Varieties of Variation in a Very Small Place: Social Homogeneity, Prestige Norms, and Linguistic Variation

It has been widely assumed that linguistic heterogeneity reflects social heterogeneity, with differences in the use of linguistic variants corresponding to social groupings and sensitive to social self-presentation in terms of one or more prestige norms. This assumption is challenged by patterns of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language (Baltimore) 1994-12, Vol.70 (4), p.631-696
Main Author: Dorian, Nancy C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Groups
Children
Code Switching (Language)
Communities
Contrastive Linguistics
Culture
Data Analysis
Data Collection
Dialects
Foreign Countries
Gaelic language
Language
Language Fluency
Language Patterns
Language Variation
Linguistics
Literature Reviews
Nouns
Prepositions
Prestige
Research Methodology
Rural communities
Rural Population
Scotland
Scots Gaelic
Social classes
Social Differences
Social networking
Socioeconomic Status
Sociolinguistic variations
Sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics
Speech Communication
Status Need
Tables (Data)
United Kingdom
Verbs
Villages
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Summary:It has been widely assumed that linguistic heterogeneity reflects social heterogeneity, with differences in the use of linguistic variants corresponding to social groupings and sensitive to social self-presentation in terms of one or more prestige norms. This assumption is challenged by patterns of variation within the former fishing communities of East Sutherland, Scotland. In these Gaelic-speaking communities exceptionally homogeneous single-village populations show well established patterns of intravillage and intraspeaker variation that do not correlate with such familiar social factors as socioeconomic status, sex, social network, or style, and only in a limited number of cases with age. Absence of any locally workable prestige norm (the result of geographical isolation, low literacy, dialect aberrance, and minority-language enclavement) is considered as a factor in the absence of social weighting of village-internal variants. High-proficiency, Gaelic-dominant speakers participate fully in the variation, making the obsolescence of the dialect unlikely as an explanation. Reasons for inattention to individually patterned variation within small and homogeneous speech communities are considered.
ISSN:0097-8507
1535-0665
DOI:10.2307/416324