An Encyclopaedia of Language_06

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An Encyclopaedia of Language_06 AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 279Figure 27 Use ratings by 350 educated Indians for mother tongues in seven different social contexts. The vertical scale indicates ratings ofrelative frequency of use of mother tongue. One interesting bilingual study (Rubin 1968) reports that 92 per cent of the population of Paraguay were bilingual inGuarani and Spanish, with both languages having an official status. There was little sign that this bilingualism was atemporary phenomenon which would disappear as the population became monolingual in Spanish. Factors such as whetherthe conversation was taking place in an urban or rural setting, the sex of the interlocutors, their social orientation to each otherand the topic of conversation all influenced language choice in much the same way as they would be likely to influencestylistic choice in a monolingual community. These social and contextual factors are presented in Figure 26 in the form of atree diagram, which lays out decision on the appropriate code as a set of ordered, binary choices. There have been a great many large-scale surveys of language use in bilingual and multilingual communities, which aretypically concerned with ‘who speaks what language to whom, and when and to what end’. Figure 27, for example, presentsinformation gathered by Parasher (1980) from 350 speakers in two Indian cities on their language use in a number of differentdomains (or sets of similar situations). The methods used by Parasher and others who have carried out similar studies oflanguage use in bi- or multilingual communities are discussed in detail by Fasold (1984: chapter 7). A number of these studies have focused in a more detailed way than have those of Rubin or Parasher on the circumstancesin which speakers shift between different elements in their repertoire. For example, Denison (1972) reported his observationsmade in 1960 in the village of Sauris, in the Italian Alps, of how speakers switched between Italian, Friulian, and German.The main factors which determined language choice seemed to be the setting of the interaction (German was usually confinedto domestic contexts), the participants and the topic. Friulian was usually used in interaction with other local residents outsidethe home, and Denison showed how persons could manipulate their repertoires for social and personal purposes. He described,for example, how one woman used German in an attempt to compel her husband to leave the bar where he was drinking,where Friulian would be the usual choice. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, she seems to select German, the language ofdomesticity, for clearly manipulative purposes. (The situation in Sauris in the 1980s is that German is no longer used; therepertoire now consists of Friulian and Italian.) Perhaps the most detailed and influential study of all which focuses on speakers’ use of their repertoire is the one carriedout by Blom and Gumperz (1972) in Hemnesberget, a small town in Northern Norway, where the manner in which speakersalternate between standard Norwegian (Bokmål) and Norwegian dialect was carefully analysed. The difference betweendialect and standard in Norway is comparable to the difference in central and southern Scotland between Lowland Scots andstandard English, and like Scots speakers (who differ from most speakers of urban dialects in English cities in this respect),Hemnesberget people perceive the two codes as distinct elements in their repertoire. The fact that they can be better analysedat a structural level as overlapping on a continuum (much as Labov analysed the various accents found in New York City) isbeside the point, since Blom and Gumperz are concerned chiefly with the strategies and behaviour of speakers. However, aswe suggested earlier, the psycho-social principles underlying dialect-shifting are similar to those underlying style-shifting andlanguage switching. One particular group of speakers with strong feelings of local loyalty, who were aptly described by Blomand Gumperz as members of the ‘local team’, use the dialect at all times with other locals, and are restricted in their use of thestandard to contexts where it conveys ‘meanings of officiality, expertise and politeness to strangers who are clearly segmentedfrom their personal life’ (1972:434). In complete contrast, the local elite view the standard as their normal code, resorting tothe dialect only for some special effect such as adding local colour to an anecdote.280 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY Blom and Gumperz focus in their analysis on an issue which we have not yet made explicit here, although it underliesmuch of our discussion of style-shifting and code-switching: that is the socially functional nature of a varied repertoire. Sincespeakers can express important ...