Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Reconstructing non-standard varieties and their speakers
- Date
- Friday 25 April 2025
- Time
- Series
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Abstract
In this talk I discuss the methods and tools used to understand sociolinguistic variation in historically underdocumented and undocumented varieties, in an effort to reconstruct not only the linguistic variables, but also the sociolinguistic status of the speakers who use them. In cases where there is a strong language ideology that recognizes only a standardized norm as correct and authentic, there is a strong tendency to overlook sociolinguistic variation, and/or to regard variants that deviate from a prescriptive norm as mistakes. An example is Russian, which has been regulated from the top-down since at least the time of Peter the Great in the 18th century. The result is recognition of regional varieties, without any description of sociolinguistic variation, and without documentation of how language is used by non-standard speakers. Where documented, the variation is treated as deviation, as in Dolopchev’s (1909) description of mistakes (nepravil’nosti) in Russian spoken in the region that includes modern-day Odesa.
This talk addresses the problem of how to do good historical sociolinguistic reconstruction with “bad data” (Labov 1994: 11). Using a combination of canonical and non-canonical sources, including explorer’s diaries, journalistic accounts, literature and even jokes, I illustrate how we can reconstruct the ethnolinguistic repertoire of speakers (Benor 2010) of speakers of a non-standard variety of Russian that was spoken in Odessa from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s, from Imperial Russia to the Soviet period (Grenoble & Kantarovich 2022). Relying on literary texts requires an understanding of how language is used in these sources, and what it can tell us about the actual speakers who were models for constructed speech. Use of such data, in combination with what extant documentation there is, enables us to reconstruct not only the sociolinguistic system but also how speakers manage multi-dialectal repertoires in everyday use.
References
Benor, Sarah Bunin. 2010. Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14.2. 159-183.
Dolopchev, V.R. 1909. Opyt slovarja nepravil’nostej v” russkoj razgovornoj rechi. [An attempt at a dictionary of mistakes in Russian colloquial speech] 2nd edition. Corrected and expanded. Warsaw: Tip. K. Kovalevskago.
Grenoble, L.A. and J. Kantarovich. 2022. Reconstructing non-standard languages: A socially-anchored approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press.
Labov, W. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Volume I: Internal factors (Language in Society 20). Oxford: Blackwell.