Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

188 Part 3: Language and Variation
monolingual, but now called authentic, speech community, where selfconscious
and exceptional uses seemed to be viewed as noisy and irrelevant
performance features one needed to ignore to hear the deeper,
systematic, authentic language user (cf. Coupland, 2007: 25).
In addition, the search for the authentic speaker portrayed style- shifting
as an inauthentic social action, and suggested that speakers at their most
casual self are not paying attention to their speech. Both ideas are problematic,
and seem to be based on the underlying idea of an isolated place
where speakers are free from any exterior linguistic infl uences that would
necessitate paying attention to speech. Obviously, it is hard to imagine
that such homogeneous and a-political safe havens exist, and if they did,
it remains unclear how any linguistic change can take place within them.
Arguably, too, authenticity cannot be considered the intrinsic quality of
anyone or any object, but needs to be viewed as a social meaning, namely
as something that depends on people’s judgement of a particular person,
situation or object. According to Goffman, for example, it is participants’
‘framing’ of the situation that decides whether they see speech as ‘owned’
by the one who produced it, or as modulated and ‘put on’ (Goffman, 1971,
1974, 1981). Authenticity should not, therefore, be a condition of the
research design, but is a concept that should be used in the analysis itself
for speakers’ judgements of each other’s ways of speaking (Coupland,
2007: 25; Jaspers, 2006: 135). Clearly in that case, sociolinguists’ decisions
on linguistic authenticity can become the object of critical concern
(Bucholtz, 2003).
Of course, this does not mean that it is useless to appeal to social norms
for the explanation of language use. But I hope the above has made clear
that we cannot simply import norms into sociolinguistic analysis as readymade
explanatory tools, since they stand in need of explanation themselves.
Relevant questions are then: how does normativity come into
being, and how does it relate to our linguistic behaviour? How do individuals
relate to ‘groups’? (Cameron, 1990). Up to now, Cameron points
out, variationist sociolinguistics has mainly tended to endorse the principle
that your language use merely ‘refl ects’ the group or network you
belong to. Alternatively, she says, some authors argue that you use your
language to mark your social (group) identity. Yet, in both cases it is problematic
that language use is viewed as a mere ‘performance’ product or
the output of a primary and deeper lying, this time social structure
(Cameron, 1995: 15). If we think this is undesirable, we need to focus on
how the social world gets constructed in practice rather than merely acted
out, and on how the social and the linguistic interact with each other.
For describing social practice, we can hardly rely on the quantitative
methods in the variationist’s toolkit. Although these methods help to
make a probabilistic measure of the distribution of certain linguistic
variables and are very useful for obtaining a general appreciation of