Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

182 Part 3: Language and Variation
mainstream linguistics at his time, and he insisted that language is in fact
a system where everything hangs together. A sound from one (historical)
variety cannot, therefore, be compared with a sound from another variety,
since the function of both sounds in the linguistic system they belong to is
not necessarily the same. As a result, de Saussure said, it is not individual
sound changes that need to be studied but the change from one linguistic
system to another. In doing so, de Saussure made a crucial distinction
between language use (or parole) and the linguistic system (the langue): it
was the latter that was to be worthy of attention from linguists. So by the
1960s, the view was fi rmly established that ‘real’ linguists devoted all their
time and energy to describing the (grammatical) structures of (a) language
and that in order to do so, it was necessary to take language use out of its
social surroundings and study it in isolation. It was the implicit knowledge
of this system that Chomsky saw as speakers’ actual linguistic competence.
In his view, moreover, an effi cient description of the linguistic
system was only possible without the noise and the other limitations of
‘real-life’ language use by specifi c speakers in specifi c sociocultural contexts
(such as interruptions, hesitations, lapses, muttering, etc.). The linguistic
products of these imperfect, constraining or noisy circumstances
were viewed as only the momentary and arbitrary realisations, that is the
mere performance of a primary, and possibly universal, systematic cognitive
structure. For this reason, Chomsky famously based his analysis on
‘ideal speakers and hearers in a completely homogeneous linguistic community’
(Chomsky, 1965: 3). In doing this, it was not as much his intention
to deny heterogeneity and variation, than to see these as surface features
that were irrelevant for the explanation of deeper lying linguistic systematicity.
In the same way as his structuralist predecessors, Chomsky and his
followers only perceived systematicity and norm-following within language
(and its cognitive foundation) rather than in actual language use
itself. Hence, where in the 19th century linguistic variation was mostly
seen in historical terms, it had now become an irrelevant and impure
surface feature of a deeper-lying linguistic system.
Variationist sociolinguistics
In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the sociolinguist William Labov as
well as scholars from other disciplines such as Joshua Fishman (sociology
of language) and Dell Hymes (linguistic anthropology) were among the
fi rst to take up the gauntlet against the postulation of homogeneity and
the apparent irrelevance of linguistic variation. They pointed out, among
other things, that linguistic homogeneity does not exist, neither at the level
of linguistic communities nor at the level of individual grammars.
Moreover, Hymes maintained that language use is permeated by the
sociocultural context in which it occurs; so, in order to communicate