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Reviewed by:
  • Folk Linguistics
  • James R. Dow
Folk Linguistics. By Nancy A. Niedzielski and Dennis R. Preston. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 122. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. xx + 375 , 47 figures, 2 tables, transcription conventions, appendix, notes, bibliography, indices.)

According to the authors, this book is about stankos, Leonard Bloomfield's term to describe talk about language beliefs by nonlinguists. More specifically, it is an analysis of nearly sixty hours of taped interviews made by 11 field-workers with 68 respondents. The interviewers themselves were quite diverse, six women and five men, with five being speakers of a non European language. The respondents were a demographically varied group primarily from Southeastern Michigan, including nine African Americans and some from other ethnic backgrounds, (e.g., Polish and German). The book is divided into six chapters and includes a summary of each individual respondent, anonymous of course, with gender, age, educational level, and a brief work history. Similar brief information is offered for each interviewer.

As the authors develop their concept of "folk linguistics" or "talk about talk," they carefully address the objectives of folk linguistic study, and lay out their methodology and fieldwork principles. Building on previous proposals for a study of folk linguistics, the authors suggest that their study is primarily concerned with four topics, namely what people say about the following topics: (1) What is said; (2) How it is done; (3) How they react to what is said; and (4) Why they say what they do, and react the way they do (p. 30).

In other words, this book is not a traditional study of the folk speech of some specific age, work, or ethnic group, but is clearly an analysis of folk ideas and expressions aboutlanguage. The authors use folkto "refer to those who are not trained professionals in the area under investigation. . . . We definitely do not use folkto refer to rustic, ignorant, uneducated, backward, primitive, minority, isolated, marginalized, or lower status groups or individuals" (p.viii).

Four chapters address specifics: "Regionalism," "Social Factors," "Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics," and "General and Descriptive Linguistics." The chapter on regionalism is an intriguing presentation of "folk" conceptualizations of divisions among American English. There are a total of 21 hand-drawn dialect maps where the respondents were asked to locate such areas as "Southern," "Midwestern," etc. The rough hand-drawn outlines were then traced onto a digitizing pad, which produced composite maps for analysis. This kind of aggregate analysis allows the authors to establish "folk" concepts of the various dialect regions. These analyses are supported by conversational evidence from the respondents. In the chapter on "Social Factors," African American Vernacular English (AAVE) became the central theme in the interviews. Interestingly enough both the African American and the non-African American respondents focused on this variety, using various terms to describe it, most often simply "slang." In the conversational evidence common verbal biases against African Americans surfaced, (e.g., "lazy" and "low class") while some noted that AAVE has "crept into white culture" (p. 137).

In chapter 4 on language acquisition, we learn that both "formalist" and "functionalist" theories are found among folk linguists; however, the folk do "not engage in any discussion as to whether language is innate or learned behavior" (p. 203), showing a clear preference [End Page 504]for the sociofunctional areas of language acquisition. In one case we find an intriguing reference to an innate and "private" language of children, (e.g., Dell Hymes's description of the Ashanti where "infants are not allowed in the room when a woman is giving birth, for the infant may communicate with the unborn child in this shared language and, warning it of the tough life ahead, cause a hard delivery due to the unborn's unwillingness to emerge" [p. 210]). Chapter 5 details the concepts of phonology, lexicon, and syntax, and concludes with an extensive presentation of folk ideas on the passive voice.

The authors use their empirical data to establish that there does indeed exist a metalanguage,(i.e., "talk about talk"), but they then move to a discussion of what they refer to as "metalanguage 2," "unasserted beliefs which members of...

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