Chapter published in:
Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 9–26

The sociolinguistic city

| Carnegie Mellon University
What might we learn if sociolinguists’ objects of study were cities rather than speech communities within cities? Drawing on urban sociology, I suggest that we think of a city as a site of encounter among different sociolinguistic worlds. This would force us to confront heterogeneity, to ask how and when disparate linguistic resources, language ideologies, and communicative practices bump up against each other and impinge on each other. We would have to consider urban mobilities and their sociolinguistic consequences. We would also need to rethink how sociolinguistic practices circulate in non-face-to-face contexts, asking about the role of material artifacts in this process. I illustrate each of these points with examples from my and others’ research.
Keywords: cities, urban studies, heterogeneity, encounter, mobility, circulation, Pittsburgh, Sydney, migration, sociolinguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cities as sites of encounter
    • 2.1Heterogeneity and sociolinguistic encounter
    • 2.2City mobilities and urban encounters
    • 2.3Circulation in the city: How change spreads
  • 3.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.01joh
References
Beal, Joan C.
2009 Enregisterment, commodification, and historical context. “Geordie” versus “Sheffieldish”. American Speech 84(2). 138–156. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bodnar, John E., Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber
1983 Lives of their own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Byington, Margaret F.
1974 Homestead. The households of a mill town. Pittsburgh, PA/London: University of Pittsburgh Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Carnegie Corporation of New York
2013 How do you pronounce “Carnegie?” https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=fkWsv7ZLgn4 (26 May 2019.)
Cheshire, Jenny et al.
2011 Contact, the feature pool and the speech community. The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2). 151–196. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eberhardt, Maeve
2008 The low-back merger in the Steel City. African American English in Pittsburgh. American Speech 83(3). 284–311. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009a Identities and local speech in Pittsburgh. A study of regional African American English. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh dissertation, Linguistics.Google Scholar
2009b The sociolinguistics of ethnicity in Pittsburgh. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(6). 1443–1454. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 Enregisterment of Pittsburghese and the local African American community. Language & Communication 32(4). 358–371. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope
2000 Linguistic variation as social practice (Language in Society 27). Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hamnett, Chris
2003 Gentrification, postindustrialism, and industrial and occupational restructuring in global cities. In Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds.), A companion to the city, 331–341. Malden, MA et al.: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Horvath, Barbara
1998 Finding a place in Sydney. Migrants and language change. In Peter Trudgill and Jenny Cheshire (eds.), The sociolinguistics reader, vol. 2: Multilingualism and variation, 90–102. Abingdon/New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara
2009 Pittsburghese shirts. Commodification and the enregisterment of an urban dialect. American Speech 84(2). 157–175. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 Speaking Pittsburghese. The story of a dialect. Oxford/New York, NY: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew E. Danielson
2006 Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Linguistics 34(2). 77–104. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara and Dan Baumgardt
2004 “Pittsburghese” online. Vernacular norming in conversation. American Speech 79(2). 115–145. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara, Neeta Bhasin and Denise Wittkofski
2002 “Dahntahn Pittsburgh”. Monophthongal /aw/ and representations of localness in southwestern Pennsylvania. American Speech 77(2). 148–166. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara and Scott F. Kiesling
2008 Indexicality and experience. Exploring the meanings of /aw/-monophthongization in Pittsburgh. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(1). 5–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara and Calvin Pollak
2016 Mobilities, materialities, and the changing meanings of Pittsburgh speech. Journal of English Linguistics 44(3). 254–275. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara et al.
2015 Pittsburgh speech and Pittsburghese (DOE 11). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Karp, David A., Gregory P. Stone and William C. Yoels
1991 Being urban. A sociology of city life, 2nd edn. New York, NY: Praeger.Google Scholar
Kelly, Marjorie
2003 Projecting an image and expressing identity. T-shirts in Hawaii. Fashion Theory 7(2). 191–212. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1966 The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
1972 Language in the inner city. Studies in the black English vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
2001 Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors (Language in Society 29). Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mac Giolla Chriost, Diarmait
2007 Language and the city. Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McCool, Sam
1982 Sam McCool’s new Pittsburghese. How to speak like a Pittsburgher. Pittsburgh, PA: Hayford Press.Google Scholar
Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy
1985 Linguistic change, social network, and speaker innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21(2). 339–384. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Milroy, Lesley
1987 Language and social networks, 2nd edn. (Language in Society 2). Oxford/New York, NY: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Thomas D.
2010 “A Latino community takes hold”. Reproducing semiotic landscapes in media discourse. In Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski (eds.), Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space, 168–186. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S.
1996 The founder principle in creole genesis. Diachronica 13(1). 83–134. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Park, Robert E.
1925 The city: Suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment. In Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie (eds), The city, 1–46. Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
1926 The urban community as a spatial pattern and a moral order. In Ernest W. Burgess (ed.), The urban community, 3–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Santa Ana, Otto
2002 Brown tide rising. Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael
1993 Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In John A. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive language. Reported speech and metapragmatics, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simmel, Georg
1950 The metropolis and mental life. in Kurt E. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 409–424. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Smakman, Dick and Patrick Heinrich
(eds.) 2018 Urban sociolinguistics. The city as a linguistic process and experience. Abingdon/New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Symes, Colin
1987 Keeping abreast with the times. Towards an iconography of t-shirts. Studies in Popular Culture 12(1). 87–100.Google Scholar
Tönnies, Ferdinand
1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen. Leipzig: Fues.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
1974 The social differentiation of English in Norwich (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 13). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wirth, Louis
1938 Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology 44: 1–24. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zackal, Juarin
2014 7 things you need to kow about the Pittsburgh marathon. Pittsburgh Magazine. http://​www​.pittsburghmagazine​.com​/Pittsburgh​-Magazine​/May​-2014​/Rules​-of​-the​-Road/ (3 May 2015.)
Zorbaugh, Harvey W.
1929 The Gold Coast and the slum. A sociological study of Chicago’s Near North Side. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar