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Why do we stress the ethnographic approach?

The survey tradition, pioneered by Labov (1996), launched the quantitative study of variation, and over the following decade (e.g. (Wolfram 1969; Macaulay 1977; Modaressi 1978; Trudgill 1974)), provided an indispensable picture of the social stratification of linguistic variables over large urban populations. General correlations of variables with demographic categories outline the route that linguistic change takes as it spreads through the population, and suggests hypotheses about how and why it spreads. The ethnographic approach builds on this foundation, seeking answers to questions posed by the survey data, but unanswerable within the abstract sociological model that underlies this foundational work. Survey studies treat speakers in virtue of their membership in large categories, and cannot get at the social mechanisms for differentiation. The search for explanations for these patterns requires us to go beyond the abstract categories to find what it is, for example, about being working class in New York that leads people to a greater tendency to raise the nucleus of /aeh/; or what it is about being a New York working class woman that makes her do it even more. As long as we stay with the abstract categories, our explanations can only come from generalizations about those categories - generalizations probably made over populations other than the ones for which we have linguistic data, and generalizations made by researchers (e.g. sociologists) whose primary interest is not language and whose analyses may not touch on the motivations for language use. Furthermore, attention to individual social categorizations leads to a treatment of these categories as independent if cross-cutting. But social categories combine in complex ways, and it is only at the local level that one can understand how, for example, gender interacts with class. The ethnographic study of variation explores how variation is used within communities. It may explore how broad stratificational schemes such as class unfold locally (Rickford 1986; Eckert 2000); and it may explore the use of variation in day-to-day social practice to create social meaning. This research practice strives to bring the study of sociolinguistics back into synch with the field of linguistic anthropology. The two traditions parted ways in the course of the survey era, and students of variation have much to learn from the work that has been going on in the meantime in anthropology. Some issues are outlined below: Indexicality The suvey approach to variation has traditionally viewed variation as directly reflecting membership in broad social categories, particularly class, gender and ethnicity. Linguistic anthropologists (e.g. Silverstein; Ochs 1991) have stressed the importance of of indirect indexicality, which is central to understanding the meaning of variation. Variables rarely index social categories directly; rather, they index attitudes, stances, activities that are in turn associated with categories. So, for instance, the reduction of -ing to -in (as in walkin' for walking) might index casualness, the fortition of th/dh (as in ting for thing) might index toughness. And these variables in turn are connected to broader categories like class and gender through the kinds of things that people at different places in the social order do and the kinds of personae that they construct. Construction of Personae The second piece, then, is that variation does not simply reflect pre-established social categories, but is a resource for the construction of personae. This means, among other things, that variation can be a resource for social change as new kinds of personae emerge to meet new social challenges (Zhang 2001). Style The view of variation as a resource for the construction of personae brings us directly into the study of style. Style has been traditionally viewed in variation as "different ways of saying the same thing" - and has been studied primarily in terms of formality as a way of getting at more natural speech. While we recognize this important aspect of style, we have been exploring style more broadly, connecting it to the construction and performance of personae (Eckert 2000; Eckert and Rickford 2001;Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994). Outliers and Authenticity The understanding that variation can be part of change rather than a reflection of completed changes obviates the traditional focus on the "typical" speaker. The view of speakers as representatives of broad categories effectively homogenizes the members of those categories, and establishes linguistic patterns for the "typical speaker" - the person who is a fully-fledged member of the analyst-defined community or social category. Outliers - for example, a working class white male speaker who does not speak like the average working class white male, is viewed as bsimply anomalous. But when we look at language use on the ground, we find that such speakers are frequently pushing the envelope of social change - and that language use is a basic tool for this social action. This speaker may tell us far something about gender and/or class in that community that may well be crucial to our understanding of the meaning of variation. The focus on the typical speaker ignores the fact that a large proportion of the world's population live on what might be called the borders of communities (see Pratt 1988) and that focusing on the invariant center is analogous - at a different level - to ignoring variation altogether. Equivalence Finally, there is an assumption that speakers are doing the same thing everywhere. This has fundamental consequences for fieldwork, since it assumes that a sociolinguistic interview elicits equivalent speech from all speakers. But the bottom line is that in different places in society, people may be doing very different things with language, so understanding variation requires seeing how people deploy it in different situations. Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic variation as social practice. Oxford, Blackwell. Eckert, P. and J. Rickford, Eds. (2001). Style and sociolinguistic variation. New York and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Macaulay, R. K. S. (1977). Language, Social Class and Education: a Glasgow Study. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press. Modaressi, Y. (1978). A sociolinguistic analysis of modern Persian, University of Kansas. Ochs, E. (1991). "Indexing gender". Rethinking Context. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1988). Linguistic utopias. the linguistics of writing: Arguments between language and literature. N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant and C. MacCabe. New York, Methuen: 48-66. Rickford, J. (1986). "The need for new approaches to class analysis in sociolinguistics." Language and Communication 6: 215-221. Rickford, J. and F. McNair-Knox (1994). Addressee- and topic- influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study. Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. D. Biber and E. Finegan. New York, Oxford University Press: 235-276. Silverstein, M. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. Meaning in anthropology. K. H. Basso and H. A. Selby. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press: 11-55. Trudgill, P. (1974). The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wolfram, W. (1969). A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington DC, Center for Applied Linguistics. Zhang, Q. (2001). Changing economics, changing markets: A sociolinguistic study of chinese yuppies. Linguistics. Stanford CA, Stanford University.