarking (e.g. 'she play', 'the boy sing') with social class membership in the city of

Norwich in England (Trudgill 1974) - the 'higher' the social class of the speaker, thelower the absence of -s marking. Another very frequently noted pattern is thetendency for women to use standard forms of stable dialect features more than men.Figure 4, again fromTrudgill's (1974) research in Norwich, looks at the results ofthecorrelation of social class, speaker sex and the use of non-standard [n] variants ofunstressed -ing suffixes. Within each social class group, women consistently use lessof the non-standard pronunciation than men. It is the regularity of these (and other)

patterns that lends weight to the argument that variability is 'structured' socially

Figure 3: Absence of third person present tense marking in Norwich

(Trudgill 1974)
http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref11http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref11http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref10http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref10http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref11http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref11http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref10http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054#ref10


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Figure 4: The use of the non-standard [n] variant of the variable (ing) in Norwich(Trudgill 1974)

FACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR VARIATIONS IN

LANGUAGE

A. Genetic endowment, .which interprets part of the environment as linguisticexperience


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... and which determines the general course of the development of the languagefaculty.B. Experience, .which leads to variation, within a fairly narrow range, as in the case ofother subsystems of the human capacity and the organism generally..C. Principles not speci_c to the faculty of language: .(a) principles of data analysis

that might be used in language acquisition and other domains; (b) principles ofstructural architecture and developmental constraints... including principles ofef_cientcomputation.

British Sign Language was formally recognized as a language in the UK on March18, 1993. As a language, BSL has much in common with other languages. Still, thereis much about BSL that is unique, due to its innate difference from spoken languages.BSL is the primary language of the Deaf community in Britain, a community thatlives and thrives in a larger society of hearing people, many of whom remain largelyunaware of many of the issues in Deaf culture.

Societal structures, language users characteristics, and BSLvariation

British Sign Language is a rapidly changing and growing language due to a number offactors. According to Deuchar, just as we find variation in English, we also find it inBSL, at the same kinds of levels of the language, and linked to the same kind of socialfactors (130). This was reiterated more recently by Rachel Sutton-Spence and BencieWoll, who assert that just as there are variations according to region, social groupmembership and the social situation, so there are regional, social and situational

differences in BSL (23).

Among the societal structures responsible for origins of BSL variation would be thoserelated to education of the Deaf. According to Deuchar, the Deaf in Britain are unlikethe Deaf in some other cultural minorities in that they have not lived in isolation. Onthe contrary, they have lived in many different parts of the country. Therefore, the

places where they would come together as a meeting point would be institutions forDeaf individuals. These would primarily be educational institutions, particularly thosethat are specifically structured for members of the Deaf community.

Language users characteristics that are responsible for BSL variation include range

of competence, age, response to setting (formal/informal), and level of social skills(Deuchar). Range of competence may vary from user to user, depending on individualability as well as level of depth of exposure to BSL. Response to setting is also ahighly individual characteristic; all individuals, including members of the hearing

population as well as those in the Deaf community, respond with varying levels ofcomfort to different settings. Some individuals move comfortably between formal andinformal settings, while others are inclined to feel more uncomfortable in less familiarsurroundings (Deuchar; Sutton-Spence & Woll).

Geographical distance also accounts for much of the variation, affecting bothdifferences and similarities in vocabulary. An example of this is an experimentDeuchar did regarding variation in number systems. The investigation was made in1981 among Deaf adults in Lancaster. She found that a certain variant of the number


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SIX (right index on left fist) was only used by people over the age of forty who hadattended a school for the Deaf in NW England. In this case she concluded that boththe social factors of age and schools seem to be significant (131).

Additional examples of users characteristics that are responsible for variation are

offered by Brennan et al. Some pairs of BSL signs have identical manual components,and the only way to tell them apart is through non-manual activity such as the facialgestures that accompany the manual components. For example, the signs ENOUGHand FED UP are distinguished only by facial gesture. Another example is that of thesigns SMART and CANT BE BOTHERED, which make use of exactly the sameaction of the hands, but in the latter case a distinctive mouth pattern is used (Brennanet al. 2).

Sociolinguistics and Socio-Historical Characteristics in theBSL/language continuum

The sociolinguistics of a language is the study of linguistic and sociological values. Itcan also be described as the study of how that language functions within society andhow it is affected. The sociolinguistics of Sign Languages is not unlike thesociolinguistics of any other languages. The same issues that affect other languagesaffect Sign Languages, although the issues may be expressed differently.

The fact that BSL is now officially accepted as a language is an important part of thehistory of BSL. It is partially responsible for changing the way BSL is perceived bythe larger community. Other sociological and historical changes have occurred overtime. Many of these are due to education. As Sutton-Spence and Woll point out: BSL

changed when schools started using it nearly 200 years ago, and again when it wasbanned in schools (35). Another factor that has affected the socio-historical change inBSL is technology, particularly television (Sutton-Spence & Woll 35).

Political correctness in BSL

As noted above, British Sign Language (and Sign Language in general) is like anyother language in many aspects. This includes political correctness. Politicalcorrectness has caught up with sign language for Deaf people. Gestures used to depictethnic and religious minorities and homosexuals are being dropped because they arenow deemed offensive (Mickelburgh). This is true of American Sign Language as

well: Traditional sign language words and letters for the use of the Deaf in Americaare being changed to be made more "culturally appropriate" (Davis).

However, it is true that many signs are still in use that may be considered as racist.One explanation for this is that Deaf communities often feel that hearing professionalstry to impose their own values on Deaf culture, which is considered offensive andintrusive by many members of the Deaf community. This is not concerned with thedangers of offending someone by mistake, but with signs that are consideredunacceptable because of Deaf politics and Deaf pride (Sutton-Spence & Woll 249).Socially unacceptable language in BSL is similar to socially unacceptable language ingeneral, and includes taboo signs linked to taboo topics, insults, and expletives.


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Ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, and social networks

In America there are clear divisions between some Black ASL dialects and someWhite ASL dialects [largely due to segregation]. In Britain, however, the variationin BSL between Black and White signers appears to be less marked (Sutton-Spence

& Woll 27). Some explanations for this include the fact there were relatively fewBlack people in Britain until the 1950s. In addition, Black Deaf children attendedmixed Deaf schools, and were therefore less inclined to be divided by racialcategories.

There is, however, a growing sense of identity among Black Deaf adults in Britain,and this may eventually lead to a more distinctive Black dialect of BSL as time goeson (Sutton-Spence & Woll 28).

In contrast, the British Asian Deaf community relatively small. However, geneticdeafness seems to be more common to British Asians, so as this segment of the Deafcommunity grows, its members may develop a dialect of their own as well.

Religion also has an effect on BSL, particularly the Roman Catholic and Protestantreligions. The signing of Deaf British Catholics is strongly influenced by Irish SignLanguage because Irish monks and nuns have provided education for Catholic Deafchildren....and Irish-trained priests serve the Catholic Deaf communities in Britain(Sutton-Spence & Woll 28). In addition, signers tend to have two variants of BSL,and will use them differently depending on whether they are communicating with

people within their own religion, or with those outside of it.

It has also been noted that in some variations of Sign Languages, the differencesbetween genders are markedly different. This has been attributed to the fact that oftenmales and females are educated in separate institutions, and when they leave theseinstitutions must learn how to communicate with each other. However, this is not thecase with British Sign Language, where the differences in language between male andfemale members of the Deaf community are reported to be unimportant (Sutton-Spence 26).

Situational changes have an effect on BSL as they do on all other languages. Changesoccur depending on the number of people the speaker is addressing; for example,when addressing a single individual as opposed to addressing an entire group.

Changes also occur when the signer is addressing someone who does not have astrong grasp of BSL, either a member of the Deaf community who is foreign, or anEnglish-speaker who is not a member of the Deaf community. Other situationalchanges also affect BSL, as when the signer is addressing strangers, or addressingsmall children (Sutton-Spence & Woll 31).

Media

What is Media?


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In general, "media" refers to various means of communication. For example,television, radio, and the newspaper are different types of media. The term can also beused as a collective noun for the press or news reporting agencies. In the computerworld, "media" is also used as a collective noun, but refers to different types of datastorage options.

Computer media can be hard drives, removable drives (such as Zip disks), CD-ROMor CD-R discs, DVDs, flash memory, USB drives, and yes, floppy disks. Forexample, if you want to bring your pictures from your digital camera into a photo

processing store, they might ask you what kind of media your pictures are stored on.Are they on the flash memory card inside your camera or are they on a CD or USBdrive? For this and many other reasons, it is helpful to have a basic understanding ofwhat the different types of media are?Media refers to any kind of format used to convey information. Mass Media refers tothose types of media that are designed to reach large numbers of people. The varioustypes of mass media are:

Television (cable, network, satellite, etc.) Radio Film & Video Print (newspapers, magazines, direct mail, etc.) Photography Electronic (E-mail, the Web, etc.)

Media

History

Before getting into the specifics of the print and digital media revolutions let's look atmedia in general: How do we define media? Or more accurately, how do media defineus? In what ways are media agents of cultural change? Why do print and digitalmediums have different effects, or messages?

Advancements in media technology are now becoming the calibration marks forhistory's major paradigmatic shifts. "Mediology," even, is a recognized and ever-expanding field of study. French radical theoretician, Regis Debray, for instance,

proposes three historical ages of transmission technologies: the logosphere (the age of

writing, technology, kingdom, and faith), thegraphosphere (the age of print, politicalideologies, nations and laws), and the newly born videosphere (the age of multimedia

broadcasting, models, individuals, and opinions). Though these temporal strata havenot been widely accepted, Debray's work exemplifies the fact that the technologies oftransmission have taken on a position in our culture of vertiginous power --- almostomnipotence --- as media now get credit for shaping not only to the information wedistribute and consume, but our powers of perception, our political, social andeconomic systems, and our general constructions of truth.

Media and their wide-ranging effects have been around ever since humanity has beenconglomerating into tribes and nations and developing methods of communication ---ways of extending the scope of one's naked voice beyond hearing range, and givingform and substance to one's thoughts. The Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, in


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other words, are no less viable (although less ubiquitous) expressions of media thanTV shows and magazines of today. But the schematic analysis of media --- therecognition and study of its impact on every aspect of social living, is only a fewdecades old. Carlyle may have claimed in the 1830s that the printing press destroyedfeudalism and created the modern world; Plato, as Derrida emphasizes, may have

pointed to the effects of writng 2,500 years ago, but the wide-ranging attention todaygiven to media and their effects is, on the whole, unprecedented. Even morefundamental, the concept of the malleable individual constructed by his "field ofcultural production," as Pierre Bordieu called it, has been tossed around for centuries.Back to the days when the actors of the ancient Greek and Roman stage jumped in anout of personalities as quickly as they affixed their various masks, notions of theinconstancy of the human condition have been entertained.

The nineteenth century brought about major ideological change that set the stage formedia studies. What with a God dethroned by that mundane insurgent, science, thechaos that seized Western nations around the close of the nineteenth-century seemed

unparalleled in history. Darwin had come up with a convincing theory of evolutionwhich smacked God-fearing members of the Victorian Age square in the face. Hedismantled on a grand scale the moral, spiritual, and even political, foundations of theWestern world--- a world hitherto comfortably centered around the almighty God who

bestowed tidy, immutable essences in each one of His human creations. Darwin,along with a heady battalion of progressive philosophers and scientists --- including

pioneers of the brand new social sciences: sociology, psychology, anthropology, et al--- quite effectively threw into question the fundamental meaning for humanexistence. The notion that human beings have malleable personalities largelyconstructed by the environment in which they develop --- the subjectivity ofexperience --- began to gain currency and scientific evidence in the late 1800s, andestablished the foundation on which the grandfather of media theory, MarshallMcLuhan, would base his claims half a century later .

McLuhan introduced into the language our present usage of the term media, as well asa number of other concepts, including "the global village," "the medium is themessage," and "The Age of Information," that since have become commonplaces. Byfall of 1965, his most popular and optimistic book, Undertanding Media: The

Extensions of Man, had procured him a position as a faddish social theorist and, tosome, a prophet. A review in The New York Herald Tribune, representing a consensusof informed opinion, called him "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin,

Freud, Einstein and Pavlov..." McLuhan's notoriety and credibility faded away by thetime of his death, in 1980: he had become increasingly recalcitrant in public, hiswords, increasingly nonsensical, even absurd, and the print medium, which he had

pronounced obsolete, was popular as ever. (There are innumerable examples ofMcLuhan's often brash effortd to shock the public. My favorite is the announcementin 1971 of s new product tha he created with his nephew, chemist Ross Hall. Hecalled the formula Prohtex, and it removed the semll of urine from underpants withoutmasking the other, more intersting smells, such as perpiration---an iumportant form ofcommunication for preliterate man. He was preparing the world, facetioulsy, for theglobal village.) But McLuhan was not altogether a harlequin. Today his wordsresonate with eerie prescience. Critic Gary Wolf writes:


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ethnographic fieldwork in a secondary school in Detroit in order to gradually piecetogether a picture of who hung out with who, who were the central members and theless central members of the emergent groups and so on. She was then able to plotgroup membership against a large number of linguistic variables. Her research is

particularly important in making us realise just how gross categories such as 'female'

or 'adolescent' or 'working class' are, lumping together very different people into thesame group, and that a sensitivity to how real groups of people are formed andmaintained provides a very rich seam for future sociolinguistic analysis.

Aymara Linguistics in the Past 22 Years

Juan de Dios Yapita

In 1965 Dr. Julia Elena Fortn and Dr. M. J. Hardman-de-Bautista founded theInstituto Nacional de Estudios Lingsticos) National Institute of Linguistic Studies,

INEL) in La Paz, Bolivia, as a dependency of the Directorate of Anthropology of theBolivian Ministry of Education andCulture. INEL was to undertake theformation ofhuman resources in the field of linguistic science and thereby to contribute newknowledge to the national education system, to overcome the linguistic barriers thatexist in Bolivia.

Seventy-five percent of the Bolivian population belongs to Aymara, Quechua, orother native ethnic groups. Education in Bolivia is imparted solely in Spanish withoutregard to the indigenous languages, and as a result, there is social, economic, andracial discrimination. INEL would work to solve the existing communication

problems, in order to foster better understanding among the different social levels ofthe Bolivian population.

Once founded, INEL opened its doors to students. The first group of 180 consistedentirely of professionals, almost all of them educators. The courses were divided intotwo parts, the first a study of general linguistics at the graduate level and the secondcomposed of courses of specialization. The courses were taught by Dr. Hardman, ananthropological linguist who came to Bolivia as a Fulbright Professor in order to

prepare human resources in linguistics in Bolivia. In 1966 and 1967 scientificlinguistic studies took place in Bolivia for the first time, introducing a new stage inthe study of the national languages of Bolivia.

In 1968 the author introduced a phonemic alphabet of Aymara and adopted it for thewriting of Aymara literature. In keeping with the linguistic structure of Aymara, theletter x was used to represent the postvelar fricative phoneme, and quotation marks (")were used after certain consonants to indicate aspiration. Initially it was intended tointroduce the letter z to avoid using the digraph ch, but this idea was abandoned inorder to avoid possible confusion with the letter z in the Spanish alphabet.

The phonemic alphabet reflects the true Aymara phonological system. Nevertheless, itwas opposed, due to the fact that a linguistic consciousness still did not exist inBolivia. The strongest opposition came from those who were involved in translating

the Bible into Aymara. But this opposition has gradually been overcome.


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The majority of the graduates of INEL went abroad to finish their studies in theirspecialties. Linguistics is a science that studies human language. We graduates ofINEL prepared ourselves to teach in different areas: some in Aymara, some inQuechua, some in Spanish and others in foreign languages. Those who returned toBolivia began to develop courses in basic linguistics and courses in Aymara and

Quechua as second languages, for monolingual Spanish speakers and others. Aymaracourses were taught at the Alliance Franaise and by INEL under the auspices of theCasa de la Cultura in what is now the Museo de Etnografa y Folklore (MUSEF).Other courses were given in Aymara phonology for rural school teachers.

In 1967, two graduates of the INEL linguistics courses, Professor Eustaquia Tercerosand the author, traveled to Per, to participate in a bilingual education program underthe auspices of the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, in the town of Quinua at thefoot of the mountain Kuntur Kunka in Ayacucho.

In 1968, in the Department of Languages of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrs

(UMSA) in La Paz, then directed by Professor Luis Carrasco, the author preparedteaching materials in Aymara, and Professor Tercerosprepared teaching materials inQuechua, which were used to teach groups of university students and other interested

persons. In the same year, continuous courses were held in Aymara at the Casa de laCultura under INEL auspices. We who are specialists in Aymara carried forward thework in this language.

The year 1968 is a milestone in Aymara linguistics because in that year Aymara wasfirst taught using linguistic methods, and it was the first time that an Aymara persontaught the language. Until then, the presence of the language had not been a force tocontend with. The undersigned remembers a time of transition: Aymara was

beginning to be taught in a methodical way just as other languages were taught ininstitutions of higher learning. The first course taught at the Casa de la Cultura hadmore than 30 students, both men and women, of different professions. This firstAymara course got off to a very successful start, and the students' interest in learningwas high.

On one occasion, at the moment when I was having the students repeat the first linesof a dialogue, a person who had nothing to do with the course but who had come in toobserve interrupted the class and said,

A. That isnt the way to greet someone in Aymara! )At that moment, I was teachinghow people greet each other today.)B. Well then, how do you greet someone in Aymara? (I replied.)A. In Aymara you say Dios aski ur churtam.B. Dios aski ur churtam - Thats not Aymara either. Its a translation from Spanishinto Aymara.A. Oh, you mean youre teaching new wave Aymara?B. If you like.

The gentleman went away, and then returned a few moments later and said,Congratulations, go on with your teaching.


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That is what happened during a first class in Aymara. The author thought to himselfon hearing this kind of observation, Im going into a jungle where thorns will pierceme and snakes will bite me, but I will open a new road. By this I meant that in thefuture, the teaching of Aymara would become a specialty and native speakers of thelanguage would be the ones teaching it.

That same year, several of us Aymara speakers were invited to teach Aymara to NorthAmerican students in the United States. In order to leave Bolivia we had to showevidence that we had paid our taxes. In one government office the following dialogueoccurred the familiar is invariably the form used, showing disrespect.

A. Where are you going?B. Im going to the United States.A. Why are you going to the United States?B. Im going to teach Aymara.A. To teach Aymara?

B. Yes.A. Okay, tell me, how do you say captain; in Aymara?B. Captain in AymaraI dont know.A. If you dont know how to say captain, how do you expect to go abroad to teach?Ill teach you how to say it. Its Kallach patar kimsa warawaran ichxatt'ata. (On topof the shoulder three stars.) Now you know.

The above examples clearly show a lack of respect toward the Aymara speaker. SomeSpanish speakers felt free to make fun of and to criticize them, on a linguistic level.But at the same time it is clear that persons who prepare themselves scientifically in agiven field have the confidence and skills they need to triumph over adversity.

In 1969-1972, Dr. Hardman, as director of the Aymara Language Materials Programand as a professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Florida, invited twoBolivian, Juana Vsquez and the author, to participate in a team of specialists in the

preparation of Aymara materials, such as Aymar ar yatiqaataki, and Aymara course;the Teachers Manual to explain the course materials; and the Outline of Aymara

Phonological and Grammatical Structure, a reference grammar to accompany thefirst two.

While participating in the preparation of the materials, the author began to publish

news bulletins in Aymara for the first time in the Aymara Newsletter, later edited byJuana Vsquez. TheNewsletterwas sent to all Bolivian universities, which respondedwith letters of appreciation and encouragement.

In 1970, also for the first time, the Linguistic Institute at the University of Ohio in theUnited States published another Aymara newsletter which was distributed to all theInstitute participants, who came from different countries. The bulletin was alsodistributed at the Congress of Americanists held in Lima. In this way, the newsletter

began to be distributed internationally.

In 1972 a short course in reading and writing Aymara was held in Tiwanaku,

organized by rural development promoters in the region, among whom VitalianoHuanca Torrez should be singled out. Of the more than 30 men and women who


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participated in this course, several continue to work in the promotion of Aymaralanguage and culture, and some work in organizations devoted to research anddevelopment in the social sciences.

In the same year the Instituto de Lenguaje y Cultura Aymara (ILCA) was founded in

La Paz under authority of the Bolivian Ministerial Resolution 1300/72 as a privatecultural institution with the following objectives:1. To teach Aymara as a second language to non-speakers of the language.2. To teach Aymara speakers to read and write in Aymara so that in the future theywill write their own history, in their own language, in texts for Aymara-speakingchildren, young people, and adults.3. To prepare teachers for bilingual education, with courses in the following subjects:a. General linguistics

b. Aymara grammar: Phonology, morphology, syntax, semanticsc. Sociolinguisticsd. Cultural anthropology

e. Bilingual education4. To prepare materials for teaching the above courses and to teach Aymara languageat all levels.5. To publish newspapers and other materials in Aymara (myths, historical accounts,tales, poems, etc.).It was also planned to prepare materials in Spanish for teaching it as a secondlanguage.

The founders of the Instituto de Lenguaje y Cultura Aymara were Pedro Nacho A.,Pedro Copana Y., and myself, the present director. Shortly after its founding, ILCAorganized a short course in reading and writing in Aymara at the YMCA in La Paz.The participants were all Aymara speakers; they received certificates of attendanceafter passing a stiff final examination.

In 1973 the Aymara materials development team at the University of Florida andstudents of Aymara at that institution joined together to establish The AymaraFoundation, Inc. a private, not-for-profit organization, for the purpose of supportinginstitutions that promote Aymara language and culture in South America (Per,Bolivia, and Chile).

In the year 1979 a major program in Linguistics and Languages, with special

concentrations in Aymara and Quechua, was created in the Universidad Mayor de SanAndrs (UMSA). At present, the program has about 50 students, and a few studentshave already graduated. It is hoped that in future years the graduates in Aymara andQuechua linguistics will provide a new direction to the national education system,especially in bilingual education, since specialists in linguistics education are badlyneeded in Bolivia.

Publications

For many years, ILCA has been publishing a newspaper in Aymara calledYatiasawa (We must be informed). This is a mass communication medium in the

Aymara language. At the present time it is the only periodical published solely inAymara.


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The content of the newspaper is informational and cultural, written for Aymaraspeakers who already know the language Its publication in Aymara is a challenge toAymara is a challenge to Aymara writers, in view of the fact that in writing on atheme in Aymara, Aymara speakers must reflect on the profound differences betweenthe structures of the Spanish and Aymara languages. Those responsible for the

publication are conscious of the need to maintain high standards of excellence and toimprove their writing with each new issues, so that reading Aymara will be anedifying and agreeable experience.

Yatiasawa was originally published at the University of Florida by the author, andlater continued in Bolivia. It reaches hundreds of readers in Bolivia, and is sent abroadto universities in Europe, North and South America, as well as to all Bolivianuniversities, educational centers, and the libraries of cultural institutions. It is used asteaching material by students of Aymara at the UMSA and by certain secondaryschool students. It is also used by Aymara speakers to practice translating fromAymara into Spanish.

A number of theoretical works exist on Aymara linguistics (see References). Thelinguists who have contributed most in this respect are Dr. M.J. Hardman and Dr. L.T.Briggs. It is also important to mention the study Desarrollo del alfabeto aymara(Development of the Aymara Alphabet) by Felix Layme Pairumani (1980), a very

positive contribution to Aymara linguistics.

Three Aymara women have brought their ideas to Aymara literary production. Theyare Juana Vsquez, Bertha Villanueva, and Basilia Copana Yapita. As alreadyindicated above, the fist participated in the preparation of teaching materials at theUniversity of Florida. The others have contributed their poems and stories in Aymarato Yatiasawa.

At the present time the Instituto de Lenguaje y Cultura Aymara works tirelessly in theproduction of Aymara literature. It is important to emphasize that in the last few yearsit has prepared hundreds of Aymara speakers to read and write in Aymara, so thatthere now are writers in the Aymara language. From 1965 to the present, Aymarastudies and literary production have advanced, achieving respect for Aymara languageand culture over a 22-year time span.

AUTOBIOGRAPIES OF STUDENDS WHO WORK ON

LANGUAGE VARIATIONS

Former Students

Alexandra D'Arcy

Jonille Clemente
http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#alexhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#jonillehttp://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#alexhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#jonille


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Sonja Molfenter

Alexandra D'Arcy

I have a Ph.D. from U of T. My interests include: grammaticalization,

morphosyntactic & phonological variation, and Canadian English. In 2006 I began mynew job as a lecturer at University of Canterbury, NZ.

After completing an MA at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where I workedwith Sandra Clarke, I chose the University of Toronto for my doctoral studies due toJack Chambers encouragement. Upon arrival, Jack introduced me to SaliTagliamonte and from that day forward, I have never looked back. Salis passion forlinguistics is boundless and her enthusiasm is inspiring. During my four years in theLinguistics Department I have undertaken many research projects, working both forand with Sali. These include the acquisition of the copula by children, variation insentence tags and in the intensifier and complementizer systems, as well as ongoingchange with verbs of quotation, stative possession, and deontic modality. I foundworking with Sali to be an extremely rewarding experience. She challenged me to bea better linguist and with her guidance I have become a better variationist. Myexperiences here have led me to a permanent position as a Lecturer in the Departmentof Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, beginning in January of 2006. Keep

posted to this site for updates on my research in New Zealand

J onille Clemente

I have an honours B.Sc. from U of T. My interests include: anthropology, and health

and disease. I will be starting the Bachelor of Nursing program at U of T in 2005.

I entered the Sociolinguistics lab as a break to my life of science in Life Sciences.During my year working with Sali we experienced what it was really like to be asociolinguistic researcher. Our main tasks included conducting interviews,transcribing and coding the interviews into a statistical program. Our results were

presented at the 2003 Undergraduate Research Fair and even garnered attention in adocumentary on CBC.

Not only did working with her allow me to learn about research, but surprisingly it

gave me a feeling of importance in the vast sea of students here at U of T. In fact Iliked it so much, I continue to work with Sali on a yearly basis for a longitudinalportion of the study. Sali has been a great professor and mentor in my life; workingwith her has been one of my most valuable university experiences.

Sonja Molfenter

I have an honours BA from U of T. My interests include: language acquisition, andlanguage variation & change. I began my masters in speech-language pathology at Uof T in 2005.

I started my work for Sali in 2002 during my 2nd year. I had just transferred fromMalaspina College-University on Vancouver Island, BC. I took Salis Language and
http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#sonjahttp://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/people/darcy.shtmlhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#sonjahttp://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/people/darcy.shtml


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Society course and loved it. I liked Salis teaching style and her passion for her workand I wanted to get involved.

After her course was over, I volunteered my time and Sali accepted. I started out byhelping around the office, but was soon offered a job in the sociolinguistics lab as a

transcriber. I continued this work part-time through out my 3rd and 4th year. Throughthat time, I took several courses with Sali. Her higher-level courses are unique in thatthey teach students how to conduct accountable sociolinguistic research from start tofinish. At the end of the term, students present their findings and hand in a full-fledged paper on their work.

In the summer of 2004 Matt King and I embarked on collecting the Toronto Corpus.We spent the whole summer on the streets of Toronto interviewing nativeTorontonians. We then took this further and presented a poster at NWAV 33 on themethodology and conduction of these interviews.

Working for and with Sali has such an awesome experience. Not often can anundergraduate experience the things that I have been able to. Sali has given me theopportunity to attend and present at conferences, collect data, manage data, conductresearch, and oversee small-scale projects.

Currently we are collaborating on a project of 2nd dialect acquisition in threeCanadian children who moved to the UK all under the age of 5. We are tracking thechange from Canadian to British English by extracting the intervocalic [t] (bu[d]er vs

bu[t]er). I started this project in 4th year as an independent research project with Sali.Sali suggested I take the project further. For the past year we have been expandingthis work. We are presenting this research at Methods XII in August 2005. Down theroad we hope to submit this work the Journal of Child Language. UPDATE: this

paper has been accepted by Language and Society! For more information on thisproject,

Current Students

Derek Denis

Dylan Uscher

Derek Denis - Research Assistant, Undergrad

In September 2008, I entered my first year of graduate study at the University ofToronto. My linguistic interests are: language variation and change; socio-syntax andother theoretical approaches to variation; transmission and diffusion of change;statistical methods; modern Israeli Hebrew; and, Germanic languages, particularlyScandinavian.Outside of linguistics I'm active in the Toronto music and art scene. I play in several

bands ranging in genre from post-hardcore to noise. I began the art collective
http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#Derekhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#Dylanhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#Derekhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Current_Students.html#Dylan


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OBJECTIVES BEHIND THEIR RESEARCH

The Heritage Language Variation and Change Project (HLVC) is systematicallydescribing and will compare variable usage and change in several non-officiallanguages spoken in Toronto, a city where 125,905 residents report no knowledge ofFrench or English (City of Toronto 2007). This multilingual and multi-level projectwill push Labovian variationist research beyonds its monolingually biased core bysynthesizing a method examining both intra- and interlanguage choices made bymultilingual speakers (who comprise well over half the worlds population).

Specific goals:

document and describe heritage languages spoken by immigrants and twogenerations of their descendants in the Greater Toronto Area, contrastinggrammars at various degrees of contact to homeland varieties and to English

spoken in those communities. develop a standardized framework for examining variation in different

languages, which includes a quantification of similarity, so that degrees ofsimilarity between grammars can be compared.

define the types of changes that do and do not occur in ethnic enclavelanguages more fully.

examine connections between continuous variable (phonetic) approaches,based on speaker production, and discrete variable (phonological) approaches,based on coder perception, in order to develop grammatical descriptions whichcohesively describe categorical and variable patterns.

RESEARCH METHODS (ADOPTED BY EARLIERLINGUISTS)

It is argued that many of the major notions in mainstream linguistic

theory and method over the years have been influenced by a classical

formalist ambience that suited conventional ideas about how science

ought to proceed but fostered an idealized frozen conception of the

language system in isolation form reality and society. Today, the tide is

turning toward functionalist accounts of language; but the accompanying

shift in our scientific programme calls for careful reflection. Some deep-

lying motives for the shift are explored with a view to potential

consequences.

A. The quest for language by itself
http://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/research/heritage_lgs.htm#languages%23languageshttp://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/research/heritage_lgs.htm#languages%23languageshttp://www.toronto.ca/wards2000/pdf/ward23_ethnocultural.pdfhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/research/heritage_lgs.htm#languages%23languageshttp://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/research/heritage_lgs.htm#languages%23languageshttp://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/research/heritage_lgs.htm#languages%23languageshttp://www.toronto.ca/wards2000/pdf/ward23_ethnocultural.pdfhttp://individual.utoronto.ca/ngn/research/heritage_lgs.htm#languages%23languages


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1. Two basic facts about language seem fairly plain. One fact is

that language has a high degree of organization reflected in the front

end presented to our perception the sounds and forms of words and

phrases. The other fact is that people use language to do things to

mean things and to achieve things. Within the big picture of language

adopted by speakers and hearers in everyday life, these two facts seldom

compete or conflict. Yet the study of language has often sought to choose

either the one fact or the other either how language by itself is

organized or what people use language to do. If you face such a decision,

the first choice may well look more appealing in promising a smaller,

tidier job. Instead of confronting what J.R. Firth (1957a: 187) was pleased

to call, after Alfred North Whitehead, the mush of general goings on, we

can focus on the organization of language and divide up the labour of our

studies, one person or group studying the sounds, another the words,

another the phrases, and so on. Once all these items have been found and

classified, our job should be finished.

2. Given such an appeal, it is hardly surprising if the majority of study

so far, ranging from traditional grammar up through philology and

modern linguistics, has been devoted to language by itself. When

Saussures influential Course in General Linguistics emphatically

concluded with the fundamental idea that the true and unique object of

linguistics is language studied in and for itself (1969 [1916]: 232), he (or

his students) presumably intended to shield linguistics from absorption by

neighboring sciences. Saussure complained that heretofore language has

almost always been studied in connection with something else (1969: 16).

Though surrounded by other sciences that sometimes borrow from itsdata, sometimes supply it with data political history, psychology,

anthropology, sociology, ethnography, prehistory, and

palaeontology linguistics must be carefully distinguished from such

sciences, which can contribute only to external linguistics, concerning

everything that is outside the system of language; in return, we can

draw no accurate conclusions outside the domain of linguistics proper

(1969: 102f, 147, 6, 9, 224, 20f, 228) (but see 43).


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3. In effect, the prospects for any science of language were made

contingent on the precept that language by itself can indeed be located

and studied, given the proper methods. This precept was in turn reflected

in several tenets propounded in influential books setting down the

classical programme of mainstream linguistics:1

(1) A language should be considered a uniform, stable, and abstract

system in a single stage of its evolution.

(2) This system is to be defined by internal, language-based criteria.

(3) Language is a phenomenon distinct from other domains of

human knowledge or activity.

(4) A language should be described apart from variations due to time,place, or identity of speakers.

(5) The description of a language should be couched in statements at a

high degree of generality, if possible about the language as a whole

or even about all languages.

Within that programme, the tenets interlock in projecting a free-standing

and self-sufficient conception of language that stands firm while we are

describing it (cf. 26, 65).4. Most of the theoretical and practical problems throughout modern

linguistics have arisen from the tendency to consider tenets (1-5) as

fundamental postulates which any science of language must accept rather

than as empirical hypotheses to be tested by a range of methods.

Linguistics was rendered highly self-conscious about the hypothetical but

henceforth essential borderline between linguistic versus extra-

linguistic or non-linguistic data, issues, explanations, and so on (cf. 30,63). Since language by itself is not a fact or object directly presented

to observation, linguistics sought to construct it by sheer theoretical

bootstrapping. The most fateful consequence has been the idea that

language can be removed from all contexts for purposes of rigorous

analysis; in fact, such analysis merely creates a different and special

context, one that may exert powerful but largely unacknowledged controls

on the language data (cf. 40, 54).


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5. Let us focus here on hypothesis (1) stating that language should be

considered a uniform, stable, and abstract system, which can be called for

short the u-s-a hypothesis (though it was by no means limited to or

universally accepted in the real USA). The strongest test for this

hypothesis would be whether linguistic research does indeed discover such

a u-s-a system for a given natural language like English. The discovery

process has proceeded by means of conventional data-handling

strategies, such as:

(1) collating: a large set of data samples are compared and contrasted to

distill out what they have in common, e.g. which word types

frequently occur with other types;(2) generalizing: certain aspects of the observed data are construed to

be general ones, e.g. that the Subject-Verb-Object order of a

sample set of English sentences is a typical pattern for the language

as a whole;

(3) rarefying: the rich data are rendered more sparse by

disregarding certain aspects or details, e.g. variations in the actual

pronunciation of language sounds;

(4) decontextualizing: the data are taken out of the observed context

and treated as if they had occurred in isolation or could occur in a

wide range of contexts, e.g. irrespective of the social status of groups

or speakers;

(5) introspecting: the linguists make estimations based on their own

intuitions about the language, e.g. which sentences do or do not

violate the rules;

(6) consulting informants: native speakers are and asked to judge or

rate data samples of their language, e.g. to decide whether two

utterances mean the same.

Since the data by themselves do not tell us exactly how these strategies

should be applied, the validity of the strategies ought to be a further

hypothesis, or rather a set of hypotheses, to be tested by our results.

6. But how can the results provide a test for the validity of the verystrategies expressly deployed to produce those results? To escape


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circularity, the key tests would surely be the convergence among data

discovered and described, and the consensus among linguists about how

the data should be treated and interpreted. In retrospect, these two tests

have been met with full success only in the description of language sounds

in phonology. Here, linguistics indeed found a u-s-a system of

phonemes whose quantity and nature can be precisely described by two

sets of criteria. Physically, each phoneme can be uniquely described by

its features, e.g., a voiced stop such as [d] produced when the vocal cords

vibrate and the air flow is fully blocked; the visual correspondence

between phonemes and written letters of the Roman alphabet was also

supportive, though it was not an official base because the description was

strictly addressed to spoken language. Mentally, each phoneme must be

capable of differentiating between units that also differ in meaning, e.g. [d]

versus [t] in hid versus hit. This full success made the study of language

sound systems in phonemics or phonology into the model paradigm

in modern linguistics, e.g. when Firth (1957a [1951]: 222; 1968 [1957b]:

191) recommended that phonemic description should serve primarily as a

basis for the statement of grammatical and lexical facts, and that

linguistic analysis should have the same rigorous control of formal

categories as in all phonological analysis. A lasting heritage of this view

has been the proliferation of -eme terms (e.g. morpheme, lexeme,

tagmeme, syntagmeme, sememe) modeled after the phoneme.

7. Henceforth, mainstream theories confidently projected language to

be an array of u-s-a subsystems (usually called levels), each consisting

of a repertory of minimal combinable elements comparable to

phonemes. A complete description of a language would be the sum ofthe descriptions for each subsystem, supplied by linguists working in the

several areas within a neat division of labour. For a time, some linguists

(especially in America) insisted that rigid, water-tight compartments or

levels are aesthetically satisfying and provide the only valid scientific

conclusions, and that level mixing was a sin, e.g. the Pike heresy of

persistently using non-phonetic criteria in phonemics (quoted by Pike

1967: 59, 443, 66, 362; cf. Hockett 1942, 1955; Moulton 1947; Voegelin1949:78; W. Smith 1950: 8; Trager & H. Smith 1951).


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8. Yet matters have proven less manageable as research has moved

beyond the subsystem of sounds. The subsystem of minimal meaningful

forms, called morphemes, is already less tidy. Convergence and

consensus are fairly high for identifying and isolating the morphemes in

our data, where the chief physical criterion, the linear arrangement of the

data written down, is visually clear though less well-defined than the

articulatory criteria of phonology. But convergence and consensus are

rather lower for classifying morphemes into categories, since observed

linear positions by themselves do not afford explicit, clean-cut indications

of category; at most, we can set up some categories whose names indicate

where items appear, e.g. prefixes in front, suffixes behind, and infixes

in the middle. Some languages do present specific morphemic sectors,

such as the inflections of Nouns and Verbs, which can be precisely and

exhaustively described; yet even there, complexities can arise, e.g., the

category of English Noun plural morphemes written -s or -es but

pronounced /s/, /z/, /s/, or /z/2 , plus the zero morpheme not written at

all (like sheep). Otherwise, the majority of morphemes fall into very

large and fuzzy sets, e.g., all Nouns or all Verbs. The standard solution to

this problem has been to put all indivisible words over into the class of

lexemes and reserve the term morphemes for the tidier sectors.

9. The su

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