Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:24:53.810Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - The Analysis of Sociolinguistic Change over the Lifespan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

Mary Kohn ,
Walt Wolfram ,
Charlie Farrington ,
Jennifer Renn  and
Janneke Van Hofwegen
Mary Kohn
Affiliation:
Kansas State University
Walt Wolfram
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University
Charlie Farrington
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Jennifer Renn
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
Janneke Van Hofwegen
Affiliation:
Google, Inc.
Get access

Summary

The approach to language variation developed over the last half century has focused on systematic variation of variants for a single structural unit under the construct of the linguistic variable. While this approach may offer important detail for particular variables, it is essential to examine the overall configuration of a language variety as well. Composite linguistic measures facilitate the exploration of social factors and offer a profile of change for the entire linguistic system. We describe the methodological tools to provide a global description of language variation, “the composite index”, and to fully capture when and why individuals change their linguistic behavior over time. We emphasize the need to view language as a system by moving beyond individual variables to more fully characterize the ways in which individual linguistic features move in-tandem across the lifespan. The study demonstrates that a composite index score like the Dialect Density Measure (DDM) can be used as a means of tracking trajectories of language use across the lifespan on a unidimensional scale.

Keywords

(Vernacular) African American Language (AAL)linguistic variationlinguistic variablescomposite language indicesDialect Density Measure (DDM)vowel spacevowel dispersionvowel normalization
Type
Chapter
Information
African American Language
Language development from Infancy to Adulthood
 , pp. 22 - 45
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bachman, Lyle F. and Palmer, Adrian S.. 2008. Language Assessment in the Real World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baugh, John. 1983. Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle and Wagner, Suzanne Evans. 2017. Using panel data in the sociolinguistic study of variation and change. In Evans Wagner, Suzanne and Buchstaller, Isabelle (eds.), Panel Studies of Variation and Change, 1–18. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cedergren, Henrietta and Sankoff, David. 1974. Variable rules: Performance as a statistical reflection of competence. Language 50(2): 333–355.Google Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G. 2009. Computational methods for normalizing acoustic vowel data for talker differences. Linguistics and Language Compass 3(6): 1430–1442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craig, Holly K. and Washington, Julie A.. 2004. Grade-related changes in the production of African American English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47(2): 450–463.Google Scholar
Craig, Holly K. and Washington, Julie A.. 2006. Malik Goes to School: Examining the Language Skills of African American Students from Preschool-5th Grade. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durán, Robert. 1988. Validity and language skills assessment: Non-English background students. In Wainer, Howard and Braun, Henry I. (eds.) Test Validity, 105–127. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Fitch, W. Tecumseh and Giedd, Jay. 1999. Morphology and development of the human vocal tract: A study using magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106(3): 1511–22.Google Scholar
Flipsen, Peter. and Lee, Sungbok. 2012. Reference data for the American English acoustic vowel space. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 26(11–12): 926–933.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fox, Robert Allen and Jacewicz, Ewa. 2017. Reconceptualizing the vowel space in analyzing regional dialect variation and sound change in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142(1): 444–459.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Giles, Howard. 1973. Accent mobility: A model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics 15(2): 87–105.Google Scholar
Giles, Howard. 2008. Communication accommodation theory: “When in Rome.” or not! In Baxter, Leslie A. and Braithwaite, Dawn O. (eds.) Engaging Theories in Interpersonal Communication: Multiple Perspectives, 161–173. Los Angeles, CA:Sage.Google Scholar
Green, Lisa J. 2002. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Lisa J. 2011. Language and the African American Child. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gresham, Frank M. and Elliot, Stephen N. 1990. Social Skills Rating System (SSRR). Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. 2014. Bricks and bricolage. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 43, October, Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Habick, Timothy. 1993. Farmer City, Illinois: Sound systems shifting south. In Frazer, Timothy (ed.), “Heartland” English: Variation and Transition in the American Midwest, 97–121. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Hare, Bruce R. 1985. The HARE General and Area-specific Self-esteem Scale. Unpublished manuscript. Stony Brook, NY: State University of New York, Stony Brook.Google Scholar
Heffernan, Kevin. 2010. Mumbling is macho: Phonetic distinctiveness in the speech of American radio DJs. American Speech 85(1): 67–90.Google Scholar
Higgins, C. M. and Hodge, M. M.. 2002. Vowel area and intelligibility in children with and without dysarthria. Journal of Medical Speech-Language Pathology, 10(4): 271–277.Google Scholar
Holmes, Thomas H. and Rahe, Richard H.. 1967. The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 11(2): 213–218.Google Scholar
Jencks, Christopher and Phillips, Meredith (eds.). 1998. The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Kelley, Elizabeth, Jones, Garland, and Fein, Deborah. 2003. Language assessment in children. In Herson, Michel and Beers, S.R. (eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Psychological Assessment Vol. 1: Intellectual and Neuropsychological Assessment, 191–215. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Kohn, Mary Elizabeth and Farrington, Charlie. 2012. Speaker normalization: Evidence from longitudinal child data. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 131(3): 2237–2248.Google Scholar
Kohn, Mary Elizabeth and Farrington, Charlie. 2017. Longitudinal sociophonetic analysis: What to expect when working with child and adolescent data. In Wagner, Suzanne Evans and Buchstaller, Isabelle (eds.), Using Panel Data in the Sociolinguistic Study of Variation and Change, 122–152. London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1969. Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45(4): 715–762.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1991. The three dialects of English. New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change, 1–44. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1998. Co-existent systems in African American Vernacular English. In Mufwene, Salikoko S., Rickford, John R., Bailey, Guy and Baugh, John (eds.), African American English: Structure, History, and Use, 110–153. London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Vol. 2. Language in Society. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon, and Boberg, Charles. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change: A Multimedia Reference Tool. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Clarence Robins, Paul Cohen and Lewis, John. 1968. A Study of the Non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City. Final report, Cooperative Research Project 3288. 2 vols. Philadelphia, PA: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.). 2015. The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lee, Sungbok, Potamianos, Alexandros, and Narayanan, Shrikanth. 1999. Acoustics of children’s speech: Developmental changes of temporal and spectral parameters. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 105(3): 1455–1468.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lindblom, Björn. 1990. Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory. In Hardcastle, W. J. and Marchal, A. (eds.), Speech Production and Speech Modelling, 403–439. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree, Smitherman, Geneva, Ball, Arnetha F., and Spears, Arthur K. (eds.). 2003. Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
McGowen, Rebecca, McGowen, Richard, Denny, Margaret, and Nittrouer, Susan. 2014. A longitudinal study of very young children's vowel production. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 57(1): 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Marcyliena. 2002. Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin, McDonald, Elizabeth C, Deboe, Nancy L, and White, Aubrey R. 2006. The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men’s sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics 34(2): 202–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nycz, Jennifer. 2011. Second Dialect Acquisition: Implications for Theories of Phonological Representation. Ph.D. Dissertation. New York: New York University.Google Scholar
Oetting, Janna B. and McDonald, Janet L. 2001. Nonmainstream dialect use and specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44(1): 207–223.Google Scholar
Oetting, Janna B. and McDonald, Janet L.. 2002. Methods for characterizing participants’ nonmainstream dialect use in child language research. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45(3): 505–518.Google Scholar
Parker, Jeffry G. and Asher, Steven R.. 1993. Friendship and friendship quality in middle childhood: Links with peer group acceptance and feelings of loneliness and social dissatisfaction. Developmental Psychology 29(4): 611–621.Google Scholar
Pettinato, Michèle, Tuomainen, Outi, Granlund, Sonia, and Hazan, Valerie. 2016. Vowel space area in later childhood and adolescence: Effects of age, sex and ease of communication. Journal of Phonetics 54: 1–14.Google Scholar
Pianta, Robert E. 1992. Child-Parent Relationship Scale. Unpublished measure. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet, Bent, Tessa, Bradlow, Anne, Munson, Benjamin, and Michael Bailey, J.. 2004. The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 116 (4): 1905–1908.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. 1996. Where the worst English is spoken. In Schneider, Edgar (ed.), Focus on the USA, 297–360. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. and Niedzielski, Nancy. 2000. Folk Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Rastatter, M., McGuire, R., Kalinowski, J., and Stuart, A.. 1997. Formant frequency characteristics of elderly speakers in contextual speech. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 49(1): 1–8.Google Scholar
Renn, Jennifer E. 2007. Measuring style shift: A quantitative analysis of African American English. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Google Scholar
Renn, Jennifer E. 2010. Acquiring Style: the Development of Dialect Shifting among African American Children. Ph.D. Dissertation. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Google Scholar
Rickford, John R. 1999. African American Vernacular English: Features, Evaluation and Educational Implications. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali A., and Smith, E.. 2005. Goldvarb (Version 3.0b3) [Computer Program]. Last accessed March 31, 2008, at http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/goldvarb.htmlGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian and Blondeau, Hélène. 2007. Language change across the lifespan /r/ in Montreal French. Language 83(3): 560–88.Google Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian and Wagner, Suzanne Evans. 2011. Age grading in the Montréal French future tense. Language Variation and Change 23(3): 275–313.Google Scholar
Sellers, Robert M., Rowley, Stephanie J., Chavous, Tabbye M., Nicole Shelton, J., and Smith, Mia A.. 1997. Multidimensional Inventory of Black identity: A preliminary investigation of reliability and construct validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73(4): 805–815.Google Scholar
Seymour, Harry N., Roeper, Thomas, and Jill, De Villiers. 2003. Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation. Chicago, IL: Pearson.Google Scholar
Singer, Judith D. and Willett, John B.. 2003. Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
Stewart, William A. 1968. Continuity and change in American Negro dialects. The Florida FL Reporter 6: 14–16, 18, 30.Google Scholar
Stockman, Ida. J. and Vaughn-Cooke, Anna Fay. 1989. Addressing new questions about black children’s language. In Schiffrin, Deborah and Fasold, Ralph W. (eds.), Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 52, 275–300. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. New York/Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2011. Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Terry, J. Michael. 2004. On the Articulation of Aspectual Meaning in African American English. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Amherst.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. 2001.An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. 2007. Phonological and phonetic characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5): 450–75.Google Scholar
Van Hofwegen, Janneke. 2015a. Dyadic analysis: Factors affecting African American English usage and accommodation in adolescent peer dyads. Language and Communication 41: 28–45.Google Scholar
Van Hofwegen, Janneke. 2015b. The development of African American English through childhood and adolescence. In Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, 454–74. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Van Hofwegen, Janneke and Wolfram, Walt. 2010. Coming of age in African American English: A longitudinal study. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(4): 27–52.Google Scholar
Vorperian, Houri K. and Kent, Ray D.. 2007. Vowel acoustic space development in children: A synthesis of acoustic and anatomic data. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50(6): 1510–1545.Google Scholar
Wagner, Suzanne Evans. 2012a. Real-time evidence for age grad(ing) in late adolescence. Language Variation and Change 24(2): 179–202.Google Scholar
Wagner, Suzanne Evans. 2012b. Age grading in sociolinguistic theory. Language and Linguistic Compass 6(6): 371–82.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walter A. 1969. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. 1993. Identifying and interpreting variables. In Preston, Dennis R. (ed.), American Dialect Research, 193–221. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. 2007. Sociolinguistic myths in the study of African American English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1: 292–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. 2015. The sociolinguistic construction of African American Language. In Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook on African American Language, 338–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt and Fasold, Ralph W.. 1974. The Study of Social Dialects in the United States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Woodcock, Richard W. and Johnson, M. B.. 1989. Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement: Standard and Supplemental Batteries. Allen, TX: DLM Teaching Resources.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×