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Tyler Kendall is Associate Professor of Linguistics and directs the Language Variation and Computation Lab at the University of Oregon. His primary research interests focus on social and cognitive aspects of language variation and change using approaches from sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, lab phonetics, and psycholinguistics. Jason McLarty is a PhD student in the linguistics department at the University of Oregon. His research interests include language variation and change, sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, prosody, regional and social variation, ethnic dialects, and African American English.

All languages and their varieties are rich with systematic variation. For over 50 years, sociolinguists working in the tradition of “language variation and change” (Labov 1966; cf. Chambers and Schilling, eds. 2013) have explored the ways that aspects of language covary with the social identities of speakers and with larger cultural norms and practices. Some of this variation – for instance, the use of multiple negation (e.g. he didn’t do nothing about it.; Labov 1972, Weldon 1994) – is highly salient and subject to overt commentary and oftentimes stigma, but much goes relatively unnoticed (for example, the Pacific Northwest English feature of pre-/g/ /æ/ raising, where words like bag are pronounced with vowels closer to the vowel in bet than in bat; Wassink 2015), acting as subtle indicators of who we are and how we see ourselves with respect to one another. Considering this kind of sociolinguistic variation in the language teaching classroom can lead to useful exercises that help learners orient to the norms of native speakers’ speech communities (see Patrick 2002), explore how learners’ (foreign) accents might hinder or even help them in different kinds of interactions with native speakers, and, more broadly, better understand the language and culture they are learning.  Such classroom activities might involve exercises that ask:

• How variable are forms in textbook descriptions of language use? Students can analyze speech from a native speaker (e.g. through a YouTube video) and contrast specific forms (such as pronunciation variants or verbal auxiliaries) with textbook descriptions.
• How do native speakers feel about their own language use, and the language use of other native speakers? Students can survey native speakers with maps that ask them to draw or annotate where different dialects are spoken and what stereotypes correspond with those dialects (i.e. doing “Perceptual Dialectology”; see Preston 1989).
• How do native speakers change their speech based on different social settings? Students can examine register (Biber and Conrad 2009) and/or audience-based (Bell 1984) differences in recordings (e.g. through YouTube), where the same speaker is recorded in different contexts.
• How does popular media (film, television, cartoons, etc.) use language to construct identities of characters? Students can use short excerpts from media to examine whether certain speech features co-occur with certain character types.

These examples are suggested as ways to help the class discover the social meanings of language variation in the subject language. Uncovering and exploring natural, native speaker variation can help elucidate fine points in language teaching and open students’ ears to different ways of sounding native or non-native.

References

Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad. 2009. Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chambers, J.K. and Natalie Schilling (eds.). 2013. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2^nd ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of. English in New York City. Washington, DC: The Center for Applied Linguistics.

Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Patrick, Peter. 2002. The Speech Community. In J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 1^st ed. Malden: Blackwell.

Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Perceptual dialectology: Nonlinguists' views of areal linguistics. Dordrecht: Foris.

Wassink, Alicia Beckford. 2015. Sociolinguistic Patterns in Seattle English. Language Variation and Change 27.1: 31-58.

Weldon, Tracey. 1994. Variability in Negation in African American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 6.3: 359-397.