TY - JOUR
T1 - Globalising the study of language variation and change
T2 - A manifesto on cross-cultural sociolinguistics
AU - Adli, Aria
AU - Guy, Gregory R.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are deeply grateful for the comments, critiques, and new insights that we received from the participants in the workshop ‘Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in a Megacity’ (February 2019, New York): Philipp Angermeyer, Isaac Bleaman, Zachary Cooper, Naomi Nagy, Michael Newman, Arthur Spears and James Stanford. Their feedback has enriched our understanding of issues throughout this paper. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Language and Linguistics Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Sociolinguistic study of variation and change has a long-standing bias towards speech communities in Western and especially Anglophone societies. We argue that our field requires a much wider scope for variation studies, which puts more emphasis on culturally contextualised social meaning in the full range of human societies. The pursuit of understanding, generalizations, and even universals in the study of the social life of human language demands a global empirical base. In a meta-analysis of studies appearing in major sociolinguistic journals and conferences, we find little broadening of the language and cultural scope in the last 30 years. English alone and a few Western societies continually account for the great majority of studies. We propose several ways for going forward: testing and rethinking existing theories using data from understudied languages and regions, engaging with sociolinguistic scholarship in languages other than English, learning from other disciplines that incorporate cross-cultural approaches, engaging the dimensions of social organization and practice instantiated in cultures of the Global South, and moving towards research designs that compare different places and languages.
AB - Sociolinguistic study of variation and change has a long-standing bias towards speech communities in Western and especially Anglophone societies. We argue that our field requires a much wider scope for variation studies, which puts more emphasis on culturally contextualised social meaning in the full range of human societies. The pursuit of understanding, generalizations, and even universals in the study of the social life of human language demands a global empirical base. In a meta-analysis of studies appearing in major sociolinguistic journals and conferences, we find little broadening of the language and cultural scope in the last 30 years. English alone and a few Western societies continually account for the great majority of studies. We propose several ways for going forward: testing and rethinking existing theories using data from understudied languages and regions, engaging with sociolinguistic scholarship in languages other than English, learning from other disciplines that incorporate cross-cultural approaches, engaging the dimensions of social organization and practice instantiated in cultures of the Global South, and moving towards research designs that compare different places and languages.
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U2 - 10.1111/lnc3.12452
DO - 10.1111/lnc3.12452
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85130811357
SN - 1749-818X
VL - 16
JO - Language and Linguistics Compass
JF - Language and Linguistics Compass
IS - 5-6
M1 - e12452
ER -