Sociolinguistics and Political Economy

Sociolinguistics and Political Economy 493 Sociolinguistics and Political Economy Au th or ‘s y op Pe rs Since the beginnings of sociolinguistics, it has been well established that language and economic structures are interrelated. Other social sciences concerned with political economy have been largely dismissive of lan- guage, viewing it as an entirely symbolic rather than material phenomenon. By contrast, sociolinguists – including both those who describe and those who critique capitalist systems – have repeatedly and con- clusively demonstrated that language is intimately tied to speakers’ material economic position. The earliest work examining this relationship con- centrated on the linguistic dimensions of social class, particularly the social and economic reflexes of the standard and the vernacular forms of a language. The robust correlations that variationist sociolinguists found between socioeconomic status and language use were cited as powerful evidence of the social organization of linguistic variation. Variationist so- ciolinguistics was also instrumental in redirecting scholarship on speakers living in poverty from a framework centering on language deficiencies to one focused on linguistic difference. Whereas the first studies of language and social class were largely framed within a structural-functionalist paradigm in which social classes orient to the same social norms, and in which class organization is con- sensual, scholars informed by Marxist theory have argued that a conflict-based model of class would improve the fit between sociolinguistic findings and the social theories used to account for them, insofar as language is used not only in parallel fashion across classes but also to carve out social differences be- tween classes. The difficulties of objectively determin- ing class led other researchers to focus on social networks, in which occupation figured heavily, as a way of arriving at locally meaningful social groupings for linguistic analysis. Social class has been at the center of a longstanding debate in sociolinguistics: how to account for the widespread pattern in which women are frequently found to surpass men in the use of standard variables. One early explanation for this pattern was that women, lacking equal access to real-world power, use language as a symbolic resource to claim social prestige by pro- jecting through their speech a class position above their actual material circumstances. A revised version of this argument posits that women more than men are socially evaluated not on their accomplishments C ! 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. but on their personhood, and that language is a crucial component of self-presentation. This account allows for the possibility (which has been empirically demon- strated in variationist-sociolinguistic research) that some female speakers might seek to project a work- ing-class rather than middle-class persona and hence will outpace their male counterparts in the use of vernacular rather than standard variables. This analysis of the semiotic power of language relies heavily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a cen- tral theorist in sociolinguistic discussions of political economy. For Bourdieu, language is a form of capital, a term that for him includes not only economic power but also social, cultural, and symbolic power. Bourdieu argues that when a linguistic market is con- stituted in a society, the distribution of linguistic capital – that is, the form of the language imbued with the most power within the market – is uneven across speakers. The economic analogy is not wholly metaphorical, for Bourdieu notes that power in the linguistic marketplace tends to extend to power in the economic marketplace as well. However, language can function as a primarily symbolic form of capital that enables speakers to accrue local prestige, such as popularity among high school students in the United States, although even in this situation speak- ers’ choice of linguistic variables tends to correlate with their orientation to socioeconomically divergent pathways after high school: jobs versus college. The relationship between language and work, which has long informed variationist socioinguistic research, has also been explored within other para- digms. Ethnographic sociolinguists have documented the ways in which opportunities in the labor market are tied to language, demonstrating not only that lack of access to linguistic capital prevents economic mobility, but also that even within a limited field of options speakers may make agentive and strategic linguistic choices to promote their own social goals, whether these involve economic advancement or participation within a local linguistic and economic market. Although scholarship on standardization, language shift and loss, and the international spread of English has shown that broad political-economic forces such as nationalism, colonialism, industrializa- tion, and globalization have dramatic and often cata- strophic consequences for language, such research also demonstrates that these forces cannot fully determine speakers’ linguistic practices. In contrast to much of the work on language and economic systems discussed above, which considers the linguistic consequences of broad economic struc- tures and processes, research within discourse analysis on al M Bucholtz, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 11, pp. 493–495