This book’s articles present current research into language use and language change that will interest scholars looking into meaning and symbolism as well as researchers tracing the wanderings of vernacular culture in a geographic landscape.
How do vernacular speech patterns interrelate with meaning and world view? Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, “When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Humpty refers here to the link between the word as a signifier and its meaning as something signified. Symbolism enters the picture as soon as meaning does. Meaning is based on a word’s use in human society, and therefore, use transmits and affects meaning. Space and place matter because society matters. Dialects indicate sociocultural common ground (Vaattovaara, 125).
Laws of group life require conformity, loyalty, and identification with the group. Word choice or pronunciation may signal group members’ identity and belonging, as well as communicate substantive content (Thompson, Grace, and Cohen 2001: 79ff, 118, 163). By maintaining a common dialect, groups continuously reinforce group ties and shape the character of the group. This 2012 collection of essays follows the 2010 collection Language and Space (Auer and Schmidt 2010; Lameli, Kehrein, and Rabanus 2010).
For some scholars of sociolinguistics, urbanization, often taken for granted as the future of humanity, has an opposing direction as well, a form of reaction – movement into small towns and the countryside, a trend that has been taking place in the United Kingdom for years now. David Britain’s research (14-30) advocates the use of sociolinguistic methods of data analysis in city neighborhoods, rural areas, and urban streets alike. He sees social contact, including conflict, as a vital component of language use and language change.
Robert Moller’s article in German for the collection, entitled “Der Sprachgebrauch bei uns,” (how we talk at home) – provides a method for utilizing a native speaker’s own assessment of his or her use of words as a descriptive tool in the scientific sense. It sets up a landscape map of German speech territory, as defined by the dialect his informants identify as the prevailing dialect in each geographic area.
Perhaps the most interesting article for folklorists and social scientists who work internationally is Johanna Vaattovaara’s article “Making sense of space—on dialect production and perception at the Finland-Sweden border” (119-141). The marker of this linguistic and geographic border is an h sound that occurs in writing mid-word, in certain words, although some speakers omit it. Certain question words in colloquial American English—what, when, where, why, for example—often lack the initial h sound and thus begin with a voiced, rather than a voiceless consonant. In British English the pronunciation of the letter h at the beginning of a word may indicate the social class of the speaker as well as his or her original home. “Oo’s there?” says the speaker of Cockney dialect. “Who’s there?” says the snobbish butler.
In the Tornio Valley on the border of Sweden and Finland, the h sound in the middle of a word is the phenomenon under discussion. Its presence or absence indicates, not first and foremost the social standing of the speaker, but rather his/her home territory, belonging, or origin. The intersection of dialect and space/place becomes apparent in many, or even most speech acts, over and over.
The relevance of space in this discussion is an important key to the meaning and identity of the groups using or not using the mid-word h-sound as a fricative, rather than omitting it, which distinguishes and identifies them almost as soon as they open their mouths. From that point a base exists from which researchers can move on to the study of people’s attitudes about certain geographic areas, where word choice or pronunciation is different in a specific way, and about the people who live there and speak thus. It is a basic facet of human behavior to classify people socially and culturally, by their appearance, but also by their speech.
Vaattovaara’s article centers on the process of mapping dialect areas, including what to map and how. Some sociolinguistic mapping methods, even those used for mental mapping, need to be updated in order to fit linguistic phenomena (Vaatovaara 123). Informants can often determine what dialect they hear, at the time of hearing it, and locate the speaker’s home area, based on the sound. Such methods may in the past, however, have omitted the perspective of social space. The snobbish butler lives in the same neighborhood as the newly rich Cockney millionaire, but the speech patterns are different. Culture differs as well: who defers to whom?
In a world often studied as if it were borderless, political boundaries may not coincide with separate areas in which distinct dialect differences are obvious. What do they mean near the Tornio Valley, which once belonged to Sweden but in 1809 came under the sway of Russia and is now a part of Finland (Vaatovaara, 124)? The variations in the use of the fricative h mid-word mark dialectological boundaries that do not coincide consistently with present day political boundaries.
What difference does it make if the speaker inserts a distinct h sound, mid-word, in the word sauna, making it saunha? Vaatovaara’s article (124-138) uses interviews with local informants to tackle the entirety of dialect stability and/or sociocultural change via such small distinctions, including intonation. Time shifts or crushes geographic boundaries, whether religious or secular, thus increasing the importance of dialect mapping to discern and to study group identity and adhesion.
Work cited
Thompson, Michael and Catherine O’Neill Grace, with Lawrence J. Cohen. 2001. Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children. New York: Random House.
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[Review length: 945 words • Review posted on December 1, 2016]