Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High (review)

In this excellent book, Penelope Eckert outlines her highly influential approach to sociolinguistic variation and presents as a coherent whole the major findings from her enthnographic/variationist investigation of language variation and change among students in a Detroit-area high school (Belten High), portions of which have been appearing in presentation, article, and book form for a number of years (e.g. Eckert 1989, 1990, 1996; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1995). Highly trained in Labovian variation analysis, E has extended the field in several important ways (outlined in the introduction and Ch. 1). Overriding all is her insistence on linking global patterns of variation, the traditional focus of variation analysis, with highly localized (even individual) linguistic and social patterns. It is only through such linkage, E maintains, that we can gain insight into how large-scale patterns arise in the first place, as well as how people internalize them, and, in the process, reshape them in daily conversational interaction.

Because understanding the local context is so important, E stresses that variationists must reach beyond traditional survey methodology, in which most information is gathered from sociolinguistic interviews with relative strangers, to thorough ethnographic analysis, including intensive participant-observation. She presents her detailed ethnography of Belten High in Ch. 2 and describes her ethnographic methods in Ch. 3. This chapter is an excellent guide to conducting ethnographic fieldwork, particularly for the variationist who may be unaccustomed to such methods. E is careful to note various biases that can arise in conducting ethnographic/variationist fieldwork—for example, the difficulty of achieving a representative sample when one is led to speakers via acquaintances rather than random sampling. (E uses both techniques to help ensure representativeness.) In addition, she supplements her analysis of Belten High with shorter-term investigation of three other Detroit-area schools not only to guard against bias but also to help situate Belten within the larger social landscape. The chapter also includes discussion of a number of practical, ethical, and emotional issues associated with ethnographic study, including the difficulty of obtaining adequate funding (and time) to conduct thorough ethnographic analysis and the emotional difficulty of immersing oneself in someone else’s community for an extended time.

The bulk of the book (Chs. 4–6) comprises a detailed investigation of variation and change in five vocalic variables involved in the Northern Cities Chain Shift (NCCS)—/æ/ raising, /ᵅ/ fronting, lowering and fronting of /ɔ/, backing of /Λ/ and /ε/—and two other variables, negative concord and /ay/ (which may be realized with a raised nucleus or as a monophthong among Detroit-area adolescents). E’s linguistic analysis is just as thorough as her ethnographic analysis: She examines (via VARBRUL analyses) a host of factors as possible internal constraints on variation (Ch. 4) and an even greater range of factors as possible external influences (Ch. 5). For example, she examines various measures of parents’ socioeconomic standing (e.g. mothers’ and fathers’ education and occupation, home value, income level), as possible influences on their children’s speech, only to reach the conclusion that parents’ socioeconomic characteristics have little impact. Instead, peer group plays a far greater role: The most important groups are the ‘jocks’, whose lives are centered around school and the larger corporate culture in which the American high school is embedded, and the ‘burnouts’, who focus on local urban life and resistance to institutional engagement.

Despite the fact that linguistic variation indeed correlates with social group membership, E stresses that it is really in social practice rather than structure that the meaning of variation lies. She notes, ‘A theory of variation as social practice sees speakers as constituting, rather than representing, broad social categories, and it sees speakers as constructing, as well as responding to, the social meaning of variation’ (3). Mediating between the individual speaker and the ‘broad social category’, and between individual and global patterns of language use, is the community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991, Wenger...