Folk Linguistics (review)

The study of folk attitudes toward language has long been a concern of linguists, and coauthor Dennis Preston’s earlier work on the cultural geography of folk knowledge of dialect boundaries has shown how folk perceptions of regional dialects can be systematically studied. Nancy Niedzielski and Preston’s Folk linguistics expands on this work, exploring the beliefs and opinions that ordinary people have about many aspects of language and demonstrating how data on folk perceptions can be collected and analyzed. The work is important in three ways: as part of the ethnography of language (understanding what people think about language), as a basis for work in applied linguistics (using this understanding to organize pedagogy), and as a step in the methodology of folk study (how folk knowledge can be studied).

Ch. 1 (‘Introduction’, 1–40) describes some of the difficulties of folk linguistic study and introduces the idea of folk linguistic awareness, emphasizing the range of factors that ordinary folk are aware of. N & P also discuss the methodology of their work (which involved using a network model to interview 68 demographically- varied respondents), the basis of folk linguistics in prescriptivism, and the fact that folk knowledge changes over time. Ch. 2 (‘Regionalism’, 41–126) discusses P’s previous research on folk dialectology, which involves nonlinguists’ mappings of dialect areas and factor analysis of the folk ratings of correctness, pleasantness, and degree of difference of dialects (in some cases comparing the results of nonlinguists’ perceptions with those of professional studies). N & P also discuss interview evidence from the current study which confirms the salience of stereotypes and explicates folk reasoning about regional and ethnic dialects.

Ch. 3 (‘Social factors’, 127–200) explores interview discourses concerning the nature of dialects, ethnicity, and status. Here N & P demonstrate ways in which nonlinguists perceive ‘the standard’, their awareness of codeswitching, and folk beliefs about African-American Vernacular English. They also discuss the linguistic features associated with status (vocabulary, enunciation), folk attitudes toward taboo, impressions of gender differences, and covert prestige. Ch. 4 (‘Language acquisition and applied linguistics’, 201–60) looks at folk ideas about how children learn languages, noting that a key issue is who has the main influence on language development. And N & P note that folk linguistic concerns are often with the learning of ‘proper language’—i.e. with socialization rather than acquisition per se.

Ch. 5 (‘General and descriptive linguistics’, 261–301) focuses on nonprofessionals’ ideas about language structure and language function, especially in response to problematic structures and to the use of the passive voice. Here N & P note ways in which stress, intonation, function, and pragmatic concerns all play a role in the categorization of sentences for nonprofessionals. The final chapter (Ch. 6, ‘The last words’, 302–24) distinguishes between two types of metalanguage—overt comments about language (metalanguage 1) and unasserted beliefs shared by speakers (metalanguage 2). N & P argue that the understanding of folk beliefs requires a critical analysis of culture as well as speaker reports, suggesting a direction for future studies. The book concludes with an appendix (325–36), notes, references (345–64), and author and subject indices.

Folk Linguistics provides a solid introduction to folk perceptions about a wide range of social and linguistic concepts, acknowledging the complexity of nonprofessionals’ knowledge and also suggesting the larger context of assumptions that underlie reports. N & P begin the book by citing Leonard Bloomfield’s discussion of folk linguistic knowledge in Language. Their work is a nice demonstration of how far our understanding and appreciation of folk knowledge have come since 1933.