Sociophonetics

Last updated

Sociophonetics is a branch of linguistics that broadly combines the methods of sociolinguistics and phonetics. It addresses the questions of how socially constructed variation in the sound system is used and learned. The term was first used by Denise Deshaies-Lafontaine in their 1974 dissertation on Quebecois French, with early work in the field focusing on answering questions, chiefly sociolinguistic, using phonetic methods and data. The field began to expand rapidly in the 1990s: interest in the field increased and the boundaries of the field expanded to include a wider diversity of topics. Currently, sociophonetic studies often employ methods and insight from a wide range of fields including psycholinguistics, clinical linguistics, and computational linguistics. [1]

Contents

Development

At the intersection between phonetics and sociolinguistics, sociophonetics shares its history with both fields starting with Pāṇini's phonetic analysis of Sanskrit circa 600 BCE. [2] Pānini's grammar investigated differences between standard (Vedic) usage and the regional varieties of Sanskrit spoken outside of ritual contexts, with some grammatical rules taking into account sociolinguistic context. [3] After Pānini few phonetic studies were conducted until the 1800s when technological advances especially in audio recording became available. [4] As modern linguistics developed, the types of information investigated tended to be split into an abstract linguistic system and the context in which it is used. [2] [lower-alpha 1] The context of use introduces a wide range of variability due to individual variation such as physiological and anatomical differences, but has also been shown to include social and indexical information about the speaker and context. [2]

The field of sociophonetics, and sociolinguistics generally, began in the 1960s and 70s with the work of William Labov who found statistical correlations between the use of certain pronunciations and membership in social categories. These early investigations tended to focus on variation and change in vowels, and they were conducted almost exclusively in the United States on American English. [5]

Topics investigated

Sociophonetics covers a broad range of topics between the quintessential fields phonetics and sociolinguistics. Studies have focused on differences in speech production, the social meaning of particular pronunciations, perception and perceivability of sociophonetic patterns, and the role of sociocultural factors in phonetic models of production among other topics. [6] Of particular interest to sociophoneticians is the sources and causes of variation in speech, with many studies focusing on differences in pronunciation between regions, social classes, races and ethnicities, genders, sexes, sexual orientations, ages, and within speakers. [7] A common thread between these investigations is the role of biology as an influential but not deterministic force in phonetic variation. For example, young boys will often lower their voices before any pubescent, physical changes occur in their vocal tract in order to distinguish themselves from girls and establish themselves as "masculine". [8]

Notes

  1. ↑ See, for example, Sausurre's langue and parole and Chomsky's competence and performance.

Citations

  1. ↑ Foulkes, Scobbie & Watt 2010, pp. 703–4.
  2. 1 2 3 Foulkes, Scobbie & Watt 2010, p. 705.
  3. ↑ Kiparsky 1993, p. 2918.
  4. ↑ Caffrey 2017.
  5. ↑ Baronowski 2013, pp. 403–4.
  6. ↑ Hay & Drager 2007, p. 95.
  7. ↑ Foulkes, Scobbie & Watt 2010, pp. 706–17.
  8. ↑ Holmes & Wilson 2017, p. Chapter 7.

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech, how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language.

Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

Estuary English is an English accent, continuum of accents, or continuum of accent features associated with the area along the River Thames and its estuary, including London, since the late 20th century. Phonetician John C. Wells proposed a definition of Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England". He views Estuary English as an emerging standard accent of England, while also acknowledging that it is a social construct rather than a technically well-defined linguistic phenomenon. He describes it as "intermediate" between the 20th-century higher-class non-regional standard accent, Received Pronunciation (RP), and the 20th-century lower-class local London accent, Cockney. There is much debate among linguists as to where Cockney and RP end and where Estuary English begins, or whether Estuary English is even a single cohesive accent.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:

Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics is nonexistent, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two as interchangeable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voiced labiodental approximant</span> Consonantal sound represented by ⟨ʋ⟩ in IPA

The voiced labiodental approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is something between an English /w/ and /v/, pronounced with the teeth and lips held in the position used to articulate the letter V. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʋ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is Porv\. With an advanced diacritic, ⟨ʋ̟⟩, this letter also indicates a bilabial approximant, though the diacritic is frequently omitted because no contrast is likely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Close-mid front unrounded vowel</span> Vowel sound represented by ⟨e⟩ in IPA

The close-mid front unrounded vowel, or high-mid front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨e⟩.

In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, age group, or other social group.

In the field of dialectology, a diasystem or polylectal grammar is a linguistic analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties in a way that displays their structural differences.

Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception. It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener's responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain areas of the brain. It is said to compose one of the three main branches of phonetics along with acoustic and articulatory phonetics, though with overlapping methods and questions.

Dialectology is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. In the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology deals with such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.

In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers.

Clinical linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in the description, analysis, and treatment of language disabilities, especially the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic theory.

Sociolinguistic research in India is the study of how the Indian society affects and is affected by the languages of the country.

Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, and other features. Different communities or individuals speaking the same language may differ from each other in their choices of which of the available linguistic features to use, and the same speaker may make different choices on different occasions.

LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBT communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBT communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBT communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.