Variationist Sociolinguistics

Variable agreement in Brazilian Portuguese is subject to social stigma, under strongly negative evaluation, brought to the public's attention in 2011 in a heated nation-wide sociolinguistic debate triggered by TV Globo, the principal national television network. In order to isolate objective factors underlying this debate, we examine the variable 'years of schooling' in a trend study of Rio de Janeiro speech from 1980 and 2000. Analysis of relative weights and their corresponding ranges reveals that distance between effects of each level of education has increased over time. Polarization of the education variable in 1980 was moderate, while in 2000 polarization becomes extreme in an increasingly uneven social distribution of marked forms. The results reveal massive exacerbation of sociolinguistic apartheid, showing that nothing has changed in human interaction with respect to language despite many years of language studies. For this reason, we suggest that our sociolinguistic studies ought to trigger legal action, with creation of laws against linguistic prejudice, modeled on laws against other forms of prejudice, so that society can profit from results of sociolinguistic research in a humanistic and emancipatory way.

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“…1.For discussion on linguistic prejudice, see, for example, Bagno (2011), Bortoni-Ricardo, Cobucci, and Almeida (2011), and Scherre (2008). …”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sociolinguistic correlates of negative evaluation: Variable concord in Rio de Janeiro

Scherre

Naro

2014

Lang Var Change

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“…‘my parents'Variation in the use of concord in Brazilian Portuguese is very much in the public's consciousness. In 2011, there was much heated debate in the mass media, both printed and spoken, as well as on Internet social network sites, in talk among friends in public places, and in other sorts of social gatherings because a book (Ramos, 2011) officially approved by the government to be used in education for adults and teenagers recognized lack of noun phrase and subject/verb phrase concord as a natural fact of language use (Almeida, 2011; Bagno, 2011; Bortoni-Ricardo, Cobucci, & Almeida, 2011; Faraco, 2011; Scherre & Yacovenco, 2011a). The book nonetheless warned students that they might be the victims of linguistic prejudice if they used nonagreeing forms in situations where categorical use of concord would be expected (Ramos, 2011:15).…”

Section: Phenomena Analyzed and Samplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remodeling the age variable: Number concord in Brazilian Portuguese

Naro

Scherre

2013

Lang Var Change

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We analyze change in variable subject/verb and noun phrase concord in Rio de Janeiro Portuguese using trend samples from 1980 and 1999/2000. Plural marked forms exhibit increased frequency in this period, reversing earlier trends toward loss or stability in a development typical of flows and counterflows in the community. The directionality of most structural and social dimensions does not change, but age patterns shift. Our aim is to investigate how groups of speakers evolve over time. Comparison of same-age groups at different moments does not yield insight and is not conducive to apprehending patterns of evolution because speakers move from one age group to another. We set up age cohorts so as to sample virtually the same universes. Examining age cohorts, we see increased frequency of number concord, although the original pattern of relative usage is preserved. Speakers are on the move, but constrained by social patterns in which they are situated. The pattern is broken precisely by those who were not in it, the unborn in the 1980s, who reverse direction dramatically toward increased usage of concord.

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“…The variationist or Labovian approach was applied in SLA fairly early to examine interlanguage 1 (or learner speech). The two basic assumptions in variationist studies in SLA are as follows: First, interlanguage variation, like variation in native languages, is highly systematic instead of random; and, second, interlanguage is an entity that shares equal status to and is, to some extent, independent of learners’ first language (L1) and L2 (Bortoni‐Ricardo, 1997). Dickerson (1974) completed the first variationist study in SLA by examining phonological variability in the speech of Japanese speakers of English.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sociolinguistic Variation in the Speech of Learners of Chinese as a Second Language

2010

Language Learning

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With Chinese native-speaker data as the baseline, this study investigates the use of the morphosyntactic particle DE ( ) by learners of Chinese as a second language. The general patterns are as follows: (a) DE tends to be deleted more in informal speech than in formal settings; (b) higher proficiency and longer residence in China-more interactions with native speakers-promote DE deletion; and (c) females tend to adopt more formal language style and use DE more than males. The study also found that teachers and textbooks use DE much more often than native speakers. Learners' patterns of DE use closely follow those of their teachers and textbooks, suggesting the necessity of explicit instruction in sociolinguistic variants in L2 classrooms.Keywords sociolinguistic variation; Chinese as a second language; sociolinguistics; second language acquisition; Chinese morphosyntactic particle It is not uncommon to find that even after many years of classroom language learning experiences, second language (L2) learners often find it difficult to produce sociolinguistically appropriate speech in authentic situations. Therefore, in recent decades, the development of L2 learners' sociolinguistic competence-"the ability to recognize and produce contextually appropriate language" (Lyster, 1993, p. 36)-has become a key issue and various sociolinguistic approaches, including the variationist approach, have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars in second language acquisition (SLA). Variationist researchers have convincingly argued that the acquisition of patterns of target language variation is an indispensable part of sociolinguistic I would like to thank Dr. Robert Bayley for his constant support and valuable comments on this project. Thanks also go to the College of Arts and Letters of Michigan State University for the funding on the writing-up of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. All of the errors remain mine.

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Variationist Sociolinguistics

Cited by 4 publications

References 5 publications

Sociolinguistic correlates of negative evaluation: Variable concord in Rio de Janeiro

Sociolinguistic correlates of negative evaluation: Variable concord in Rio de Janeiro

Remodeling the age variable: Number concord in Brazilian Portuguese

Sociolinguistic Variation in the Speech of Learners of Chinese as a Second Language

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