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Variationist Sociolinguistics: Methods and Principles| old_uid | 20253 |
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| title | Variationist Sociolinguistics: Methods and Principles |
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| start_date | 2022/04/12 |
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| schedule | 17h-19h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 153 |
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| details | Chaire Internationale 2022 : What can heritage languages tell sociolinguists.
We will explore recent findings from variationist sociolinguistics, a quantitatively-grounded empirical approach to understanding connections between synchronic variation and diachronic change in spoken language. We will examine outcomes from a comparative study of ten heritage languages (unofficial languages acquired at home in immigrant-based communities). These languages, all spoken in Toronto, Canada, differ typologically, culturally and demographically. Thus, comparison provides insight into how the linguistic ecology affects languages. Unlike many experimental studies of heritage languages that show them to be deficient or “attrited” in comparison to homeland (monolingual) varieties, this approach shows the phonetic and grammatical production of heritage-language speakers to be quite similar, in terms of both the rate of use of competing variants and the factors which condition the variation. |
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| summary | Quantitative analysis of large datasets from corpora of conversational speech has been productively used in linguistics, particularly for understanding synchronic variation, both intra- and inter-speaker, in monolingual communities. I will introduce the methods of variationist sociolinguistics and outline some of the main findings that have led to “sociolinguistic universals,” albeit based primarily on studies of English. |
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| responsibles | Isel |
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