Contact

Contact is an important concept in sociolinguistics — social contact and language contact. Language change spreads through networks of people who talk with one another. Tight-knit groupsthat keep to themselves tend not to promote change. Networks whose members also belong to other networks tend to promote change. People can live next door to one another and not participate in the same network. In the segregated South, blacks and whites often lived on the same piece of land; blacks worked in the homes of whites. The physical distance was minimal, but the great social distance led to different varieties of American English.

Contact between languages brings about variation and change. Situations of language contact are usually socially complex, making them of interest to sociolinguists. When speakers of different languages come together, the results are determined in large part by the economic and political power of the speakers of each language. In the United States, English became the popular language from coast to coast, largely replacing colonial French and Spanish and the languages of Native Americans. In the Caribbean and perhaps in British North America where slavery was practiced, Africans learned the English of their masters as best they could, creating a language for immediate and limited communication called a pidgin. When Africans forgot or were forbidden to use their African languages to communicate with one another, they developed their English pidgin into their native tongue. A language that develops from a pidgin into a native language is called a creole. African American Vernacular English may have developed this way.

Bilingualism is another response to language contact. In the United States, large numbers of non-English speaking immigrants arrived in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Typically, their children were bilingual and their grandchildren were monolingual speakers of English. When the two languages are not kept separate in function, speakers can intersperse phrases from one into the other, which is called code switching. Speakers may also develop a dialect of one language that is heavily influenced by features of the other language, such as the contemporary American dialect Chicano English.

Sociolinguists: Subjects and Leaders

Sociolinguists study many other issues, among them the values that hearers place on variations in language, the regulation of linguistic behavior, language standardization, and educational and governmental policies concerning language.

The term sociolinguistics is associated with William Labov and his quantitative methodology. Around the world, many linguists study the intersection of language and social factors from other perspectives. The most prominent is M. A. K. Halliday, whose approach is called systemic-functionalist linguistics. Some other prominent sociolinguists are Guy Bailey, John Baugh, Jack Chambers, Penelope Eckert, Lesley Milroy, John Rickford, Suzanne Romaine, Roger Shuy, Deborah Tannen, Peter Trudgill, and Walt Wolfram.

Suggested Reading/Additional Resources

Chaika, Elaine. Language: The Social Mirror. 3^rd ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1994.

Coulmas, Florian, ed. The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

Macaulay, Ronald K. S. The Social Art: Language and Its Uses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Wardhaugh, Ronald. An introduction to sociolinguistics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.

Wolfram, Walt. Dialects and American English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991. (reissued by Basil Blackwell in 1998 as American English: Dialects and variation).

Connie Eble is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has taught for more than thirty years. She is also Editor of American Speech, the quarterly journal of the American Dialect Society. Her book Slang and Sociability (University of North Carolina Press, 1996) reports her study of the slang of American college students. She has recently completed terms as president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Her current research project is a study of the loss of French in Louisiana in the first part of the nineteenth century.

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