Ministry of higher and secondary special education faculty of foreign languages of bukhara state university department of english literature

Introduction

The term sociophonetics refers to the interface of sociolinguistics and phonetics, and specifically to the use of modern phonetic methods in the quantitative analysis of language variation and change. Although its definition can be quite broad, including any sociolinguistic study involving sounds analysed impressionistically, it usually implies the use of instrumental techniques. This chapter takes the view of sociophonetics as a tool contributing to the understanding of the nature of language variation and change. Assuming a basic knowledge of acoustic phonetics, it focuses on sociophonetic methodology, particularly in the practice of acoustic vowel analysis.

Sociophonetics and dialectology have both worked for a long time on linguistic variation without paying too much attention to each other. This may be due to the fact that dialectologists concentrate on social and historical motivations of variation across dialects, whereas sociophonetics are interested in universal patterns of variation across languages and their motivation by human cognition and discourse. From such a perspective, one may indeed conclude that there cannot be much of an overlap between these two disciplines of linguistics. But this is not the whole story. As I would like to show in this paper, there is quite some potential of interaction. In more recent times, this potential has even become considerably more significant if we look at integrative functionalism as discussed by Croft (1995) and at the problem of the validity of typological universals if we don’t know whether linguistic types are distributed in a statistically neutral way in the population of the world’s languages (Maslova 2000).

A simple answer to the question of what dialectologists deal with is that they deal with dialects. From a somewhat more elaborate perspective, dialectologists are interested in linguistic variation on the level of dialects and its geographical and social diffusion, its historical, political and cultural motivation and its quantification as discussed in dialectometry and multivariant scaling. Most dialectological studies cover dialects of one and the same language. Some famous examples are Georg Wenker’s (1895) Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches, Jules Gilliéron’s (1902–1910) Atlas linguistique de la France, Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud’s (1928–1940) Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz and The Survey of English Dialects conceived by Eugen Dieth and Harald Orton (1962–1978). In addition, there are also studies dealing with the diffusion of structural properties across languages such as the use of uvular /r/ from Paris up to Copenhagen, Kristiansand and Bergen (Trudgill 1974).

If dialectologists deal with linguistic variation from the perspective of dialects, sociophonetics may be said to deal with variation across languages. Typologists try to find out to what extent languages show structural variation and where they follow universal patterns. For that purpose, they set up linguistic types on the basis of empirical cross-linguistic comparison, they try to see whether there are generalizations in the sense of universal patterns of covariation, and they try to explain or motivate these generalizations (Croft 2003: 1–2).

Even if we disregard the fact that dialectological studies are not always limited to dialects of one language and that typological studies may include some data from dialects of individual languages, the main problem resulting from equating dialectology with variability among dialects and typology with variability among languages is the fuzzy borderline between what makes a dialect and what makes a language. As is well-known, criteria of mutual intelligibility or structural similarity do not work. As suggested by Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 9–12), the correlation between language and dialect is rather of social nature and should be defined within the opposition pair of autonomy vs. heteronomy. An autonomous variety is perceived by its speakers as a distinct language whereas a heteronomous variety is seen as being part of a larger autonomous variety irrespective of the degree of structural divergence among the heteronomous varieties subsumed under the autonomous variety. From this perspective, Hindi and Urdu are two different languages no matter how structurally close they are, whereas the varieties of Sinitic, which are often mutually unintelligible and show a considerable degree of structural variation (for some new insights, cf. Chappell 2001), are heteronomous and thus dialects of one single language, i.e. Chinese.

Since the distinction between language and dialect is to a large extent grammar-external, typologists who aim at discovering the range of attested variation may miss some of it if they concentrate on languages without taking into account the potential of structural variation hidden behind the term of “language”. The following quotation from DuBois (1985) clearly describes how easily relevant pieces of linguistic variation even within dialects may be overlooked:

Volumes of so-called functionalism are filled with ingenious appeals to perception, cognition or other system-external functional domains, which are used to ‘explain’ why the language in question simply has to have a grammatical particularity that it does – when a moment’s further reflection would show that another well-known language, or even just the next dialect down the road, has a grammatical structure diametrically opposed in the relevant parameter. (DuBois 1985: 353)

Dialectology is of particular relevance for functional approaches subsumed under the term of “integrative functionalism” by Croft (1995). Departing from the existence of language-internal variants, this approach assumes that individual speakers select the variant they are going to use in a given situation according to sociolinguistic criteria, i.e. according to grammarexternal criteria. If this is true at the level of individual speakers, it is also true at the level of distributional patterns of linguistic types across languages because these patterns are ultimately the result of the successful diffusion of particular linguistic types and because successful diffusion depends on social criteria. From this perspective, typologists cannot but integrate findings on the diffusion of particular language structures from dialectological and sociolinguistic studies.

Cognition is only indirectly accessible to the typologist via crosslinguistic variation in the world’s languages past and present. This variation depends on social, political and cultural factors which created it. As a consequence of these factors, certain linguistic structures may be statistically under/overrepresented. It is thus not possible to draw any typological conclusions from the simple statistical distribution of a certain linguistic type or a certain covariation pair within the present population of the world’s languages (Dryer 1989). In more recent times, Maslova (2000) pointed out that these methods are problematic because of the question of whether the actual distribution of linguistic types across the world’s languages is statistically neutral. If one cannot say to what extent the actual situation is biased by former distributions, it is not possible to assess what the lack of a particular linguistic type means. Thus, “if a logically possible type is absent from the current language population, this can also be an ‘accident’”.