Thanks! I have a paper to go defend right now, but when I’m done with that, I will be happy to explain divergence and convergence. Good times!
Is there a chance that English will break up into a family of languages, the way Latin did?
Can you detect changes in a dialect as they happen? I am stating to wonder whether the English of Southern Ontario is starting to lose its ‘th’ sounds, for example.
Lastly, do you deal with written styles of language? Are these changing?
I ask this because of the way certain friends write emails. I write mine much like this: in a ‘written’ style. They write theirs in a very casual style with lots of LOLs and punctuation and sentence fragments. I suddenly realised one day that I could easily hear their voices in my mind as I was reading them. I realised that what they had written was actually a rather direct transcription of spoken words, even if they had never spoken them.
What is the job market like in linguistics? I have a relative who is a linguistics major…
This may be more in the way of psycho-linguistics that socio-linguistics…
I have thought about how Spanish has two forms of “to be”, one for permanant attributes and one for temporary attributes. Has anyone studied how variations like this affect people in those cultures - for instance, would Spanish people be less likely to incorporate certain traits into their self-identity, or perceive some qualities as more easily changed than others?
In languages that are strongly gendered, do objects tend to be more or less valued depending on their gender? Or does the gender really make no difference at that level?
Finally, have you read “The Poison Oracle” by Peter Dickensen?
These questions meld quite nicely with what **Soul **was asking. Every language, particularly those spoken by people who are geographically and/or socially isolated from each other as English is, has the potential to break up into a bunch of other languages. Language is constantly changing, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but it’s changing.
And a main thing sociolinguists do is watch language change in action. In the traditional paradigm of historical linguistics, we only observed change in retrospect. By comparing two related languages to each other, we can see how they’ve changed from their ancestors. One of the radical things about sociolinguistics as it was born in the '60’s was that it showed how we can see language change as it happens.
The easiest way to do this is look at the speech of people born at different times. Since we more or less acquire our dialect in our youth and stick with it (though there are exceptions to this rule that we need to be aware of), we can look at how the older speaker differs from the younger speaker. Voila, change in progress. By doing experiments like these, we can not only learn what variables are changing and it what way, but also the mechanisms of language change, particularly social ones. For instance, a lot of studies have shown that women tend to be innovators of change, particularly of prestigious ones.
So, I stated above that it appears that many dialects of English are actually diverging, rather than converging into one uber-dialect. This means that many dialects are becoming less alike as time goes by, rather than becoming more similar. This seems strange, since transportation and communication have become so much more advanced, there’s a lot of social and geographic mobility (particularly in North America), and all of these things seem like we’d all be converging. That’s one of the things I find so cool about sociolinguistics: things that seem “logical” aren’t always true, but what is happening has some logical consistency deep down.
Anyway, the best example I know of for this divergence is the Northern Cities Vowel Shift versus the Southern Vowel Shift. The two graphics I just linked to probably make no sense, so let me do a quick explanation. Vowel sound different from each other (have different quality) based on the position of your tongue when you say it. Try saying “beat,” then “bat,” then “bot.” You’ll feel your tongue moving around to different positions in your mouth. The diagrams I linked to have some labels: “front” and “back,” “high” and “mid”. “Front” and “back” refer to whether your tongue is hanging out in the front or back of your mouth when you say the vowel. “High” and “mid” refer to the height of your tongue.
There are also some symbols, which refer to particular vowels. In the Northern Cities diagram, the upside-down v refers to the vowel in “butt;” the backwards c refers to the vowel in “bought” if you pronounce it differently than “bot;” the a refers to the vowel in “bot;” and the a and e stuck together is the vowel in “bat.” In the Southern diagram, i = “beat,” I = “bit,” e=“bait,” epsilon=“bet,” o=“boat,” U= “put,” and u=“boot.”
All that aside, the main point is we can that the arrows are moving in different directions. The arrows represent where the vowels are moving in these shifts, from their original positions. So, in the Northern Cities (i.e., Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, etc.), there’s a change in progress where a bunch of the vowel are moving in pronunciation in a clockwise manner. In the Southern (US) Shift, front vowels are switching place and back vowels are fronting. In the end, these dialects are ending up with very different vowel inventories from each other.
Did that make sense?
Yeah, I don’t do written stuff, really. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re changing or, at the very least, new genres are emerging from new technology.
It depends on the job. Within academia, the job market is always tight. If you speak a lot of languages and are pretty well-educated, there’s always jobs out there as translator or code-breakers or interpreters. If you’re good with computers, computer companies often like linguists. Some people get jobs naming things like new medicines or companies. There’s also the nebulous world of “consulting” that I know a few people went into.
And another practical application of sociolinguistics I forgot: forensic linguistics. Linguists are used to tell whether or not a defendant is the same person as a someone on a recording or such like. For instance, if someone telephones in a bomb threat or something. I also know a linguist who was hired to convince a judge that “Redskin” is no longer an offensive term.
A project that I’ve worked on has to do with fair housing issues. Basically, a person who sounds black (or Jewish or old or foreign) is told that an apartment has already been rented when they call about it. Then, a white person calls two minutes later and is told the apartment is still for rent. Then, when the person renting the apartment is called on it, they claim, “Hey, I’m color-blind. I can’t tell what race someone is over the phone!” The study I worked on was proving these people were lying by looking at all sorts of differences between AAE and local dialects of European American English that can be used to differentiate ethnicity over the phone.
As you suspected, this is a bit out of my area. Perhaps another Doper has an idea.
Nope. Is it good?
It’s quite … interesting. 
It’s a mystery where the main character is a psycho-linguist.
I don’t know if you would call it “good”, but it’s definitely worth reading.
Cool beans. I’m always looking for interesting reading.
My dream is that, one day, there will be an Indiana Jones-type action movie with a linguist as the hero…
Hey, even sven, I finally got around to looking into your question about the West African influences in African American English. I went to what is probably the most up-to-date, complete source, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction by Lisa J. Green. There wasn’t a lot I think because the main thrust of AAE scholarship has been to prove that either AAE came from a creole or came from Southern English. Not much work has been done on looking at possible substrate influences from West African languages.
So, most of the evidence found for West African influence on AAE has been looking at final consonant clusters. English likes to jam on consonants at the ends of words, but most West African languages (and a lot of languages, in general) do not allow that type of construction. AAE has a tendency to “drop” consonants at the ends of words, so *desk *become des, *kind *becomes kin, *test *becomes tes, and so on. The way the patterns of consonant cluster simplification in AAE fall out is the same as the restrictions on consonant clusters in West African languages.
Another interesting parallel Green notes is between the verbal game called The Dozens (“yo mama so whatever, she whatever”) to verbal games that are played in Africa.
So, yeah, that’s not a great answer, but I’m not sure there’s a better one out there yet.
And he’ll be cunning, right?
Well, someone had to say it