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The idea for this book originated during the international workshop “Sociophonetics, at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication”, which was held at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in December 2010. The workshop attracted young linguists and consolidated experts from many corners of the globe, even unsuspected ones including South Africa and Japan, and appeared to inspire a lively debate on key concepts and new empirical evidence in the sociophonetic domain. A volume of proceedings with a selection of the papers that were presented at the conference came out in January 2012 (Calamai et al. 2012).
Since the workshop took placed, much water has flowed beneath the bridge. This book stemmed from the resolution of making the most pertinent concepts and hypotheses presented at the workshop available to a larger audience. We therefore asked several of our invited speakers to supply material that would contribute to a comprehensive overview of the issues tackled in contemporary sociophonetic research.
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 analyzed impressionistically, it usually implies the use of instrumental techniques. It remains to be seen whether sociophonetics develops into a separate discipline, with its own questions and standards of proof, or whether it continues to mark a methodological approach within variationist sociolinguistics. This chapter takes the more modest view of sociophonetics as a tool contributing to our understanding of the nature of language variation and change. Assuming a basic knowledge of acoustic phonetics, it focuses on sociophonetic methodology, with particular attention paid to the practice of acoustic vowel analysis.
The foundations of what is referred to as sociophonetics today were laid by Labov, Yeager, and Steiner (hereafter, LYS; 1972) in their seminal study of variation and change in American English vowels; the term sociophonetics has until recently been largely associated with acoustic vowel analysis. Although it is now broader and includes the instrumental analysis of other types of speech sounds, the acoustic analysis of vowel variation and change remains its central focus. For the first few decades following LYS, acoustic studies of vowel variation were conducted almost exclusively in the United States, first at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, Hindle (1980), Labov (1991, 1994), Ash (1996), Fought (1999), and then elsewhere, for example, Fridland (2001), Thomas (2001). The last decade has seen a rapid growth of acoustic vowel studies, both of North American English, for example, Baranowski (2007), Boberg (2008), Yaeger-Dror and Thomas (2010), and of other varieties of English, for example, (p. 404) Australian English (Cox 1999), Singapore English (Deterding 2003), English English (Kerswill, Torgersen, & Fox 2008), Brunei English (Sharbawi 2006), and New Zealand English (Maclagan & Hay 2007). The Atlas of North American English (hereafter ANAE) by Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006) deserves special mention as the most comprehensive and arguably most important sociophonetic study of vowel variation and change since LYS.
Most sociophonetic studies of vowels have investigated variation and changes in the position of vowels in phonetic space, measured in terms of differences in F1 and F2 (and occasionally F3, for example, Bowie 2008), over time and across different dialects or social groups. These include studies of vowel shifts mentioned above, and studies of vowel mergers (e.g., Baranowski in press; Johnson 2010; Eberhardt 2008) and near mergers (e.g., Di Paolo & Faber 1990; Labov, Karen, & Miller 1991). Vowel duration has been studied as a factor in chain shifts (e.g., Jacewicz, Fox, & Salmons 2006; Labov & Baranowski 2006; Langstrof 2009) and mergers (Di Paolo 1992), in regional variation in American English (Jacewicz, Fox, & Salmons 2007; Tauberer & Evanini 2009) and in studies of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (e.g., Scobbie, Hewlett, & Turk 1999).
We are grateful to all contributors for their valuable collaboration. Most of the chapters were patiently rewritten more than once in order to improve the book’s internal consistency and readability. We gratefully acknowledge the editors of the Studies in Language Variation series for their careful comments and suggestions throughout the various stages of the work. We are particularly grateful to Pier Marco Bertinetto for having provided us with the unique opportunity of organizing the sociophonetic workshop in Pisa, and for having supported all our subsequent scientific and editorial initiatives.
Our hope is that the volume will be a stimulus to further productive inquiry into the nature of sociophonetic variation and the way in which the speakers and hearers of a language organize sociophonetic information in their mental representation of speech.
The integrative approach ultimately links the microlevel of the individual to the macrolevel of the distribution of types in the world’s languages. If we want to know more about the range of the linguistic potential of humans, each variant is relevant. In this sense, variety matters.
The integrative perspective evokes our suspicion that more might have happened in the past than we can see in the structures of today’s languages. Given the appropriate sociolinguistic conditions plus extensive migration, what has been a “quirky” case in a language sample at some time in the past may have become a “normal” case in a language sample of today
I share Newmeyer’s (1998) basic optimism as far as the “more robustseeming” generalizations are concerned. But as I tried to show in this paper, another promising way of coming up with “more robust” generalizations is the integration of typology, dialectology, and sociolinguistic models of diffusion plus findings from contact linguistics.
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