how it differs from animal communication. Although the human ability to learn language is innate, a person learns a language through contact with others and thus language is culturally transmitted – an idea which is at the heart of sociolinguistics. Other features include discreteness, productivity, and displacement, which can be used to distinguish between non‐linguistic means of communication such as gestures and language. Another important feature is that the relationship between the form and meaning of a linguistic sign is arbitrary; aside from a few onomatopoetic words, such as words for animal sounds (e.g., meow, moo), the form (including both the sound and the way it might be written) of a morpheme is not derived from its meaning, or vice versa. We see evidence for the arbitrariness of the form–meaning relationship in the presence of synonyms within languages (e.g., sofa, couch) as well as the fact that words from different languages may have drastically different forms but still have the same meaning (e.g., English love, Swahili kupenda).
By examining how language works in its social context, sociolinguistics has greatly advanced our understanding of the relationship between signs and their meanings. The philosopher Peirce (Hartshorne et al.1931) suggested a three‐way typology of signs. A symbol is a sign which has developed a conventional meaning; for example, a heart shape indicates love. There is nothing about this shape which inherently leads to this interpretation; it is simply a correspondence which has grown out of use. As noted above, linguistic signs are generally symbols, that is, we understand them because of conventionalized meanings, not because of any ‘natural’ connection between the sign and its meaning. An icon is a sign which in some way resembles the object it refers to, such as a map. Although linguistic signs are not generally held to be iconic, particular varieties may be seen as having an iconic relationship with the people who use them (see chapter 3 for a discussion of this in the section on language ideologies). An index is something which ‘points to’ something – such as literal pointing with your finger to indicate what you are referring to, or the commonly used example of smoke indexing fire. Smoke does not resemble fire, but since the two often co‐occur, we associate them with each other (as shown in the idiom ‘when there’s smoke there’s fire’). The concept of indexicality is one which has drawn great interest in sociolinguistics. Put simply, certain varieties often come to index certain types of language users; thus indexicality is inherently a central aspect of the study of language in society. We will expand on the use of this concept in sociolinguistics in the next chapter.
Knowledge of Language
As mentioned in the last section, language is culturally transmitted, and while the ability to learn a language is innate, we are not born knowing a particular language, nor are we genetically pre‐dispositioned to speak a certain variety, but we learn the language(s) we are exposed to. The system (or the grammar, to use a well‐known technical term) is something that each language user ‘knows,’ but two very important issues for linguists are (1) just what that knowledge comprises and (2) how we may best characterize it.
In practice, linguists do not find it at all easy to write grammars because the knowledge that people have of the languages they speak is extremely hard to describe. Anyone who knows a language knows much more about that language than is contained in any grammar book that attempts to describe the language. One of the issues here is that grammar books tend to be written as prescriptive works; that is, they seek to outline the standardized language and how it ‘should’ be spoken. What sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropologists do is provide descriptive grammars of languages, which describe, analyze, and explain how and why people actually speak their languages.
One example of this difference can be found in the less/fewer distinction. Prescriptively, less should be used with non‐count nouns, such as water, rice, or money; fewer is used with count nouns (or noun phrases) such as drops of water, grains of rice, or pesos. So something may be worth less money, but it costs fewer pesos. Descriptively, however, this distinction does not hold; less is often used with count nouns. For example, it is common in the US to see signs in grocery stores indicating that certain cashier lines are for patrons with ‘ten items or less,’ although ‘item’ is clearly a count noun. Chances are you will also hear people saying things like there were less students present today than yesterday. While some speakers do still adhere to the less/fewer distinction, it is being lost in some varieties.
Linguistics are aware of prescriptive rules of language as dictated in reference grammars, and they are not irrelevant in sociolinguistics; as we will discuss below, language ideologies are also an important part of how language functions in society. However, in the study of language, linguists focus on descriptive grammar, that is, the rules inside the heads of language users which constitute their knowledge of how to use the language. This knowledge includes underlying rules and principles which allow us to produce new utterances, to know both what it is possible to say and what it is not possible to say. Most language users can’t articulate these rules, but know how to apply them. It is this shared knowledge that becomes the abstraction of a language, which is often seen as something which exists independent of language users. How this knowledge is used by language users is the core of sociolinguistics. In the following sections, we will explore the ways in which sociolinguists and linguist anthropologists have conceptualized language and its users.
Competence and performance
Confronted with the task of trying to describe the grammar of a language like English, many linguists follow the approach associated with Chomsky, who distinguishes between what he has called competence and performance. He claims that it is the linguist’s task to characterize what language users know about their language, that is, their competence, not what they do with their language, that is, their performance. The best‐known characterization of this distinction comes from Chomsky himself (1965, 3–4) in words which have been extensively quoted:
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker–listener, in a completely homogeneous speech‐community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. This seems to me to have been the position of the founders of modern general linguistics, and no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered. To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker–hearer is only one. In this respect, study of language is no different from empirical investigation of other complex phenomena.
However, it is exactly the interaction of social and linguistics factors that interests Labov, arguably the most influential figure in sociolinguistics in the last sixty or so years. He maintains (2006, 380) that ‘the linguistic behavior of individuals cannot be understood without knowledge of the communities that they belong to.’ This is the focus of sociolinguistics, and what makes it different from Chomskyan linguistics. We are primarily concerned with real language in use (what Chomsky calls performance), not the language of some ideal language user (i.e., an idealized competence). This distinction is reflected in methodological differences; syntacticians such as Chomsky will often use grammatical judgments to get at competence, while sociolinguists tend to use actual language production (see Part II for discussions of sociolinguistic methodologies).
Further, the knowledge which underlies language production, or performance, is more than just knowledge of grammar; language users must also know social norms for how to use a language – when it is appropriate to speak or to be silent, what topics are acceptable, what form of a question is appropriate to use with a friend versus your boss. There is thus another kind of competence, sometimes called communicative competence. This means knowing social
