The sociophonetic orientation of the language learner

William Labov

This paper is an effort to define the phonetic target of the language learner: what are the data that the child focuses on in becoming a native speaker? A number of studies are reviewed to show that children reject the idiosyncratic features of their parents’ phonetic system if they do not match the pattern of the larger speech community: in the acquisition of the Philadelphia and New York City dialects; the formation of a new dialect in Milton Keynes; the spread of the low back merger in eastern New England; the reduction of the future marker in Tok Pisin. The end result is a high degree of uniformity in both the categorical and variable aspects of language, where individual variation is reduced below the level of linguistic significance.

Published online: 12 June 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.15.01lab

References

Bickerton, Derek

1981 Roots of language . Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.

Durkheim, Emile

1895 Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique . Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan.

Johnson, Daniel Ezra

2009 “Stability and change across a dialect boundary: the low vowels of southeastern New England”. Publications of the American Dialect Society 95.

Kerswill, Paul & Anne Williams

2000 “Children, adolescents and language change”. Language Variation and Change 8. 177–202.

Holmes, Janet

1969 “Sociolinguistics and the individual”. Te Reo 12. 41–47.

Labov, William

1980 “The social origins of sound change”. Locating Language in Time and Space ed. by William Labov, 251–266. New York: Academic Press.

2001 Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 2: Social factors . Oxford: Blackwell.

1966 The Social Stratification of English in New York City . Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics. (2nd edition: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2006.)

Le Page, Robert B. & Andree Tabouret-Keller.

1985 Acts of Identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Payne, Arvilla

1976 The acquisition of the phonological system of a second dialect . PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

1980 “Factors controlling the acquisition of the Philadelphia dialect by out-of-state children”. Locating Language in Time and Space ed. by William Labov, 143–178. New York: Academic Press.

Sankoff, Gillian & Hélène Blondeau

2007 “Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French”. Language 83. 560–588.

Sankoff, Gillian & Suzanne Laberge

1973 “On the Acquisition of Native Speakers by a Language”. Kivung 6. 32–47.

Sober, Elliott

1994 Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology . Cambridge: MIT Press.

Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov & Marvin Herzog

1968 “Empirical foundations for a theory of language change”. Directions for Historical Linguistics ed. by Winfred Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel, 97–195. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Williams, Ann

and Paul Kerswill 1999 “Dialect levelling: continuity vs. change in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull”. Urban Voices ed. by Paul Foulkes & Gerard Docherty, 141–162. London: Arnold.

Cited by

Cited by other publications

No author info given

2016. Editorial. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 2:2 ► pp. 121 ff.

Blaxter, Tam, Kate Beeching, Richard Coates, James Murphy & Emily Robinson

2019. Each p[ɚ]son does it th[εː] way: Rhoticity variation and the community grammar. Language Variation and Change 31:1 ► pp. 91 ff.

Dressler, Wolfgang U., F. Nihan Ketrez & Marianne Kilani-Schoch

2017. In Nominal Compound Acquisition [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 61], ► pp. 287 ff.

Ortiz López, Luis A., Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo & Melvin González-Rivera

2020. In Hispanic Contact Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 22], ► pp. 2 ff.

Suokhrie, Kelhouvinuo

2016. Clans and clanlectal contact. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 2:2 ► pp. 188 ff.

Tamminga, Meredith, Laurel MacKenzie & David Embick

2016. The dynamics of variation in individuals. Linguistic Variation 16:2 ► pp. 300 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 december 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.