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okay good morning good afternoon or good evening i hope you're all safe and healthy wherever you are and in spite of your government i'm certain we have a wide international audience right now because today we have the pleasure and the honor to listen to william labov at the zeberlin supported event linguists online as you know linguists online is promoted by the brazilian linguistics association abdullin in cooperation with sipple the permanent international committee of linguists alfal the latin american association of linguistics and philology sael the argentine society of linguistic studies the lsa linguistic society of america

and the lagb linguistics association of great britain we thank tragic points for providing simultaneous translation to portuguese my name is levi oshiro i'm a sociolinguist at university of campinas and out of the many other more important people who could be here in my shoes today it turned out to be my privilege to introduce bill above lebov is one of the very few who truly does not need an introduction so because we are all very familiar with his groundbreaking books and articles i'd like instead to highlight some of labov's contribution that may not be immediately visible

when reading sally italia monty's making waves the story of variation is social linguistics it's not hard to see at least two major patterns in sociolinguist stories of how they become a sociolinguist or how they've come to be associated with bill above the first pattern is some variation of the statement when i first read x x being the social stratification of english in new york city or the logic of non-standard english or the social motivation of a sound change among others so when i first read x i thought it was brilliant and i wanted to do

the same there are few such statements by linguists such as brad guy peter treadgle and john rickford and incidentally that was also my case when i first read empirical foundations for a theory of language change authored by weimer klabov and herzog i just knew that's what i wanted to do now the second pattern we find in sally's book is people saying we were interested in doing something similar to lebovs work in new york city so we contacted him and then we learned that lobov has been directly or indirectly responsible for helping setting up projects such

as roger schweiz collection of 700 plus social linguistic interviews in detroit in the 1960s the montreal corpus organized by gillian sankoff and riado sedergren and david seinkoff in the 1970s or of special importance to us in brazil the mobrow and later on the people corporate collected at the federal university of rio de janeiro with greg guy's fundamental help and tony nadu and median langley's leadership which set the spark for many other similar projects in brazil so to put it shortly label's willingness to share his knowledge has helped set up social linguistic research groups all over

the world and getting in contact with his work is always inspiring so i invite you all now to get inspired by william lebov in his talk justice as a linguistic matter la bob thank you so much for accepting aberlin's invitation the floor is yours now your turn bill say hi hello good morning um i'm going to be talking about justice as a linguistic matter the subject of this paper stems from the evaluation of my work by a committee that awarded the telcott parsons prize of the american association of arts and sciences in 2019 the committee

recognized the contributions i've made to the quantitative analysis of linguistic change and variation for the development of linguistics as a science then they also noted that throughout his career social justice concerns have fueled lebal's research i'd like to explore here the connection between these two aspects of my work since it's not obvious how the analysis of linguistic variation leads to advances in social justice the merriam-webster dictionary's treatment of justice revolves about those senses of just that mean conforming to fact or reason and those that mean morally upright are good social justice generally refers to the

equal distribution of wealth opportunities and privileges if the quantitative approach to linguistic analysis can move the speech community in that direction it's encouraging for the future of our field with that thought in mind i'd like to examine the social impact of linguistic analysis in some of the most prominent chapters of the research that i've been involved in over the past 60 years i'd like to thank the help my colleague gillian sankoff who has been very important in all these developments now i entered the study of linguistics after 10 years as an industrial chemist i was

a maker of printings and i brought with me the habits of numerical recording testing and experimentation i left behind a career of accumulation of trade secrets and entered into the pursuit of the universal properties of human language at columbia university there i found a very different mode of gathering data for most linguists at that time it was by asking the question can you say this can you say that it occurred to me that the field could profit by the adoption of the new invention the tape recorder which preserved what people actually did say i also

found that it was good that i brought my numerical habits with me because there was considerable variation in the way that people said the same thing in my effort to record linguistic variation i introduced the concept of the linguistic variable closed set of possible options which could be used to calculate frequencies it wasn't clear how widely it would be accepted the only numbers in most linguistic articles were the numbers on the pages so i expected decades of stiff resistance to the quantitative study of change in variation but i was surprised my first report on the

social motivation of a sound change on martha's vineyard was greeted with a wave of approval at the national meeting of the linguistic society of america i then took a course on survey methodology with herbert hyman of columbia's bureau of applied social research i carried out a study of new york's lower east side using a subset of the sample created by richard cloward and lloyd olin for their study of delinquency and opportunity this diagram is typical of the linguistic results he takes off from the observation that in new york city r will sometimes be pronounced like

a vowel depending on who he's speaking to who plus new york may be pronounced new york or new york or hardcore may be pronounced as hardcore unless r is followed by a vowel as in horrible where it's always a consonant the vertical axis on this diagram shows the percent pronunciation of r horizontal axis the style of speech in the interview ranging from the most casual speech to the reading of wordless and the various lines show the graduated performance of speakers from five social classes the pattern was so regular that the columbia sociologists said to me

you don't have to use statistical analysis to detect the pattern of independent factors here social class and style with the additional feature of crossover by the lower middle class than the most careful styles this work and the further efforts of myself and my students were accepted as a valuable addition to the field of linguistics as long as they were based on the closed set of values that were the results of linguistic analysis many other speech communities were studied detroit boston san francisco london sydney and many other languages in paris buenos aires rio de janeiro helsinki

well by the time the second edition of the new york city study was published 35 other cities have been studied on this model the n-wave meeting devoted to this approach to linguistic analysis is in its 49th year and the journal language variation and change is in its 32nd year variation in dialects has been found to be controlled by sets of many independent variables and linguistic change has been found to be controlled by the interaction of linguistic and social variables we're directly following the citation of this work on linguistic variation the committee has a discussion of

social justice and my efforts to improve literacy for speakers of stigmatized languages and it doesn't immediately follow that the quantitative study of linguistic variation led to an involvement with such matters it's true that the new york city dialect was heavily stigmatized and most of our subjects had strong feelings about it but it was rare to find someone whose life chances have been injured by the way they talked well it's true that the new york city dialect was heavily stigmatized and most of our subjects had strong feelings about it but it was rare to find someone

whose life chances had been injured by the way they talked from the point of view of linguists who put all dialects on an equal plane new yorkers are unjust to their own dialect but it's not the type of social problem which calls for social justice the link that did lead in that direction was a methodological one the 24 of speakers in my sample who were african-americans did represent the lower east side but there's reason to think that they represented the speech of neighborhoods that were 100 african americans no reason to think that so i applied

for funds from the office of education to provide a linguistic analysis of what we then recognize as non-standard negro english i proposed to find out if there was a connection between that speech pattern and the high rate of reading failure in harlem schools we sampled in that old neighborhood in harlem with methods similar to the lower east side but the main study was focused on local street groups on on and 12th street where we rented a clubhouse not far from the university we enlisted two young african-american men to interview the members of local street clubs

the cobras the jets the t-birds they were recorded as individuals and as groups one of the linguistic variables that drew most attention was the realization of the copula which connects the subject of the sentence with various other elements it may be realized as am is or are were contracted to endless or are reduced to zero in african-american vernacular english some linguists saw this as evidence that aave was related to the creole languages of west africa and the caribbean so we have he fast and everything he do everybody not black but instead of zero we also

encounter contracted and full forms i think that's what he is a brother the quantitative study of these copula forms turned out to be a major result of the harlem research the frequency of full contracted and zero forms was determined by the preceding and following grammatical context as well as the age and social history of the speaker in the final analysis it appeared that whatever standard english could contract aave could delete and conversely where standard english could not contract shown by an asteroid's care aav could not delete strong evidence that they share a common structure so

here we see in standard english he's as nice as he says he's is impossible and he it's impossible to say he's as nice as he says the next slide shows the frequency of full contracted and deleted forms of the copula for phenomenal subjects and full noun phrases for four street groups and white adolescents from neighboring regions of the city so here we have percentages of full contracted deleted forms of these with pronounced subjects or other non-phrase subjects for six groups in single and goof style the uniformity of the pattern for the aave speakers is evident

and also the way in which aave is welded into a common structure with standard english there are features of aave which are independent of other other iodox such as the aspect marker a stressed bin which designates conditions that have been true for a long time and they're still true but the figure in its lease slide 8 epitomizes the finding of the harlem study supported by many others arguments that aave is a dialect of english the study of linguistic variation in other cities showed that this and other structural relationships were quite uniform across the country new

york detroit berkeley los angeles they texas a common pattern for the deletion of the calculator least of all before noun phrases and increasingly before adjectives locatives verbs and future constructions with going to ghana so quantitative analysis of this common structure have played a major role in the development of new techniques of multivariate analysis as well as the social evaluation of dialects this analysis of linguistic structure is not readily absorbed by many educational psychologists ryder and engelmann contended that african-american youth had no language at all that the absence of the copula was the absence of any

logical structure whatsoever the writer reports that the black four-year-old children they study could make no statements of any kind or quote the language of culturally deprived children is found is merely an underdeveloped version of standard english but as a basically mode of expressive behavior if children should answer the question where's the squirrel with the vernacular form in the tree they would be reprehended by various means and made to say the squirrel is in the tree after two years of immersion in the harlem neighborhoods we were in a good position to assess the relation of dialect

structure through education and social mobility next slide contains results first published in the teachers college record it shows grade level and reading level for two groups of speakers between group four and two grade four and grade 10 in school 32 isolated individuals which we call the wings and the 16 group members 46 group members in addition they're a serious sign of social conflict this symbols with arrows indicate there are eight members who had been expelled or suspended from school now the lames on the left were not good readers they were as a whole a year

behind the school norms the blue diagonal shows the few who are on great level in reading but the street group members were much worse and the difference between them grew greater with age the group members had an absolute ceiling of fifth grade and only one of the 46 was on grade level in addition this slide shows strong evidence of social conflict between the school system and african-american youth only one of the lames have been expelled or suspended but eight of the group members indicated by arrows that they were no longer allowed in school 13 others

have been marked as behavior problems in the school's disciplinary records we also found no correlation with linguistic ability the triangles on this diagram represent speakers who had found we had found were outstanding and verbal ability within the vernacular domain of narrative song and ritual insults in the interviews and group sessions we find full expression of the conflicts between the vernacular norms and those of the dominant one society including the educational psychologists now the paper that i wrote entitled the logic of non-standard english attempted to do justice to the logic of aave most often reprinted was

a discussion between the interviewer casey and larry hawthorne a 16 year old member of the jets then suppose there's a god would it be right or black you be white man what why i tell you why cause the average whitey out here got everything you did and they got you know you understand so um for ordering for that to happen you know it ain't no black guard that's doing that the climactic sentence there ain't no black god it uses three rules that are all linguist regardless perfectly logical though non-standard use of it in place of

the dummy subject there ain't as the contraction it is not and the reinforcement of the negative with no these are matters of surface formulation they're not the semantics of meaning well larry's statement is not so much a cry for social justice as an assessment of the situation that highlights the injustice of that situation well the weight of social linguistic information on aave accumulated until it was brought to bear in a cry for social justice through legal channels this happened in ann arbor michigan the board of education in that town in an effort to diminish racial

segregation had promised promoted the construction of low-income housing in an upper middle class area risky considered an excellent school the martin luther king school but after a few years it appeared that something had gone terribly wrong african-american parents in this housing project brought suit against the city and the state for failing to teach black children to read they allege that a the ann arbor school district had placed or threatened to place five children in classes for the mentally handicapped b placed or threatened to place two of them in classes and programs for learning disabled children

c suspended or threatened to suspend two others from classes and so on now linguist geneva smitherman of wayne state university organized the prosecution's case providing 184 extracts from the tape recordings of the school children tabulating the results on their use of the copula she showed the same pattern we saw in the harlem studies i was among the array of linguists she summoned to demonstrate that aave was a distinct system now judge charles joyner delivered his opinion on july 12th of 79. he found the complaint valid citing president nixon's 1972 message to congress quote school authorities

must take appropriate action to overcome whatever language barriers exist unquote he found that all of the distinguished researchers and professionals testified to the existence of a language system which is a part of the english language but different in significant respects from the standard thing was used in the school setting the judge charles joyner then found for the plaintiffs and directed this ann arbor school board to submit to him within 30 days a plan defining the exact steps to be taken one to identify the children speaking black english and two to use that knowledge and teaching

students how to read standard english in the years that followed not much progress has been made in following judge joyner's direction programs for quantitative analysis wait we're losing we're missing a page between african-american vernacular english and standard english i've met violent objections from parents teachers and the general public who have not absorbed the linguistics view of black english as is later evident in the ebonics controversy following the work of the oakland school board but the issues have been stated the linguistic society of america has taken a stand in a position paper by john rickford who

was then president of the society and more than one program for contrastive analysis is underway in addition to myself linguist lisa greene and charity hudley and christine rowlands and among others have initiated programs specifically directed to teachers you need to know more about the language of the children they're teaching the testimony and issues of the ann arbor case bear on the issues of this presentation as i wrote at that time my aim here is to show how linguistic analysis can be applied to an important issue and then to resolve if i can the contradiction that

is present at the outset between the objectivity needed for linguistic research and commitment to a social position as an adversary situation i came to the university of pennsylvania in 1970 where i taught two courses that played a major role in the development of quantitative analysis one the study of the speech community where students entered local philadelphia neighborhoods to gather speech data and two quantitative analysis where they learned to analyze it my colleagues gillian sankoff joined me in 1979 she focusing on multilingual communities and me on the single dialects that i learned early in life over

the decades we received strong support from nsf and from the university sustaining the first of many social linguistic labs well in more recent years we've developed a pen computational methods that can analyze our recordings measuring simultaneously the physical and social dimensions of the data the fave program fave to analyze the changes in the sound system of the language was developed at penn with great gains in speed and accuracy it's now used by our colleagues throughout the world and we're very pleased to report that the university of pennsylvania library has digitized our entire archive of 7

100 interviews just a thousand of my own to create the pen social linguistic archive and we're working with linguistic data consortium to make it available to others researchers now my report on the ann arbor trial included a principle of a debt incurred an investigator who has obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community has an obligation to make knowledge of that data available to the community when it has need to it by that time my own salary was 10 times what it had been in colombia but the speakers who had recorded and we had

recorded in harlem had suffered a different fate language in the inner city my book based on the language of the african-american youth we had recorded in harlem began with the dedication to the jets the culvers and the thunderbirds who took on all odds and we dealt all low cards at that time i had not yet found a way to use our linguistic knowledge to contribute to the african-american community and the situation in philadelphia neighborhoods was no better than it had been in holland at penn we finally did get around to doing something useful with our

knowledge of aave i had a strategic lunch with ira harkovy of the netter center the ed the university organization committed to social justice i converted my course on african american vernacular english to an academically based service called learning course over 10 years we support from nsf and elsewhere we developed a tutoring program that gives children an understanding of how the alphabet works within a broader view of who is to blame for what's wrong with the world this diagram reflects our understanding of the way in which aave interacts with that wider world but the instruction of

the tutoring program has content that links it with that world content that appears in the section so reading materials for the program this material in the format of a graphic novel was the reading room the stories i wrote for the chapters of the reading road drew heavily on what we've learned from the speakers of the dialect now one example is the story take off your coat it's about a boy who gets into trouble through doing growing good on his way to school he stops to get a cat out of a tree but unfortunately rips a

hole in his pants at school he can't explain why he refuses to take off his coat and he winds up in detention these stories illustrate the wealth of experience with social justice when we ask were you ever blamed for something you didn't do the incident that inspired this story actually happened it was in the school records of larry hawthorne who we heard a few minutes ago speaking on brother how whether god is white or black now the reading wrote presents the world as the readers know it where they are continually blamed for things they did

not do it only it not only says to the reader you know what i'm saying but it also says i am on your side you don't have to be a good little kid to read learn to read if the undergraduate tutors responded to the reading road as well the grassroots movement that began in 2008 and continues to this day 10 students do all the recruiting planning tutoring and organizing of the pen and reading institute where 50 to 60 undergraduate tutors use the reading road to tutor second and third graders in local schools now i'm only

the guy who gives encouraging talks at the beginning of the year now the study of dialect geography was originally a conservative and traditional field studies of vowel changes including my own study of new york city were based upon acoustic judgments of height backness and length by beginning in the 1960s instrumental methods of acoustic analysis were developed which could apply to field recordings by the end of the century great increases in speed and accuracy were made possible by computational developments in the 1990s the penn social linguistic lab undertook a national survey contacting by telephone at least

two speakers in every city of the united states and canada with a population of over fifty thousand the result told heavily on the progress of linguistic shifts cases of merger where two valves collapsed into the same area and follow rotations where the series of valves moved consecutively the progress of these changes was an important factor in the development of automatic speech regulations the mapping of all these systems was accomplished in only a few years and published in the atlas of north american english in the year 2006 it also provided a dramatic example of how quantitative

research can decide matters of social justice this is the case of paul prince of ali the cargo handler for the american airways in los angeles a series of bomb threats against the airline have been made by telephone and recorded let's go here the police the prosecutor and the executives of pan-american airlines thought that the caller sounded like prince of ali who was known to be a disgruntled employee when he was arrested in february of 1984 he was able to post twenty thousand dollars bail but then the bomb threats continued in april he was arrested again

and held on fifty thousand dollars bail in the los angeles county jail there he remained until january prosecutors had offered him a plea bargain in june time served and five years probation for a guilty plea on the first three counts principally refused although he knew he faced a possible 68 years in prison since this was a matter of voice and prince of ali was raised in new york city the phonetics laboratory at ucla sent me a copy of the tapes of the original bomb threats and prince of ellie [Music] repetition i knew the prince of

valley was innocent the bomb threats were made by someone with a solid eastern new england phonology and prince valley was a consistent new yorker but how to convey this to californians forum new york and boston were identical people who have this merger have been told that dumb [Music] but this mystery is hidden from most people for californians as well as speakers elsewhere in the american west and all of canada they're homonymous the distinction part of the history of the language don and dawn is preserved only in the spelling you would not want a matter of

life and death to be decided by points on which ordinary people cannot agree this slide is from our atlas of north american english and shows how merger for the words don and dawn the green circles show the new englanders from the boston area who pronounce don and dawn the same all the new yorkers to the south say dawn and dawn quite different that will become a crucial issue when we juxtapose bomb and off in the pennsylvania trial in the principality trial the case was tried in front of judge gordon ringer who also had a connection

with president nixon he was known as the first judge to order a president to testify in court i was told that as an expert witness i was limited to giving my opinion of the evidence but i looked for a way to establish that prince of valley's innocence was a fact [Music] i prepared for the judge there was no jewelry the displays you see on the slide first we'll hear the bomb threat caller and second prince of valley i'm going off acoustic analysis of the bomb threats and principella's repetitions demonstrated that prince of valley had distinct

phonemes for a bomb and off while the bomb threat caller uses single phoneme the measurement of the first and second formants show that the bonsai collar has a single range for these two phonemes while principally like the new yorkers we saw on the previous slide has two let's hear them one more time starting with prince of elle the new yorker i'm going off the park the judge then said to prince of valley stand up say the pledge of allegiance principality said i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america church said to

me what can you tell me about that i said i chose your new yorker because that's the only dialect in the eastern united states or the charity and flag is raised from ah to air well on monday morning the judge asked the prosecuting attorney if he had any further evidence to present he did not the judge then refused to hear further evidence from the defense he found the defendant guilty on the basis of the law not guilty he found the defendant not guilty on the basis of the linguistic evidence which he described as objective and

powerful and a bomb going off judge ringer later told the los angeles times there was the odds and the odds that did it the prosecutor had to agree with this assessment saying he attempted to cross-examine me but quote there's nothing i could catch him on prince of ali later sent me a thank you card saying that he had spent 15 months in jail waiting for someone to demonstrate the truth of the matter as i had done i've had many scientific results where the convergence of evidence was so strong that i felt that i had laid

hands on the reality behind the surface but nothing could be more satisfactory for any scientific career than to separate fact from fiction in this case by means of linguistic evidence one man could be freed from the corporate enemies who had assailed him and another could sleep soundly on a conviction that he had made a just decision what then is the relation between objective quantitative multivariate analysis and the search for social justice from my own experience it's not a complicated matter to understand this to understand the speakers of a language we must listen to them and

if we listen they will speak to us clearly and simply and let us know what is to be done to make the world we share a little more just than it was like okay thank you so much for your talk above we have many many questions from the audience i think first of all i should say that we have people from everywhere in the world as i predicted from the amazon argentina canada portugal india australia i'm assuming james walker is in australia right now so uh uh it really is uh a world event your talk

um i'm gonna try to put together a few questions here uh we have many people and i think i'm gonna um try to paste this on on the zoom chat uh so i've given us very compelling evidence that uh our work and social linguists can contribute to social just justice and not just in the educational setting but we have a lot of people in the chat on the youtube chat uh talking about giving back and how we uh sometimes forget about it we don't return to the communities uh our findings and actually it's already started

a whole discussion among brazilians of what we can do to share more and to give back to the communities so um there's one question about educational social linguistics this is a line of research proposed by stella bertone ricardo in brazil um but uh more more broadly could you talk about uh give us a few more examples of concrete actions uh of different groups different sociolinguists of how we could give back to the communities we study of the this principle of the dead incurred just a minute do you have more suggestions about how to give back

to communities bill's having some little trouble with hearing today so i'm trying to write out the questions can you have any more suggestions about how to give back to communities i don't think uh you can hear the question can you hear this question do you have some suggestions about how to give back or uh even more broadly uh to what extent do you believe to what extent sec linda please i think there's an answer here you have an answer about giving back bill yeah go ahead you you can talk now when the linguist in the

community [Music] interviews lots of people they have a story to tell not in the standards survey interview but the kind of social interest are going to be you know we open our ears to what people have to tell us and lots of us who have done interviews in big cities so at the beginning people have really sometimes refused i'd love to tell you you're trying to sell me something and maybe after about three quarters of an hour they say hey maybe this guy is not selling something he might be someone that i could use to

reach out to the will reach people and help straighten things out so giving voice to people he means a lot more than recording their speech patterns it's a matter of giving them a contact with the outer world and that's not been designed of many social linguistic interviews now how do we actually reach people well it's in writing into results as i look at the many excellent quantitative analyses harvested nra and other journals i don't often see the voice of the original speaker i don't see the details that bring us into his life but i don't

see the recounting of his experience which he has given to the interviewer instead he's mostly reduced to an invisible digit and the calmer figures now john rickford has done that particularly in the case of racial gentile in the recent his recent paper and presidential address and walt wolfram has done so effectively in the films that he's constructed in from north carolina virginia now some linguists have contributed directly by writing creating programs for contrastive analysis that i've mentioned in the work of christine marlinson and direct participation in schools can can be very powerful but the work

that flows particularly from the linguist has to do with speech and what people can do with their own speech now i'm actually writing a book at the moment called conversations with strangers and it begins with the notion that the important instruction that parents give their children don't talk to strangers it's all wrong and they should talk to strangers because there's a lot to learn from them and what we learn from strangers will give us a chance to feedback the indebtedness we have to them hey we have other questions as well we have a number of

questions about african-american vernacular english and also relating to progess retro preto geez i don't know if you've ever heard the term okay let me see if i can face this question uh here so there's one um a specific more specific question about african-american english do you still see the stigmatization of black people for their dialect in new york or this phenomenon disappearing and related to that question uh [Music] someone maria carolina has asked if you could talk about pretogis it's interesting that sabria fisher one of these days contacted me to ask about this term as

well about uh african brazilian portuguese and if there could be parallels between african-american english in the united states and popular brazilian portuguese and in brazil generally talking about race is uh sort of a taboo we brazilian social linguistics hasn't talked much about black portuguese so these are general questions about uh african-american and african brazilian varieties of language you know i think we're faced with one of the most general countries for governing human language that's what i've called the golden age syndrome people believe that language was somehow initiated in a perfect form and any change from

it is deterioration so we've interviewed thousands and thousands of old people no old person has ever been heard to say a sentence like you know it's so good the way young children talk today but so much better than when i was a child when we hear one such sentence we'll know that there's some change in that basic structure and that means that whenever people we call to attention a feature of their dialect that they didn't know about they are profoundly embarrassed and in the newspaper articles which we write about our work we find that whatever

we say about them is first misunderstood because there is no language to convey the information and secondly when people understand what we're talking about they reject it now in our reading road program we try to combat this by talking directly to the teachers but giving them knowledge doesn't change their basic attitude so one approach i've taken was to take the most eloquent of the speakers that we encounter and let them talk to the general public and you heard larry hawthorne that was taken from in my article the logic of non-standard english which has been reprinted

more than any other article i've written and for every time they've reviewed the article they're 10 times they quote larry hawthorne because he has eloquence and not every speaker has the same control of the language i've got dozens of people who i'm trying to give voice to now so taking advantage of the of the fundamental linguistic capacity of the speakers is a way to counter the fundamental problem we have because people hate the way they talk if they think that it's different from what their grandfather said yeah that that's true and we we often see

this uh attitude from uh speakers of uh the non-standard varieties yeah it's really common to see that they themselves uh often think that they are uh in the wrong right we have uh similar questions but also uh from asia that uh let me see do you think okay linguistic theories have been the result of research conducted in english and western societies as a society is the major part of variationist theory does lebop do you think that your ideas have succeeded in accommodating diverse asian societies [Music] there is a remark by james walker he mentions an

issue that he organized at asia pacific language variation but uh i think there's still this general question of to what extent do you think that variation is social linguistics has been able to address minority languages other varieties and not just the western societies we're just working on this interpretation one minute okay so bill the idea is is the type of societies with asia in asia in particular with minorities are our methods uh applicable some of the early work which is decided here is related to the class structure of society which is quite different from society's

founding an energy in the pacific and elsewhere we can generalize by talking about any vertical differentiation the relationship of life to that society has to be examine from within the social linguistic structure now what we're mostly concerned with is what a young child hears growing up leaving his parents environment and hearing the language of the school of the playground of the workplace and deciding whether it's unconsciously going to dominate the future that james stanford study of the acquisition of people the dialect in southeast asia where one particular community has a rule of saying if you

marry somebody from outside you'll continue here with your own local dialect and women do not learn the dialect of the community now what happens when a person leaves their own community and joins a new community it's quite different in different parts of the world and has great consequences for the future of the language so gender differences in the acquisition of language bear upon the future of the community and the research that we on gender has to be sensitive to the difference between men and women in their acquisitions of the new forms it turned out that

women were the most extreme in rejecting the reform and contribute a great deal to the stigmatization of the language that's not true in every community gender differences are not universal so i think that two major factors social class and gender have been illuminated and explored more in recent times and indicate that cross-linguistic studies in different communities will benefit by a clearer and more an understanding of gender and social class that is specific to that community okay okay i'm sorry again i think that's it for that question yes and i think um we're i know there

are many other questions on the youtube chat which you can also uh read later on uh but i think this is a good time to to wrap up uh i'm sorry i'm sure i've missed a number of questions from the audience but uh i'm sure that everybody is so thankful for your talk this morning uh bill and for the opportunities for us to listen to you to learn with you uh and to inspire us uh in in our studies in our actions and sharing our knowledge with the with the communities so thank you so much

once again okay um and uh i'm reminded by everland that you can also well you can watch this again and you can uh write a review of this talk too and sent to havista and uh there's a whole program there are many other very interesting talks gideon sankoff will be talking to us next week as well so i'm sure we're all looking forward to these other events okay i think that's it thank you gillian thank you above thank you