Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Style and Styling 187
perspective, social practices and psychological profi les are largely
isomorphic. A number of authors have insisted that these premises reduce
people to judgmental dopes or pre-programmed clones that are merely
responsive to changes in a pre-existing external world (cf. Duff, this
volume; Eckert, 2000; Eckert & Rickford, 2001; Garfi nkel, 1967; Heritage,
1984; Schilling-Estes, 2002). It is diffi cult to see how such clones would
be able to engage in self-conscious variation or resistance, since the selfconsciousness
needed for this is deleted to account for normative behaviour.
Hence, in the same way as structuralist linguists could not explain
the change between static linguistic systems, variationists’ construction of
a static community precludes an explanation of how communities can
change (cf. also Eckert, 2000: 34).
In truth, much of this is due to variationists’ focus on ordered rather
than unprincipled linguistic heterogeneity, and their resultant search for ‘a
unit of analysis at a level of social aggregation at which it can be said that
the heterogeneity is organized’ (Eckert, 2000: 30). This may also explain
the tendency for looking at variation and deviance as only temporary:
after the introduction of an innovation (such as a postvocalic [r] or a new
meaning of an older word), variationists assume there is a certain period
of relative uncertainty which, though, eventually leads to a new consensus
and general acceptance of the innovation (cf. Milroy, 1992).
Alternatively, new elements or variations are described as symptomatic of
another, thus far hidden subgroup in the speech community. Nevertheless,
variationist sociolinguists in this way reintroduced the homogeneity they
criticised in structuralist accounts of language: speech communities are
seen as heterogeneous but in an orderly way, that is, with their separate
parts as homogeneous(ly acting) communities that either share a consensus
or are on the way back to one. In this view, variation and (political)
confl ict are mainly perceived between homogeneous groups, but are
abstracted away or ignored within those groups (Rampton, 1998: 18; cf.
also Ortner, 1995; Pratt, 1987).
Finding the ‘authentic’ speaker
These diffi culties also impact on variationist methodology. As stated
above, the primary interest in variationist work is to explain how linguistic
systems evolve. This led to a focus on retrieving linguistic data that
were as close as possible to people’s everyday ‘authentic’ speech forms.
But this search consequently weeded out most interest for exceptional and
self-conscious speech forms as well as for speech from ‘inauthentic’ speakers
such as recent outsiders or second language users. Given the ubiquity
of such ‘inauthentic’ speakers and forms in contemporary societies, the
consistent disregard of them not only illuminates the blood, sweat and
tears variationist sociolinguists shed to carve out ‘good data’, but also that
their data-construction ironically enough re-installed a homogeneous,