Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The New School is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Research.
http://www.jstor.org
ociolinguisticsidentifies
an areaofresearch, one whoseprob-
lemscanbe studiedbymembers ofa variety
ofdisciplines.2Never-
the
theless, term does
sociolinguistics pose the specialquestionof
therelationbetweenlinguistics and sociology.It is to thisques-
tionthatthispaperis addressed.
Mytitleis adaptedfromSapir(1938),as aresomeofmywords.
A generation ago Sapirsawin anotherdisciplinea reference point
fromwhichto highlight certainlimitationsof culturalanthro-
pology.He wishedto transcend a modeofanalysisthatabstracted
fromvariation and persons.Todaysociology is a reference point
fromwhichone can highlight certainlimitations of linguistics,
if one wishesto transcendagaina modeof analysisthatfailsin
"takingaccountofhumanbeings"(Sapir1938:575). Sapirchose
an examplefroman earlierscholar(Dorsey),thatof theOmaha
Indian,Two Crows;I havefollowedhim in usinga similarex-
ample,thatoftheMenomini, White-Thunder.
II
Untilrecently and sociology
linguistics seemedmilesapartin
theUnitedStates.Structural wasconceivedas a disci-
linguistics
i Presented at session 67, "Sociolinguistics," 61st annual meeting, American
Sociological Association, Miami Beach, Florida, September 1, 1966. I am indebted
to ProfessorEverett Hughes for inviting me to participate, and to Murray Wax
and Michael Micklin for their discussion.
2 The firsttwo papers of the session (see n. 1), tor example, are Dy an antnro-
pologist and a psychologist. For a general discussion of such hybrid terms, see
Hymes (1966a).
Ill
What would one have needed to knowabout White-Thunder's
generationin orderto describethe sociolinguisticsystemof which
it was part,in orderto explain the processby which the change
of systemcame about? Bloomfield'ssketches(pp. 394-396) give
us someclues. One mustobviouslybegin,notwiththe Menomini
language,but with the speech communitywhich comprisesit,
English,and occasionallyotherlanguages. Social positionsmust
be specified,
fortheMenomini,likeothercommunities, pervasively
evaluatepronunciations, lexiconand grammar,and thejudgments
of "good" and "bad" are dependent (according to Bloomfield)
ultimatelyon which persons are taken as models of conduct,
includingspeech. Types of use mustbe specified,forBird-Hawk
(who spoke only Menomini,possiblyalso a littleOjibwa) "spoke
with bad syntaxand meagre,often inept vocabulary,yet with
occasionalarchaisms,"once he departedfromordinaryconversa-
tion. Stylesof speech- over-elegant,
archaic,emphaticor rhetori-
cal, can be distinguished. One can guess that Menomini was
perhaps being compartmentalized to certaindomains of use, as
has been the case with the survivingIndian languages of the
AmericanSouthwest.
Such observationsare incidentalin Bloomfield'saccount. An
adequate understandingof the nature and changes of socio-
linguisticsystemsmusthave a systematic basis. The usual theory
IV
The need forsociolinguistic descriptions mayappearobvious
and important to a sociological audience.Suchis notyetwidely
thecasein linguistics. A decadeago Americanlinguists, satisfied
generally withtheavailabletheoryfordescription of language,
beganto turnattention freshly to the use of linguisticsin the
of A
study society. thoroughgoing critique of that theoretical
basishasresulted in a newand ambiguoussituation.Whilesome
linguistsare at workon sociologicalproblems,the issuesthat
dominatelinguistic discussion are almostwhollythoseofdescrip-
tivetheory.And the tendency to separatelinguisticformfrom
socialcontexthas receivedrenewedimpetusfromthe insistence
bytheleadingtheorist ofthepresent day(Chomsky 1965:3):
"Linguistictheory is concerned primarily withan ideal,speaker-
listenerin a completely homogeneous speech-community, who
knowsits languageperfectly, and is unaffected by such gram-
matically irrelevantconditions as memory limitations,distractions,
shiftsofattention and interest, and errors(randomor character-
istic)in applyinghis knowledgeof the languagein actual per-
formance."
The goal of explanation in linguisticsis setas universalprop-
ertiesofthehumanmind;thepresentinterest and relevanceofa
sociolinguistic is
perspective rejected.
TABLE I
Descriptive Comparative
Structure Invariance Variation
Use (Function) Variation Invariance
TABLE II
Descriptive Comparative
Structure Variation Invariance
Use (Function) Invariance Variation
Source of Tables I and II: Hymes, "Why Linguistics Needs the Sociologist,"
American Sociological Association, 61st annual meeting, Miami, Fla., Session 67,
Sept. 1, 1966.
V
The componentsof "functional"linguistics,like the compo-
nents of sociolinguisticdescription(e.g., such as mentionedfor
"Structural" "Functional"
REFERENCES