I had a good time at LAVIS5 / SECOL91 this weekend, a linguistics conference about the southern United States. Louisiana was well represented. Here’s my contribution.
Tag: sociolinguistics (Page 1 of 2)
I’m very happy to be able to say that my master’s thesis, entitled LOL sur Twitter: une approche du contact de langues et de la variation par l’analyse des réseaux sociaux, has been published to the digital library website at UQAM. If you’re interested in linguistic variation, French on Twitter, social network analysis as it applies to language contact, or simply internet abbreviations like lol, please download it and read it. You can find it in the following locations:
- On archipel at UQAM
- On this site in the section Writings
- On ResearchGate
- On Academia.edu
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post here, but I promise, there’s a good reason: I was finishing up my master’s thesis. However, now that it’s submitted, I can talk a bit about what I did.1
Because I made use of social network analysis to detect communities in the study, there was little motivation to class subjects by social variables like ethnic group, race, religion, etc. In fact, I wouldn’t have been able to do so if I wanted to, because I assembled the corpus from tweets sent by some 200k people. Ultimately, the only variable that I can call a social variable that I used was the number for the community to which the subject belonged.
The advantage of this situation is that I completed avoided imposing stereotypes on the subjects or minimizing the differences between their identities by avoiding classifying them with people from elsewhere. A typical example of the problem in sociolinguistics is the variable of race. Some celebrated studies, like Labov’s (1966) and Wolfram’s (1969), classified their subjects according to their races, so that one ends up identifying some as African-American, for example. Even if these subjects don’t live together nor interact, they inevitably end up being viewed as constituting a single group. From there, these groups’ diverse identities are minimized.
This problem has already been recognized in sociolinguistics, and several solutions have been proposed, mainly the implementation of the concept of communities of practice and more reliance on self-identification. For example, in Bucholtz’ (1999) study, she studied a group whose members she identified according to an activity: being a member of a club. Unfortunately, she applied a label to the member of this club; she called them “nerds”. This name links them to nerds from elsewhere, regardless of the differences between this group and other groups of nerds. She wasn’t able to avoid minimizing the identity of the group that she studied by the simple implementation of the concept of communities of practice. Likewise, Eckert (2000) relied on self-identification of her subjects as either “jock” or “burnout”, but one ends up with the same problem: even if the subjects self-identify, they can choose labels that link them to distant groups. Jocks surely exist elsewhere, but these others jocks can be exceptionally different from the jocks in Eckert’s study. So, one cannot avoid minimizing identities by the simple reliance on self-identification, either.
In my thesis, I identified communities simply with ID numbers, so I never classified the subjects with other groups to which they didn’t belong. The fact that I used social network analysis to automatically detect these communities allowed me to more easily avoid applying labels to the subjects that could minimize their identities, but this is possible in any study, even if the researcher employs classic social variables. In the same way that one anonymizes the identities of individuals, one can anonymize the identities of the groups under study. Why is it necessary to know that the races in a study are “black” and “white or that the religions are “Jewish” and “Catholic”? If a researcher is interested in the way that their subjects navigate stereotypes that are relevant to their lives, that’s one thing, but most variationist studies don’t take up this question, so most studies can do more to protect marginalized people.
1. For those who don’t know the topic of my thesis, I analyzed the use of the linguistic variable (lol), made up of lol, mdr, etc., on Twitter.
Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why Be Normal?”: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls. Language in Society, 28(2), 203–223. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404599002043
Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Madlen, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.
Labov, W. (2006). The Social Stratification of English in New York City (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (Originally published in 1966)
Wolfram, W. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit negro speech. Washington, D.C: Center for Applied Linguistics.
I’m transcribing some broadcasts from Louisiana in French for a class on language change. For the recents broadcasts, I chose the show La Tasse de café on KVPI, and for the old broadcasts, the series En français, which was broadcast by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, a public TV station, in the 80s and 90s. I’m analyzing the variation between third person plural subject pronouns, meaning ils, ils -ont, ça, eux and eux-autres, but something that I immediately noticed in relation to the speech of Ms. Ledet, who was born in 1919, is that she employs many constructions that make her speech sound like that of the French in formal contexts. You don’t hear these constructions in the speech of Mr. Soileau and Mr. Manuel on KVPI (the former being born in 1941, the latter, I don’t know):
It’s not clear if this stems from a difference in region, in age, in interlocutor (the interviewer on En français seems rather France French), in interaction with francophones from elsewhere, or something else, but it’s interesting nonetheless. The corpus I’m constructing is small, because it’s just for a term paper, but I intend to extend it and possible perform other analyses.
Ya know, I’ve listened to all of Harry Connick, Jr.’s albums, but I’ve never heard him speak. He recently appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and so I heard him:
At the beginning, I noticed that he was speaking Yat, meaning the variety of English spoken in New Orleans. At that moment, he was addressing Jon Batiste, who also comes from New Orleans, but as the interview went on, it seemed to me like he changed his register to something more general, seeing as I could no longer hear any Yat features very well. For someone who is still so closely linked to the area that he came from but who has worked elsewhere for so long, with great success, I’m not surprised that he seems to maintain the two varieties, and this here is a great example of how quickly they can switch in a situation where the two help express the totality of one’s character. In my opinion, that’s what on loses when one loses their native language due to the idea that it’s not worth much: one’s totality.
There’s a post at Language Log on The Jeremy Kyle Show, where the guests speak varieties of English that even the host can’t understand, and me neither, as a native speaker of English:
What I find interesting, is that I start to think about what I’m hearing as if it’s not English, as if it’s first necessary to find the boundaries of the words even before starting to parse them as something meaningful. This happens as soon as I fail to understand two or three adjacents words.
Something I’ve been thinking about for a few months is the lack of discussion on psycholinguistics in the sociolinguistics literature as well as the formal linguistics literature. Things like this seem to me like a good place to start.
I intend to start posting some small articles like this, seeing as it’s been a long time since I haven’t had the time to write some real posts.)
Though it is not the only way to ensure that a language remains healthy, as in the case of Catalan, which was completely forbidden during Franco’s rule but remains quite strong today, institutionalization of a language is very important. Hebrew, for instance, may have only been possible to revitalize because it was already so deeply embedded within Judaism, and hence Jewish culture. Institutionalization in no way guarantees that a language will flourish, but it may guarantee that it at least has a stable persistence, providing the opportunity to be revitalized in the first place when the time is right.
Perhaps one of the best ways to ensure that a minority language is institutionalized within a community is to make sure that no one in that community can speak the majority language. One can see this in services that are offered to more recent immigrant communities, such as Vietnamese and Hispanic communities in New Orleans. A new community health center was recently opened in New Orleans East, where many Vietnamese people live, and it offers services in both Vietnamese and Spanish via translators. This both provides speakers of these languages with important services in their native tongues as well as economic opportunities for those who know these languages.
In the case of languages such as Louisiana French, a minority language which can very nearly always be easily avoided, speakers must insist strongly on its use to get the same result, perhaps to the point of refusing to speak English, regardless of being perfectly fluent in it. This doesn’t bode well for a population of speakers who just a few decades ago were generally ashamed of the language. Even people who have grown up with Louisiana French and use it professionally are liable to use English as their day to day language. In this climate, the desire to affect a change in the linguistic makeup of the state must be particularly strong.
I wrote about Feufollet’s new album Two Universes recently, essentially just to say that their switch from being a band that sings strictly in French to one that sings mostly in English is unique. It isn’t unheard of for musicians to begin using different languages, particularly if the change is to English, but Feufollet’s history and the niche they’ve carved out for themselves make this feel more pronounced.
The implications for this linguistic decision may also spread beyond Feufollet’s own personal sound and image. Arguably the most popular band in Cajun music at the moment, they’re quite possibly in a position to redefine what Cajun music is. Much like zydeco, French could become an occasional occurrence instead of a defining feature if others decide to follow their lead. One could even see this simply as strong support for the more regular tendency of a few other well-known Cajun music acts, such as The Pine Leaf Boys or The Red Stick Ramblers, to sprinkle English language songs throughout their albums.
I didn’t mention this tendency in my last post as both The Pine Leaf Boys and The Red Stick Ramblers generally use English in songs that aren’t of Cajun origin. The former can be heard singing Jerry Lee Lewis tunes in English during concerts but they never translate classic Belton Richard numbers, while the latter seems more at liberty to use English when playing western swing songs. In fact, western swing has been sung in both English and French in Louisiana since the 1940s by people like Harry Choates, to the point where the term Cajun swing is sometimes used. It’s almost as if the less strictly Cajun the other musical aspects of a song are, the more freedom a band has to abandon French, which may partially explain why Feufollet is moving in the same direction as their sound becomes less and less centered on tradition.
We speak English primarily, as our first language, so to write songs in English is not that crazy. But a lot of the way we’ve built our careers was attached to the French cultural preservation side of the music, so we’ll see if people get upset about our singing in English. We’ve done the cultural preservation thing for a very really long time, and right now we just want to be songwriters and musicians and make art first and foremost. –Chris Stafford of Feufollet speaking about singing in English in an interview in Oxford American
It is also possible that the members of Feufollet are coming to the conclusion that French is not a necessary component of Cajun music, or perhaps of even being Cajun, or perhaps they simply no longer view their music as Cajun music. It is interesting to note that Stafford would still describe the action of singing in French as preservation after doing it for so long, with at least two members of the band having grown up in French immersion schooling. Why isn’t this their primary language? Why hasn’t it become a normal aspect of their lives? Are songwriting and language preservation mutually exclusive activities? And what does this say for the future of French in Louisiana when even people who went through immersion schooling and use French professionally view using the language simply as preservation?
The lyrics of the title track Two Universes, quoted partially in the title of this post, may be evidence of the idea that Stafford & Co. are re-evaluating what it means to be a Cajun from Louisiana. At one point, Louisianians could speak of the state almost as its own country, with those from other places simply being referred to as “les Américains,” but these two universes certainly have collided, and maybe that’s just how it should be. For those of us still hoping to see French regain strength in Louisiana, however, this sentiment is particularly sobering.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had the “discussion” with people. It’s the one where that dreaded word “dialect” comes up and, suddenly, a whole host of misunderstandings and prejudices come spewing forth. This word is so convulated in its associations for those who don’t explicitly study language as a science that it’s often even taken as an attack on one’s linguistic faculties when the opposite is really what’s meant. This regularly happens when explaining to native Louisiana French speakers that their language is a dialect of French, so as to make it an equal in value to any other variety of French, including Standard French, and their response is outrage that one would demean something they care so much about.
But perhaps the clearest case of unfortunate misconceptualization is the case of African American English (AAE), whose name itself can lead to heated debate. I feel it would be impossible to cover and explain this whole mess in a single post, even if I focused purely on AAE, but a good starting point might be the paper I wrote during my first semester in college and somehow forgot to post, entitled Ebonics and Prejudice under Writings above. I personally work with this issue daily as a tutor at a community college and it’s leading me to the conclusion that schools that serve mostly speakers of non-standard dialects should be treated the same as those who have to deal with large numbers of students whose first languages are not English as far as financial support is concerned.
For those who grew up speaking dialects (of any language) which are non-standard: learn other ways of speaking so that you can write for newspapers or give lectures at academic conferences, but don’t abandon the way of speaking you grew up with. It’s perfect just as is.
This past Monday night, I watched a film call Les Parapluies de Cherbourg at Cafe Istanbul. This film was presented by the Ciné Club of the Alliance Française de la Nouvelle-Orléans. It was fun and the host directed a conversation about the film afterward. He started with something like, “Any questions, thoughts, commentaires?” Commentaires. This was almost the only word of French that he and the attendants used. “It’s weird,” I thought, “Is it always like this? With the discussion in English?” Fortunately, I brought my friend who sometimes attends a Ciné Club in Spanish. I asked her if they do the same thing after the films, if they talk about them in English. She told me no, everything is in Spanish.
It seems to me that this is a commun thing in Louisiana when it comes to French. It’s nice to thing about a state where we can speak French every, but the idea is nicer than the realization of the idea. One can see this in the Facebook Group Cajun French Virtual Table Française. As of today, this group has 6,591 members and grows every day. It’s the perfect forum for one to get accustomed to using French daily, but this doesn’t happen too much. Usually, even the members that speak and write it fluently decide to post in English. It’s a shame, and I can’t stop myself from thinking that a lot of them simply like the idea of French, that French exists in their minds as nothing more than a romantic apparition.
But it’s hard to learn a language, and really easy to speak in a language that one knows that everyone will understand. Yet even people who are in a region where French is common often choose English. Last summer, I was in an immersion program in Liege in Belgium. I won a scholarship from CODOFIL in order to afford it. I wasn’t alone, there were other people from Louisiana that had done the same. We stayed in a hotel outside of the university where we were taking classes. Every day, we’d spend the morning speaking French in at the university and every day nearly everyone would start speaking English again immediately after class, at the hotel. It wasn’t that they couldn’t speak it, nor that there wasn’t a good reason to speak it, but no one finished the program without using English.
This is a problem for the maintenance of French in Louisiana. It’s necessary that the language be more than an idea, more than just a skill that one can use while on vacation in France. One must decide that the language is living, that if one uses it every day, everywhere, the people around them will decide that they should learn to use it, too.
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