History of Sociolinguistics

1. Session One
Ferguson and
Fishman:
Sociolinguistics and
the Sociology of
Language
Saeed Rezaei
Sharif University of Technology
srezaei@sharif.edu
February, 2016

2. William Labov (1927-)
 American Sociolinguist at University of Pennsylvania
 Married to Gillian Sankoff who is famous for her works in Pidgin in
Canada
 Famous for his works in variationsist sociolinguistics about
language variation in New York City published as The Social
Stratification of English in New York City (1966)

3. Basil Bernstein (1924-2000)
 Famous for his works in the sociology of education
 London-based sociolinguist
 His theory of codes

4. Dell Hymes (1927-2009)
 American Sociolinguist who established the journal of Language in Society
 Made a demarcation between Linguistic Anthropology and
Anthropological Linguistics
 Noted for his “ethnography of communication” and “communicative
competence model” in response to Chomsky’s theories
 See Language in Society (2010) for an honorary volume in memory of Dell
Hymes as the founder of the journal

5. John J. Gumperz (1922-2013)
 American Sociolinguist noted for his works at the University of California,
Berkley
 Was trained in dialectology, Indian dialect, and code-switching
 Famous for his works in Interactional Sociolinguistics which paved the way
for discourse analysts and other sociolinguists
 Focused on how the interlocutors’ characteristics affected the interactional
pattern among them

6. Charles A. Ferguson (1921-1998)
 A Stanford University based Professor of Linguistics
 Noted for his works and article on “diglossia”
 More of a Linguist than a sociologists in comparison to Joshua Fishman

7. Joshua Aaron Fishman (1926-2015)
 Noted for his works in minority languages and ethnicity
 Worked on Yiddish, language planning, nationalism, and language policy
 Founder of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (1973). In
complementary position with Dell Hymes’ Language in Society
 He focused more on the sociology aspect of sociolinguistics whereas
others such as Labov took side with the Linguistic side more
 He learned Latin, French and German at high school.
 At the University of Pennsylvania, he added Greek, Modern Hebrew and
Old English. Completing a BA in philosophy, his graduate major was
Oriental Studies; he studied Moroccan Arabic verbs and the phonology
and morphology of Bengali.

8. Joshua Aaron Fishman (1926-)
Continued
 Zellig Harris was his graduate adviser.
 With support from the Intensive Language Program of the American
Council of Learned Societies, he continued to study Moroccan Arabic and
developed teaching materials for spoken Arabic.
 Inspired by a visit of Roman Jakobson, he saw the value of uniting
psychological and linguistic approaches to the study of child language.
 He wrote an unpublished paper on Arabic politeness formulas in 1955 and
published an article on Arabic baby talk (Ferguson, 1956)
 It was his classic paper on diglossia (Ferguson, 1959) that was his first
major contribution to sociolinguistics, and, according to Huebner (1999),
his best-known work.

9. Einar Haugen (1906-1994)
 American Linguist at Wisconsin and Harvard
 Famous for his works in Scandinavian language and
culture

10. Uriel Weinreich (1926-1967)
 American Polish linguist noted for his studies on Yiddish
 He was a Jew and Joshua Fishman’s friend
 atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry
 Influenced his student “William Labov”
 Also noted for his theories in Semantics

11. Susan Ervin-Tripp (1927-)
 American sociolinguist and psycholinguist noted for her
works in child language acquisition at University of California
at Berkley.

12. History of Sociolinguistics
Ferguson and Fishman
 All except Bernstein (London) (although he was invited) attended the Linguistic
Institute in Bloomington in the summer of 1964, the landmark event that launched the
field.
 Bloomington 1964 was a milestone rather than a starting point, but a significant one.
 Fishman and Ferguson meet each other at Bloomington and this sparks long term
intellectual flirtations between the two
 Ferguson was mainly a linguist and Fishman a sociologist
 The role of funding agencies like Ford for the growth of the burgeoning field of
Sociolinguistics
 Conferences and Workshops
 The cooperation between Ferguson and Fishman accelerated the growth and expansion
of this field

13. History of Sociolinguistics
Ferguson and Fishman
 In all the conferences held, the sociologists and Linguists
could not find much in common because of their different
research methodology and interests. Chomsky rejected all
social issues as “not interesting”.

14. Fishman and Ferguson meet each Other!
 They first met each other in Bloomington in 1964 where they were
neighbors and talked a lot about their areas of interests.
 For Fishman, Ferguson remained his main teacher of linguistics. While
their research paths diverged, with Ferguson firmly on the linguistic
and Fishman firmly on the sociological side, their early conversations
and continuing association had a major influence on the growth and
shape of the field

15. So what…?!
 What do you think about the date of these publications and the efforts
made by early sociolinguistics?
 What significance can you find for the Iranian context?
 History may prove the value of our current works!

16. Other References