Pursuing Language Change from the Local to the Global

Thursday October 20, 2005; 7:30-8:30p

Whether it is a lexical item like awesome or a syntactic feature like be like, sociolinguists have begun to notice that this kind of linguistic variation seems to spread quickly from the place of origin, a cultural hearth in geographic terms, to places around the globe. A sound change in progress is going on in English that is global in its reach: post-vocalic /l/ and syllabic /l/ have been reported to be variably vocalized in London, the Fens, Glasgow, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the US South, Sydney, Melbourne, Christchurch, and perhaps even in the Falkland Islands. We find the full spectrum from recent introduction in Brisbane to near completion in London and many points in between. Our provisional story of /l/ vocalization so far is that the process began in the late 19th Century in London and we suggest that London is a cultural hearth. We are reasonably confident that /l/ vocalization was not a feature of New Zealand English, and perhaps not of Australian English, at the beginning of the 20th C since it does not appear in tape recordings of speakers born during this period. By 1950 /l/ vocalization was well established in parts of Southeast England, New Zealand and Australia. At the end of the 20thC /l/ vocalization was near complete in parts of London and southeast England, well advanced in New Zealand and South Australia, firmly established in the rest of Australia, and being used by young people in the Falklands and in a large number of places in England and even in Scotland. Research on /l/ vocalization in the US has not been as vigorous as it has been elsewhere and it is more difficult to assess whether it is primarily a feature of Southern English or whether it is widespread. It may in fact be receding in American English. It is important to note also that /l/ vocalization is NOT taking place in some varieties of English: Canadian English, South African English or Irish English. In this paper we present as much data about the vocalization of /l/ as we are able to gather together from our own work and from the literature in order to examine the patterns of variation over the period of about a century at different geographical scales from the individual to the neighborhood to the regional, national, supranational and global. Our aim is to compare the social and linguistic patterns in real and apparent time, where possible, and to address the question of the role of place and geographic scale in the globalization of language change. We propose an approach to multiscalar analysis of places that preserves the variation of social and linguistic constraints on language change. To date we have found no social universals (e.g., gender or social class), some linguistic universals and some linguistic variation that is particular and local. Our work confirms that places such as neighborhoods in urban areas are optimum sites of socioinguistic studies of variation because places at that scale are loci of maximum particularity, thus exposing the maximum range of variation when pursued in a multilocality research design. Finally we explain how places in global cities (the Lower East Side, Harlem) are socially configured in particular ways and show up in our analysis as place effects.

Plenary Speakers:

Barbara Horvath was introduced to linguistics while teaching ESL at Haile Sellassie I University in Addis Ababa; she received her MA at Michigan State University with a thesis on Chicano children in Los Angeles and her PhD from Georgetown University in 1976 with a dissertation on a comparative analysis of the language of Anglo, Chicano and Black children in Lansing schools. She has taught at the University of British Columbia and the University of Sydney. She has worked on sociolinguistic variation in Australian English and has collaborated with Sylvie Dubois for many years, initially on topics in sociolinguistic discourse analysis and more recently on Cajun and Creole English in Louisiana.

Ron Horvath is an urban geographer (PhD UCLA 1966) specializing in the comparative analysis of cities. He has taught at Haile Sellassie I University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Michigan State University, Simon Frazer University and the University of Sydney. He is the author of three urban social atlases and owned a computer mapping and GIS consultancy business for five years. Over the past dozen years his research has focused upon a comparative analysis of Los Angeles and Sydney as global cities.

They presented their first paper together at NWAV in 1997 on the vocalization of /l/, although Ron has had a long, informal association with many sociolinguists, starting with NWAV I at Georgetown.