Language and Space Theories and Methods

8/10/2019 Language and Space Theories and Methods

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Language and Space

An International Handbook oLinguistic Variation

Volume 1: Theories and Methods

Edited by

Peter Auer and Jrgen Erich Schmidt

De Gruyter Mouton


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III. Structure and dynamics o a language space

13. Identiying dimensions o linguistic variationin a language space

1. Dimensions of variation and the architecture of a language2. Linguistic variables and linguistic varieties3. Diatopic varieties4. Diastratic variation and diastratic varieties5. Diaphasic variation and diaphasic varieties6. Variation in a language space as a multidimensional continuum7. References

1. Dimensions o variation and the architecture o a language

A language space is made up of language varieties and at the same time a language isconceivable, broadly and metaphorically speaking, as a language space, i. e., a sceneoccupied by linguistic entities. This space, which constitutes a language, is by no meansa homogeneous space; on the contrary, it is a realm of linguistic heterogeneity and differ-ences of various kinds, which form on the whole the inner variation of a language.

Variation permeates all languages, has a socio-cultural as well as a biological foundationand shows itself in multifarious manners with an adaptive significance (Chambers 1995:206253). For the purpose of the present article, it is in particular noteworthy that theunderlying cause of sociolinguistic differences, largely beneath consciousness, is the hu-man instinct to establish and maintain social identity (Chambers 1995: 250).

The aim of this article is exactly to try establishing a certain order in this hetero-geneity, which means identifying dimensions of variation and aiming at modeling themin a congruent way. In spite of the sometimes diverging terminology, there is a wideconsent among linguists on most subjects and issues dealt with in this founding article:therefore, the following presentation will be mostly apodictic.

As a first approach in order to capture the major generalizations pertaining the innervariability of a language or a language space it is useful to sketch out some main dimen-sions of variation, picking out classes of correlations (co-occurrences) between values oflinguistic variables and relevant extra-linguistic (environmental, social, pragmatic)factors in a linguistic community.

The main factors in the societal structure of a given linguistic community that canco-occur with (inner) linguistic differences fall into four types. First, time and space;then, social stratification; and last, social situations. Correspondingly, we can formulatefour axioms: (i) a language varies with the passing of time; (ii) a language varies withthe geographical distribution of its speakers; (iii) a language varies with the social class/

group of its speakers; (iv) a language varies with the communicative situations in whichit is employed. Consequently, there are four main dimensions of variation: the temporal,


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13. Identifying dimensions of variation 227

historical dimension; the spatial, geographical dimension; the social dimension; and thesituational dimension.

These main dimensions representing the impact of extralinguistic macrofactors onlinguistic structures have been singled out since the first theoretical approaches of lin-guistics to the study of the life of language in society, see, e.g., Gabelentz (1891: 267283) in Europe or Whitney (1875: 153160) and Bloomfield (1933: ch. 3.43.8) in Amer-ica; and their phenomenology as it appears in linguistic facts has been widely analyzed insociolinguistic theory and research from Labov (1966) on. In the continental Europeantradition the distinction has been often treated unitarily in terms of the four dia-dimen-sions, in accordance with the terminology of classical Greek flavor adopted by EugenioCoseriu in the tradition of Leiv Flydal (see Coseriu 1980; Albrecht 1986: 2003): (i) dia-chronic dimension (diachronia): variation across time; (ii) diatopic dimension (diatopia):variation across space; (iii) diastratic dimension (diastratia): variation across socio-eco-nomic classes and social groups; (iv) diaphasic dimension (diaphasia): variation acrosssituations. At any given time, diachronia is out of action, so that attention must be paid

only to the three synchronic dimensions: diatopia, diastratia and diaphasia. However,studies by William Labov and other authors (cf., e.g., Labov 1994, 2001) have demon-strated how the synchronic dynamics of the inner variation often mirrors languagechange in progress, so that synchrony and diachrony should not be separated from eachother. The synchronic dimensions work together inside a linguistic space that can bemetaphorically depicted as a cube or a parallelepiped, in which the horizontal base axis(length) represents diatopia, the vertical axis (height) represents diastratia and the hori-zontal orthogonal axis (width) represents diaphasia. The whole is in a dynamic relation-ship and moves along the independent temporal axis. In synchrony, any point inside thecube, therefore, represents a certain combination of language variation factors concern-ing a given location in the geographical space, a given position on the social scale and agiven type of socio-communicative situation. Of these three main dimensions, Europeandialectology has concentrated its attention at length upon geographical variation,whereas American variationists following the example of Labov (1966) have mostly fo-cused on the social and stylistic (diaphasic) variation.

The three dimensions together with their reciprocal relationships constitute what inthe Coserian tradition is calledArchitektur der Sprache(a languages architecture). Ev-ery language or every language space has its own architecture, depending both on theextent of geographical variation or on the weight of social variation etc., as well as on thereciprocal correlation and the hierarchical relationship between the varieties belonging todifferent dimensions. In the Italian language space, for example, until recently diatopia

appears to be a major differentiating factor (Berruto 1989a), whereas in the British andAmerican language space diastratia seems to have more importance than the other di-mensions, and in the French language space diaphasia (Gadet 2003) is prevailing.

However, by and large, the diatopic dimension has a great relevance, at least becauseit is the first to draw the observers attention. It is common sense to say that everyplace in the world has its own language, in every place in the world one finds a differentway of speaking. Place, in one form or another nation, region, county, city, orneighborhood is one of the most frequently adduced correlates of linguistic variation(Johnstone 2004: 65). The same author discusses also the double nature of place, placeas a location and place as meaning, and points out that place is to be conceived not

only as a physical entity, but also as a socially constructed context, shaped and consti-tuted by people through shared experiences and shared orientations (2004: 69).


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III. Structure and dynamics of a language space228

At a first and very wide glance, geographical diversity already works at the generallevel of the human language faculty (the Saussureanfacultede langage): the six thousandand more languages existing today on earth (approximately 6800 are listed by the website Ethnologue) can be considered to be varied forms of the human verbal language.More significantly, all languages show widespread differentiation depending on the geo-graphical zones where they are spoken. A standard language spoken as national lan-guage in different countries can easily develop partially different standard forms in eachcountry, in particular as far as the lexicon is concerned, so that it ends up having dif-ferent norms in different nations (pluricentric language, Clyne 1992). In a given coun-try, a language or a language space (these two terms are employed in this article as near-synonyms) displays regional variation; in a given region, a language displays subregionalvariation; and so forth, up to the minimal language point, even a very small com-munity settled in a given geographical point, maybe a single individual. For instance,German is a typical pluricentric language with slightly different but clearly recognizablenational standards in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Thus, in the language (space)

German (Ammon 2003: 5; also see Ammon 1995) one finds a geographically unmarkedform (general German), nationally marked forms (e.g., Austrian German), regionallymarked forms (e.g., Northern Germany), and forms marked sub-regionally by the areaof a single state (bayrisch referring to Bavaria) or the region of a dialect (schwbischSwabian). Swabian itself takes different colors in the various Swabian towns, villagesand countryside.

The diastratic dimension gives every geographically identified variety an internal so-cial depth. It is commonplace to note that people reveal in their ways of speaking notonly their geographical origin but also their social position and education, so that socialclass markers are recognizable in all languages. Thus this car, it needs washingsaid by a

British subject, with pronunciation of postvocalic /r/, identifies the speaker as presum-ably Scottish (by a phonetic trait indicating geographical localization), while this car, itneeds washed, with postvocalic /r/ andwashed(a morphosyntactic feature implying socialcharacterization) rather thanwashing(Trudgill 1995: 6), suggests the speaker is Scottishand of lower social class.

A third very important range of variation within a language or a language space andeven within a given socio-geographical variety is added by the intervention of the diapha-sic dimension. Every type of social and communicative situation is characterized by acertain language use: every speaker in a speech community has the ability to change his/her way of speaking in relation to the manifold factors present or activated in a situation,

choosing the appropriate variety for that type of situation. Halliday (1978: 34

34, 225;also see Gregory 1967) has emphasized that a major distinction between diatopic anddiastratic variations and varieties and diaphasic variation and varieties (both authorscall the latter diatypic varieties) is that the former are chosen according to the user(because they are the linguistic reflection of reasonably permanent characteristics of theuser in language situations) and the latter according to the use (because they are thelinguistic reflection of recurrent characteristics of the users use of language in situa-tions). This means that a given speaker speaks spontaneously one diatopic variety,which refers to his/her geographical provenance, and one diastratic variety, which corre-lates to his/her position in the social stratification within a society; simultaneously he/she

is able to speak several diaphasic varieties according to the various communicative situa-tions.


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2. Linguistic variables and linguistic varieties

Variation implies linguistic (or better, but less common, sociolinguistic) variables. Thesociolinguistic variable is a very crucial concept for analyzing language internal varia-

tion. The rise of sociolinguistic, variationist studies in linguistics started in the 1960swith the seminal work by William Labov on linguistic variables (Labov 1966). A sociolin-guistic variable is, in a nutshell, one point of the system of a language (a phonetic/phonological unit, a morphological item, a syntactic structure, a construction, a semanticunit and so on) that admits and shows different realizations, with the same referentialmeaning, in correlation with extralinguistic (geographical, social, situational) factors andproperties (see Tagliamonte 2006: 7098). Thus, a sociolinguistic variable, as a linguisticform carrying social meaning, represents the minimal sociolinguistic unit in which lan-guage and society (in the broadest sense) closely correlate; it is the stitch that sewstogether language and society. Each realization of a given variable is one of the valuesof this variable. Therefore, each value is a variant of a variable; a sociolinguistic variableis a set of linguistic variants. This technical sense of (socio)linguistic variable has noth-ing to do with the broad meaning of the expression sociolinguistic variablethat is some-times found even in sociolinguistics; for instance, what is meant by a title such as Ageas a Sociolinguistic Variable(Eckert 1998 is that age is a social variable possibly correlat-ing with linguistic phenomena or showing linguistic significance, but by no means, ofcourse, that age itself is a sociolinguistic variable.

The pronunciation of the -ingsuffix in British English represents a good, simple ex-ample of a variable; its final sound can have two different realizations: alveolar nasal [n]and velar nasal [n]; each realization bears a social significance, since [n] is the standardpronunciation and occurs, therefore, in educated speech, while the non standard [n]

occurs in uneducated speech. Usually, notation marks for variables are put in roundbrackets: thus, in this case we have the (socio)linguistic variable (ng), with two variants,[n] and [n]. A sociolinguistic variable can occur at every level of the linguistic systemand embody units of any extension; Cornips (1998) shows how the variable can concerneven the setting of a parameter, in the sense of generative grammar, in syntactic variation(for a wider overview on this topic, see Cornips and Corrigan 2005).

The distribution of variants in a language space is not random. On the contrary theyare arranged in such a way that they tend to occur together with some given extralinguis-tic, social features. The tendential co-occurrence of variants gives rise to linguistic vari-eties. Therefore, a linguistic variety is conceivable as a set of co-occurring variants; it is

identified simultaneously by both such a co-occurrence of variants, from the linguisticviewpoint, and the co-occurrence of these variants with extralinguistic, social features,from the external, societal viewpoint. Thus, a linguistic variety bears a double characteri-zation, as a linguistic as well as a social entity, it is made of linguistic variants togetherwith their social value. In simple words, a variety of language is a set of linguistic itemswith similar social distribution (Hudson 1996: 22).

Linguistic varieties, i. e., the varieties of a given language, can be classified in relationto the main dimensions of the architecture of a language: we have indeed geographicalor diatopic varieties, social or diastratic varieties, situational or diaphasic varieties. Someauthors have raised doubts about the suitability of a variety-based model of language

variation, since varieties are often difficult to identify and defining their presence in anygiven text can be problematic. Hudson (1996: 2222, 4849), for instance, argues rather


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for a model based on the notion of item. Even if the definition of varieties raisesdoubts on many issues (but these are partially removed if varieties are conceived asparticular points in a continuum, cf. section 6), the notion of variety brings about somany advantages in terms of generalization and abstraction when one deals with varia-tion phenomena, that this notion seems difficult to replace or eliminate.

3. Diatopic varieties

The most typical diatopic (geographical) variety is a dialect. Dialect seems to be asimple category, but it turns out to be a very controversial one. First of all, for Americanand British linguists dialect is often understood as a synonym for (language) variety,designating any particular language form with at least some differences in structure andgrammar with respect to any other language form. Dialect is simply a neutral label torefer to any variety of a language which is shared by a group of speakers (Wolframand Schilling-Estes 1998: 2). In other words, every socio-geographically recognizablelanguage variety is a dialect. Similarly, Gregory (1967) distinguishes between dialectalvariation and diatypic variation as the two basic aspects of language variation, withrespect to society in a broad sense and to situations (see above). In this way, e.g., Stan-dard English is to be conceived as a dialect of English: Standard English is a dialect[]. Subvarieties of languages are usually referred to asdialects, and languages are oftendescribed as consisting of dialects (Trudgill 2002: 165); a conception which underminesthe fundamental opposition between standard language and dialect as two mutually selfdetermining concepts. For linguists from the European continent, dialect (French dia-

lecte, GermanDialekt/Mundart, Spanishdialecto, Italiandialetto, Russian , etc.)is better understood as any language variety spoken in a given place or region in con-comitance with a more prestigious superimposed variety (the latter being a standardlanguage), so that its diatopic characterization comes crucially to the fore. For a conti-nental linguist Standard English is a dialect might therefore be a rather odd, confus-ing statement.

Moreover dialect is a category sensitive to the different sociolinguistic situations andto the particular characteristics of linguistic repertoires, and can mean somewhat dif-ferent things in different situations (Britain 2004). While, for example, in the USA dia-lects are simply spoken varieties of English with some differences in pronunciation and

lexicon (cf. Chambers and Trudgill [1980] for a general Anglo-Saxon perspective, andWolfram and Schilling-Estes [1998] for the USA), in Germany as well as in Italy dialectsare mostly spoken regional linguistic systems with a noticeable structural distance from(Standard) German and (Standard) Italian, and with an autonomous history and devel-opment. As a consequence, it can be observed that in Italian and in German speakingcountries not only two (dialects and standard) but three kinds of diatopic variety exist.Between dialect and standard there is an intermediate variety (cf. section 6), representingthe way in which a standard language is regionally/locally spoken under the influenceof a local dialect: theUmgangsspracheor Substandard German in Germany or in Austria(see, e.g., Barbour and Stevenson 1990, Dittmar 1997: 193201), the italiano regionale

in Italy (Berruto 1989a). In a number of situations, in particular where we find a constel-lation of diaglossia (Auer 2005a) or dilalia (in which both the low and the high


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variety are employed in ordinary conversation; Berruto 1989b; Dittmar 1997: 150151),intermediate varieties such as regional dialects and regional standards emerge from in-tensive contact between local dialects and national standard. The former are relativelystandardized varieties of the dialects under interference from national language and hav-ing a superlocal range; the latter are varieties of the standard language with local color-ing due to the interference of the dialect and representing the regional socially unmarkedform of the national standard.

It is useful at this point to introduce a distinction made by Coseriu (1980) betweenprimary dialects and secondary dialects. Primary dialects are the varieties existing in agiven language space before the formation of a standard, that is to say the sistervarieties of the (future) standard, sharing the same origin with the variety which willlater become the standard one. Secondary (and tertiary: but the present article will notdeal with this further distinction proposed by Coseriu) dialects are regional varietiesevolving after the establishment of a standard, as a result of its local differentiation.Another useful notion in this context is that of a roof language/roofing language

(Dachsprache): with this term the German sociologist Heinz Kloss designates the (stan-dard) language which, as a metaphorical roof, covers the dialects which are clearly re-lated to it (existing in the same country and having the same origin), the language inquestion being taught at school to the native speakers of these dialects (see Ammon1989: 3843).

Clearly, the distinction between dialect and (standard) language is by no means alinguisticone, but rather a by-product of social, historical and cultural factors. Dialectproves to be in a dialectical way a concept opposed to standard, in need of sociolinguisticdefinition. From a merely linguistic point of view there is no difference between standardand dialect; it is impossible to define an existing language form as a dialect or as a

language on the grounds of purely linguistic features. The difference rests on their posi-tion in society: dialect is a geographically restricted variety, mainly spoken and lackingof (overt) prestige, occupying the low level in a linguistic repertoire; standard, instead,is a prestigious variety with a wider geographical range, which occupies the high levelin a linguistic repertoire and is employed in written and more formal usages. In short,one could say with Hudson (1996: 36): there is no real distinction to be drawn betweenlanguage and dialect (except with reference to prestige). Normally a standard lan-guage is superimposed on many dialects (or, better, it covers them as a Dachsprache).What these dialects precisely are depends on the nature of the repertoire to which theybelong and on the history of any given linguistic community.

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that a dialect, as any language or language space,can easily display inner variation across the three synchronic dimensions: diatopia, di-astratia and diaphasia. The extreme limit of sociogeographical variation is the singleindividual, and consequently the minimum sociogeographical variety is the so calledidiolect, the language form of a single individual. The extreme limit of variation generallyspeaking, i. e., including the diaphasic dimension, is the variety spoken by a given singleindividual in a given actualized situation (for which no specific technical term is currentlyin use).

The sociolinguistic counterpart of a dialect is a standard variety. A standard is alanguage form which, gaining prestige due to literary tradition, cultural acceptance, po-

litical or religious reasons, socio-economic factors and so on, has attained to a full elabo-ration (Ausbau) and has become through a codification process the reference norm (the


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good language) in a linguistic community and the correct model taught at school.Thus a standard is in contraposition to a dialect supraregional, homogeneous,explicitly codified (i. e., with an overt norm and an acknowledged corpus of referencetexts, grammars, dictionaries), typically written and normally linked to the upper middleclass (Ammon 1986: 2004).

However, besides dialect many other terms are in use to refer to diatopic varieties:vernacular, patois, basilect, koine, regiolectand accentare amongst the most recurrent ofthem. Both vernacular and patois can be viewed as near-synonyms ofdialect, bearingdifferent nuances. By vernacular linguists usually mean a dialect in so far as it is themother tongue of a definite group or community of speakers (see Macaulay 1988);patoisdesignates, mostly in the French tradition or with reference to French or Galloromanspeaking areas or also to Creole languages (and sometimes with a slight depreciatorynuance), a local dialect lacking any prestige. Basilectis instead a term adopted in creolis-tics (see, e.g., Bickerton 1973), where it has been employed to mean the most local,marked and least prestigious varieties within a variety continuum (cf. section 6), showing

at the one end these basilects, at the other end the most prestigious standardized variety(theacrolect), with intermediate varieties (themesolects) in between. The terms refer tothe idea of the continuum as a metaphorical triangle, at whose base there are manybasilects and at the top (Greek aextremity, peak) one acrolect.

While vernacular, patois and basilect are all varieties at the bottom of the sociogeo-graphical scale, koineand regiolect (lect, fromdia-lectand similar expressions, is some-times employed as a neutral term for language variety and serves as formative for thenames of other classes of varieties) are located at the top. A koine, from Greek common (language), is the stabilized result of mixing of linguistic subsystems such asregional or literary dialects (Siegel 1985: 363), often characterized in negativo by the

reduction of too locally marked features: a typical koineis a regional koine, that usuallyserves as a lingua franca among speakers of the different contributing varieties (Siegel1985: 363), i. e., of the various partially different local dialects spoken in the region.Often, it is an amended variety of the dialect of the principal town that works as akoinein a given region.Regiolectis a term sometimes employed, mainly by German andDutch speaking linguists, to refer to the dialect of a whole region, with a superlocalrange. Finally, accent means a diatopic variety marked in pronunciation only, charac-terized exclusively by phonetic (segmental and/or suprasegmental) features.

4. Diastratic variation and diastratic varieties

As American and British variationists have shown since Labov (1966) in New York Cityand Trudgill (1974) in Norwich, social variation in its strict sense often takes on theform of a sociolinguistic pattern, in which for each considered variable there is con-tinuous variation (fine stratification) based on differences in frequency and showingno sharp breaks, rather than a plain opposition of the all-or-nothing kind: A majorfinding of urban sociolinguistic work is that differences among social dialects are quanti-tative and not qualitative (Romaine 1994: 70). The same source reports a simple exam-

ple concerning two opposite sociolinguistic patterns: the variable postvocalic r as ana-lyzed by Labov and Trudgill (Table 13.1).


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Tab. 13.1: Percentage of post-vocalic /r/ pronounced in New York and Reading (Romaine 1994)

New York City Reading Social class

32 0 upper middle class20 28 lower middle class

12 44 upper working class0 49 lower working class

The inverse distribution of variants is socially significant insofar as the amount ofthe standard, more prestigious form in both speech communities (i. e., the realizationof /r/, as prevalent in General American, in New York, and its deletion, according to theReceived Pronunciation, in Reading) progressively increases along the social scale. InReading, no tokens of nonstandard pronunciation were recorded among the informantsof the upper middle class, while the greatest proportion of occurrences was found in thelower working class. This pattern is overtly symmetrical, with inverse values (no realiza-tion of /r/ by members of the lower working class, the greatest amount by the uppermiddle class), to the one found in New York City by Labov.

There is no stabilized term for diastratic varieties, analogue to dialect for diatopicvarieties. A diastratic variety is normally referred to as a social dialect, or more specifi-cally as asocial-class dialect. However, the termsociolectis also employed, in particularby German speaking sociolinguists, either as a synonym of social dialect or with morespecific meanings (Durrell 2004).

On the diastratic dimension, a language can co-vary with many different socialfactors. Besides social class, the main social factors which intervene to determine di-astratic variation are age, sex or better gender (the sex of a person as reflected in social

position, status and role and their attributes), ethnicity and social network. In manysocieties membership in social or professional groups or religious faith can also be rel-evant factors of language differentiation. Over the last decades a type of variety whichfor some authors can be traced back in extenso, and in certain regards, to the diastraticdimension has increasingly gained in importance: the interlanguages (learner varieties)of foreign immigrants.

In spite of its importance as an obvious first reference point in diastratic variation,social class is by no means a clear-cut and undisputable category: it is often difficult toestablish in what precisely a social class consists, being undoubtedly in itself a plurifacto-rial concept, that includes in various mixtures ingredients such as education, occupation,

income, attitudes, life styles and so on (some of them hardly quantifiable; Georg 2004).Social class membership moreover depends on the different social patterns and the dif-ferent shapes the social stratification takes in different societies. Establishing how manysocial classes should be taken into account in correlating language and society, as wellas defining exact boundaries between social classes within a society, are also questionablematters. In early sociolinguistics, four classes were preferably taken into account (seeTable 13.1); a higher number of classes, five or six or even nine (upper class, middle classand lower class, each subdivided in upper, middle and lower), was also sometimes takeninto consideration. Trudgill (1974) in his survey in Norwich assumed five socio-economicclasses, calculated on the basis of an index resulting from six components: occupation,

fathers occupation, income, education, locality, housing. In Romance sociolinguistics amore descriptive, albeit methodologically less articulated, representation of social class


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has been often adopted: Sanga (1981) for instance deals with Italian sociolinguistic strati-fication in the 1970s by means of six classes such as bourgeoisie( middle class),petitebourgeoisie du tertiaire ( lower middle class, traders), classe ouvriere (working class),artisans et couches moyennes pre-industrielles ( craftsmen and pre-industrial lower mid-dle class), paysans (peasants) and marginaux (outcasts). Lately, though, it has becomeincreasingly difficult to deal with the social stratification in globalized societies throughcategories of this kind.

Since the work of Milroy (1980) sociolinguists often prefer to work with social net-works rather than social classes as the main social factor correlating with language varia-tion. Social network, a structured set of social relations connecting a person and thepeople with whom this person interacts, seems to correlate very well with the distributionof socially significant linguistic features and has the advantage of being less abstract andmore flexible than the concept of class. It involves not only the social position of anindividual in a group but also the actual interactions in which he/she takes part. Close-knit networks, i. e., dense and multiplex networks (density and multiplexity are two

important criteria in defining types of network) appear to correlate with conservativevariants, while loose-knit networks (networks with little density and low multiplexity)appear to correlate with innovative variants in the dynamics of language change (Milroy1992). Furthermore, a social network perspective is perfectly compatible with a socialclass perspective, for, on the one hand, certain network shapes turn out to be (more)typical of certain classes and, on the other hand, socialization patterns as well as com-municative habits are important in characterizing both social class and social network.

5. Diaphasic variation and diaphasic varieties

The first sociolinguistic surveys already reported a recurrent behavior of many variables.A variable such as (ng) in Norwich (Trudgill 1974; cf. section 2) varies at the same timewith social stratification and, for each socio-economic class, with what has been calledstyle: the more nonstandard realizations [n] are recorded, the less controlled languageuse is, i. e., the less formal the situation is perceived. This means that (ng) presents astylistic variation pattern. Each language variety that depends on the relative formalityof a communicative situation is a style (sometimes specified as contextual style; cf.Eckert and Rickford 2001 on the whole issue of style). Relative formality is an important

parameter correlating with the diaphasic dimension. There are obviously other param-eters which play an important part in diaphasic variation. The most remarkable amongthem are the activity carried out in interaction and the subject matter of discourse, bothneeding typical syntactic and textual patterns and a particular lexicon. Any languagevariety depending on the activity and topic dealt with in a communicative situation isa register.

If all linguists agree in distinguishing register and style as the two main genres ofdiaphasic varieties, the definition of these notions is slightly blurry, and the terminologyis in need of further elucidation. According to many sociolinguists, registeris rather anoverarching term, generally designating any variety according to use and, therefore,

on the same rank as the notion ofdialect, the variety according to the user. In afunctional perspective, Halliday (1978; see also Gregory 1967) identifies within the situa-


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tional or contextual variation three interacting dimensions, calledfield,tenorand mode.Field refers to the nature of the social action carried out in the situation and includesthe subject matter of discourse as a special aspect; tenor concerns the role structuregoverning the relationships between participants; mode has to do with the function thediscourse is assigned to in the given situation and also includes channel or medium, i. e.,the distinction between speaking/speech and writing. Any variety selected on these threeinterplaying dimensions is a register; within register, style concerns the aspect corre-sponding to tenor. Any language includes numerous registers, chosen by the manifoldsituational configurations in different domains (Biber and Finegan 1994). A special typeof register is the so-called foreigner talk, namely the simplified language native speak-ers use in certain circumstances with foreigners little competent in the native speakersmother tongue (sometimes also calledxenolect).

The distinction between written and spoken language is such a pervasive differentiat-ing factor in all languages that some authors have suggested a fourth main synchronicdimension of variation, namely the diamesic dimension. Even if the medium of com-

munication is in principle selected by the situation, a reasonable ground for postulatingan independent diamesia lies in the wide range of differences one normally finds be-tween written and spoken language, including pragmatics and textuality, lexicon, mor-phosyntax, etc. (Halliday 1985; Koch and sterreicher 1990).

In order to avoid confusion or overlapping with the meaning of style as a literaryand rhetorical term, other sociolinguists callregisterswhat have been calledstylesabove,i. e., different ways of speaking according to the degree of formality of a given situationand the relationship with the addressee. According to this terminology (Berruto 1995:148150), the varieties depending primarily upon the type of activity and upon thesubject matter of discourse (and hence governed by the field) are variously called

sectorial languages, subcodes, or special languages. Subtypes of these with a link to thetechnical or professional areas in which they are employed and which require a specificlexicon are calledFachsprachen,Sondersprachen,langues de specialite,languages for spe-cial/specific purposes,technolects,jargonsand so forth. In this approach, no general termfor the varieties on the diaphasic dimension is employed.

A particular notion of sociolinguistic style has been developed by German sociolin-guists from an interpretative perspective. Dittmar (1995: 156) considers sociolinguisticstyle as a complex and ordered system of preferences of language use, selecting forms ofexpression from the individual linguistic variety space and combining them by means ofco-occurrence restrictions (see Auer 1997), in order to realize/achieve speakers goals and

purposes through accommodating to the interactional partners speech.

6. Variation in a language space as a multidimensional continuum

The arrangement of varieties in the language space constituting a language takes theform of continua. The concept of continuum implies an ordered set of elements arrangedin such a way that between two adjacent entities of the set (in this case, language vari-eties) there are no sharp boundaries, but rather a gradual, fuzzy differentiation, each

variety sharing some sociolinguistically marked features with adjacent varieties. The verynotion of a continuum in variational linguistics arose in geolinguistics, where the dialec-


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tal landscape is often viewed as a dialect continuum: between two neighboring villagedialects in a linguistic area one finds little difference, while differences increase cumula-tively as one considers progressively more distant villages, the greatest difference beingrecorded at the extremities of the continuum. In other words, linguistic distance betweenlocal dialects seems to be a function of their geographical distance, no clear-cut bound-aries being perceived between contiguous dialects.

To this view two considerations must be added. First of all, dialectometric analysisof phonological distance between Dutch dialects (Heeringa and Nerbonne 2001) hasshown that differences along the continuum are not simply cumulative, but aggregate inrelation to recognizable dialect areas, so that the continuum presents a certain disconti-nuity at the points coinciding with isoglosses defining traditional dialect areas. Theseappear to be separated by unsharp borders. Jrgensen and Kristensen (1995) likewiseshowed by means of quantitative methods that within a dialect continuum there is atleast one clear boundary, i. e., the one between one of the poles (extremities) of thecontinuum and the rest. On the other hand, the very notion of border deserves some

reflections, since borders turn out to be not only plainly objective boundaries in space,based on external criteria, but also depend on subjective attitudes and perceptions defin-ing an identity and resulting in a socially constructed, cognitive space (cf. section 1).Applying such a cognitive approach to space, Auer (2005b) shows how German dialectcontinua across state borders develop (converging or diverging both in linguistic featuresand in the structure of the linguistic repertoires) in relation to ideological constructedborders delimiting imagined communities. Gerritsen (1999), moreover, has examinedhow very similar dialects around the BelgianDutchGerman border diverge becauseof their exposure to the influence of different standard languages.

The geographical dimension is only one of the dimensions in the architecture of a

language. In order to capture the complex nature of the latter, it is useful to considerpolarized continua such as those suggested by creolistics (Rickford 1987): in fact, eachdimension of variation is conceivable as a continuum, so that the resulting general pic-ture of variation in a language space takes the form of a sum of intercrossing continua,one nonpolarized (the diatopic variation) and two polarized (the diastratic and diaphasicvariation), as sketched in Figure 13.1.

As Downes (1984: 28) points out, the linguistic side of any variety [] is a clusteringtendency within a continuum. Thus, the result is a Kontinuum mit Verdichtungen(Ber-ruto 1987, continuumcon addensamenti); varieties in this continuum represent concen-tration areas, where a variety, though not clearly-cut separated from other varieties, is

identified by a particular frequency of certain variants, by the co-occurrence of severalfeatures and possibly by some diagnostic traits, which appear in that variety only. Avariety appears where such a concentration, or condensation, takes place. A variant, anitem or a linguistic feature can spread along a certain sector of a dimension or even overseveral dimensions. This is for instance evident in the case of diastratia and diaphasia,because an item (i. e., a certain pronunciation or a certain morphemic opposition orconstruction or syntactic structure or lexeme etc.) can appear in the lower part of thediastratic dimension as much as in the lower part of the diaphasic dimension. There isno room here for discussing the idea of Bell (1984), that stylistic variation is a subset ofsocial variation. When such a particular item occurs with high frequency and in co-

occurrence with other features, thus forming a belt of concentration, the whole mayconstitute a variety.


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Fig. 13.1: Architecture of a language as a multidimensional continuum

The intersecting continua are additionally structured by the fact that the diastraticand diaphasic dimensions stretch from a high pole to a counterposed low pole. The highpole corresponds to a prestigious, socially preferred position, being occupied by formal,written and elaborated varieties on the situational dimension and by the variety of edu-cated, upper class people on the social dimension; the low pole corresponds to lowprestige, socially dispreferred positions, occupied by informal, spoken varieties (casualspeech, slang, etc.) and by the variety of uneducated, lower class people respectively.Thus, every linguistic item is simultaneously characterized by a position over the threeinterplaying continua. For instance, a particular pronunciation of a phoneme or a par-ticular morphological realization could be, roughly sketching, Scottish, lower class,informal or Swabian, middle class, formal and so on. This is the status of all sociolin-

guistically marked elements. There are of course also a good number of linguistic traitsthat are neutral with respect to the social variables and are, therefore, sociolinguisticallyunmarked. A speaker adopting a certain variant or employing a certain variety placeshim/herself not only at a given point of the linguistic space he/she lives in, but also in aparticular position within the speech community, because each variety has a symbolicvalue such that its use amounts to an act of identity (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985).

The standard variety occupies the high poles of the diaphasic and diastratic dimen-sions. What does not belong to the standard is labeled nonstandard by Anglo-Saxonlinguists, while in the European continent the term substandard is often preferred. In

German dialectology, there is a tendency to see substandard varieties as a series of moreor less marked, intermediate varieties between standard and dialect, from the near-stan-


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dard to the most localized and typical dialect (Bellmann 1998), but there is wide agree-ment on the fact that the concept of substandard is not exhausted by the dichotomystandard/(geographical) dialect, since everything, in the architecture of a language or alanguage space, which is simply below the standard, can be referred to as substandard,whether it is dialectal or not (Albrecht 1986; Mattheier 1990).

7. Reerences

Albrecht, Jrn1986 Substandard und Subnorm. Die nicht-exemplarischen Ausprgungen der Histo-

rischen Sprache aus variettenlinguistischer Sicht. In: Holtus and Radtke (eds.), 6588.Albrecht, Jrn

2003 Die Standardsprache innerhalb der Architektur europascher Einzelsprachen. Sociolin-guistica17: 1130.

Ammon, Ulrich1986 Explikation der Begriffe Standardvariett und Standardsprache auf normtheore-

tischer Grundlage. In: Holtus and Radtke (eds.), 163.Ammon, Ulrich

1989 Towards a descriptive framework for the status/function (social position) of a languagewithin a country. In: Ulrich Ammon (ed.), Status and Function of Languages and Lan-guage Varieties, 21106. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Ammon, Ulrich1995 Die deutsche Sprache in Deutschland, sterreich und der Schweiz. Das Problem der natio-

nalen Varietten. Berlin: de Gruyter.Ammon, Ulrich

2003 On the social forces that determine what is a standard in a language and on conditionsof successful implementation. Sociolinguistica17: 110.

Ammon, Ulrich2004 Standard variety. In: Ammon et al. (eds.), 273283.

Ammon, Ulrich, Norbert Dittmar, Karl J. Mattheier and Peter Trudgill (eds.)2004 Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik: An International Handbook of the Science of Language

and Society, vol. 1. ( Handbcher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 3.1.)Berlin: de Gruyter.

Auer, Peter1997 Co-occurrence restrictions between linguistic variables. In: Frans Hinskens, Roeland van

Hout and Leo Wetzels (eds.),Variation, Change and Phonological Theory, 6999. Amster-dam: Benjamins.

Auer, Peter2005a Europes sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European dialect/standard constella-

tions. In: Nicole Delbecque, Johan van der Auwera and Dirk Geeraerts (eds.),Perspec-tives on Variation, 742. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Auer, Peter2005b The construction of linguistic borders and the linguistic construction of borders. In:

Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander and Esa Penttil (eds.), DialectsAcross Borders, 330.Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Berruto, Gaetano1995 Fondamenti di sociolinguistica. Rome: Laterza.

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14. Horizontal convergence 241

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14. Horizontal convergence o linguistic varietiesin a language space

1. Introduction2. Some terms and definitions3. Diachronic and synchronic evidence4. Factors leading to convergence5. Conclusions6. References

1. Introduction

In traditional diachronic map-based dialectology, priority is given to divergence in anoriginally uniform language space (cf. Schrambke, this volume; Harnisch, this volume).Dialect divergence is explained in terms of natural or man-made borders which limit thespread of a change in that they impede communication and interaction (Bach 1969: 8081; Murray, this volume; Paul 1920: 2225; Trudgill 1986). Auer (2004) suggests a

cognitive interpretation of these borders as mental boundaries that crystallize out ofcultural and political borders.

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Language and Space Theories and Methods