Abstract
In some academic disciplines a student’s training comes steeped in the history of the field. Linguistics tends not to be such a discipline and generally does not encourage deep familiarity with its history. Thus we often fail to provide students a sense of how ideas originate and develop over time. In Making Waves, Sali Tagliamonte addresses this problem by sketching a history of variationist sociolinguistics over the last five decades or so. She offers an unusual approach that draws on conversations with dozens of leading researchers.
With an eye toward recording an oral history of the field, Tagliamonte carried out interviews with forty-three sociolinguists. In this book she attempts to tell the story of the variationist school from the perspective of its first and second generations of scholars, with William Labov and his contemporaries such as Gillian Sankoff, Roger Shuy, Peter Trudgill, and Walt Wolfram representing the former and their students representing the latter. Tagliamonte weaves together passages from the 150-plus hours of interviews to paint a picture of how variationist sociolinguistics grew from a set of research principles practiced by a small group of pioneers in North America and the United Kingdom into the major international discipline it represents today. The resulting portrait is a very personal one that draws heavily on narratives of how the scholars found their way into the field and what has motivated them to spend their careers engaged in such work.
After a brief preface laying out the background to the project, the book opens with a chapter entitled “Where It Begins.” The starting points are Martha’s Vineyard and New York City, where Labov carried out his first significant sociolinguistic research as a graduate student. The discussion quickly moves to other locations and scholars to paint a picture of the events in the 1960s that fostered the emergence of a new kind of sociolinguistics, one grounded in the quantitative analysis of how linguistic and social factors shape usage. Tagliamonte tells the story through a series of vignettes about seminal research projects, professional meetings, and other milestones. Thus, we learn of early studies inspired by Labov’s work including Shuy’s Detroit research, Sankoff’s work in Papua New Guinea and Montreal, and Trudgill’s Norwich study. We also learn of events that brought together researchers examining language as a social phenomenon, as at the Lake Arrowhead conference organized by William Bright in 1964 and the LSA Summer Institute at Indiana University in that same year. This early period of variationist activity is said to culminate in the first annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference in 1972, which is characterized as a moment for the field to converge, to come together “to form an empirically-based discipline for the scientific study of language” (21).
The next two chapters continue in much the same vein, and describe how the groundwork laid by Labov and others in that first generation is built upon by a new wave of researchers. Tagliamonte provides brief profiles of several scholars and describes the spread of the variationist paradigm around the globe. These sketches are rich with biographical detail and highlight the diverse backgrounds of these researchers. One long section in chapter 2, “Finding Labov,” recounts how encountering Labov’s work represented a turning point in several linguists’ careers. J. K. Chambers, for example, recalls, “When I first read [Labov (1963)], I was just knocked out by it. And I think Labovian Sociolinguistics got a lot of converts from that one fact” (31). These chapters also introduce readers to significant theoretical and methodological developments. The discussion moves quickly across a diverse range of topics that also includes Shana Poplack’s proposed constraints on bilingual code-switching, Allan Bell’s Audience Design model for style-shifting, and Susan Pintzuk’s work to build electronic corpora to study the history of English.
Having introduced the cast of characters and sketched the expansion of the field from the 1960s into the 1990s, the next chapters expound further on the ideas and principles that have guided variationists’ work. Chapter 4 explores the “Roots of Variationist Thinking” by considering connections to fields such as historical linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and dialectology. This recognition that the relationship of language and society has been examined in other scholarly traditions helps to counter the impression that one might otherwise get from the prior discussion that Labov invented sociolinguistics in 1963. Still, this exploration is quite selective, with no mention, for example, of scholars such as Antoine Meillet and Edward Sapir, who considered sociolinguistic questions while working within the mainstream of linguistics. Throughout the book readers find little acknowledgement that many sociolinguists operate outside the Labovian paradigm, and Tagliamonte seems to equate variationist sociolinguistics with sociolinguistics in general as, for example, when she suggests that the latter “is not much more than 50 years old” (viii).
Chapter 5 opens readers’ eyes to the methodological toolkit of variationist sociolinguistics through a series of reflections on fieldwork. Special attention is given to the sociolinguistic interview as a technique for gathering conversational speech data. Tagliamonte weaves together anecdotes from experienced fieldworkers to draw an effective critical account of established methods.
Another hallmark of research in the variationist paradigm is the reliance on quantitative analysis, the subject of chapter 6. Tagliamonte’s prior discussion has touched on the need for quantification in order to uncover the complicated relationships between linguistic and social factors, and here she underscores the peculiar properties of sociolinguistic data that necessitate the use of statistical techniques developed expressly for working with such material. The original answer to that call was the variable rule program (Varbrul) created by David Sankoff and Henrietta Cedergren, and Tagliamonte provides a detailed history of its development and a defense of its continued relevance at a time when many researchers have adopted other approaches that rely on techniques and platforms (e.g., R) standard in other disciplines.
Chapter 7 celebrates the tradition of public outreach within sociolinguistics. This part of the variationist story begins with work by Labov and others on African American English. Linguistic research was crucial in countering the dominant narrative in the 1960s that this variety of English was deficient and a hindrance to cognitive development. Tagliamonte details efforts by scholars to give back to the communities they study. She describes Wolfram’s work celebrating the rich dialect heritage of North Carolina, and she reviews Labov’s decades-long involvement with reading programs for school children.
In chapter 8, Tagliamonte treats several significant debates that have occupied variationists in recent decades. The title “Branching Out; Bursting at the Seams” accurately reflects the flow of the discussion, which ranges from critiques of broad social categories like sex and class to the evolution of the concept of the variable rule to the role of folk perceptions in linguistic variation and change. A particular highlight is the extensive review of research on the origins of African American English, which has been the subject of some of the most contentious debate in the field.
One of the questions Tagliamonte asked all of the interviewees was “Why do you like variation?” and she presents their responses in chapter 9. They provide an interesting array of the interests that motivate these scholars. Some point to personal experiences in their life as sparking their interests and others comment on the thrill of working out the complicated puzzle of sociolinguistic variation. Several scholars connect linguistic variation to diversity more broadly as, for example, in Wolfram’s observation that “in reality nothing is categorical in life” (168).
The book concludes with a chapter that summarizes the current state of the field and offers advice for younger researchers. We read a refreshingly candid assessment of the ongoing tension between researchers driven by an interest in linguistic structure and those who are primarily concerned with understanding the construction of social meaning through language (cf. Eckert’s (2012) “third wave” of variation studies). Tagliamonte frames this as a difference in orientation toward either a linguistics pole or an anthropology pole (171). She highlights the core methodological principles that serve to unite variationists of different stripes while also noting that they may contribute to academic isolation and marginalization. She stresses the need for sociolinguists (and linguists in general) to go beyond narrow disciplinary confines and make their research more visible to other fields. This theme is picked up in the quoted advice from the interviewees, who also comment on a range of issues from the narrow question of how to choose a dissertation topic to broader concerns about forging a meaningful career. Tagliamonte concludes with several reflections on the rewards of sociolinguistic research which “can lead to insights that make the world go round” (182).
Tagliamonte has produced a book that is very much sui generis at least within sociolinguistics and perhaps linguistics more broadly. The work is partly intellectual history while at the same time thoroughly biography. She reviews landmarks in variationist history but these developments are typically presented in the context of telling an individual scholar’s story. Sometimes these accounts produce valuable insights about the variationist endeavor as in the case of Greg Guy’s (1991) attempt to use data on consonant cluster simplification to challenge Lexical Phonology and his subsequent uncovering of statistical support for the theory (59-60). But sometimes broader lessons are harder to discern. The 1964 LSA Summer Institute, for example, is described from the perspective of a prominent member of the first generation of variationists:
The bus trip from Montreal, Canada, to Bloomington, Indiana takes 25 hours. Gillian Sankoff was watching the miles pass away and thinking about the LSA Summer Institute. She is very excited. . . . [The] Institute that year is focused on a new discipline in Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and there is going to be a special seminar, which will be attended by Bill Labov. Gillian is intent on participating in the seminar but when she arrives at the institute she discovers that it is a closed meeting. (7-8)
The point of this narrative is clearly not to explore the ideas that circulated at that important gathering (and no such discussion appears elsewhere in the book). Instead it seems we are meant simply to appreciate Sankoff’s personal experience and perhaps ponder how famous sociolinguists are just like us. This passage also serves to illustrate Tagliamonte’s writing style, which is unusual for an academic history. Stylistic choices like the narrative present tense and the use of first names give the writing an informal quality and immediacy that helps to put readers in the times and places being described. Moreover, while the book includes quotes from the interviewed scholars on nearly every page, the framing of the overall story and the majority of the text are Tagliamonte’s. Thus, she narrates a history filtered from many hours of conversation.
The accessible writing style suggests that the book is targeting a non-specialist audience. However, the subject matter seems most likely to appeal to readers with some experience in the field. Others might feel disoriented by the cavalcade of people and ideas packed into this fairly slim volume. The book could have value in a sociolinguistics course though perhaps as a supplementary text given the emphasis on telling the researchers’ stories rather than elaborating key principles. That said, readers with more experience in the field may enjoy the book too especially if they have limited familiarity with the early days of variationist study or if they want to know the backgrounds of the NWAV keynote speakers they’ve enjoyed.