Foreword
Professor John R. Rickford, Stanford University
For assembling this excellent edited collection, we are indebted to Robert Lawson and Dave Sayers. But when they issued their original Call for Papers in the Variationist List [Var-L] on January 18, 2012, noting that “very few people outside academia have ever heard of sociolinguistics – let alone its influence beyond the groves of academe,” not everyone agreed. Rudy Troike (University of Arizona, Tucson), for instance, pointed to early work in the US by William Labov, Roger Shuy, Roseann Gonzalez and others that helped to dispel myths about African American English, and to improve testing, teaching and interpreting in classrooms, the armed services, and courts. Celeste Rodriguez Louro (University of Western Australia, Crawley) noted counter-examples from Australia too, citing work by Diana Eades and her colleagues on Australian Aboriginal communication style in court cases, and on problems with the process of assessing the nationality of people seeking refugee status in Australia.
Responding on Var-L for both editors, Robert Lawson acknowledged the existence of sociolinguistic activism in the UK as well, for instance, in work by Peter Trudgill, Ron Macaulay, Sue Fox and others on English in education and resources for teachers. But he argued that the goal of the volume was to highlight this kind of activism by bringing it together in one coherent volume, and to focus more explicitly on engagement, a relatively new phrasing and focus of applied work. The editors have fulfilled this goal admirably, but before developing this point, I’d like to comment on the relative significance of applied research in sociolinguistics and/or language variation and change more generally.
Some of the earliest community studies by US sociolinguists – e.g. Labov et al. (1968), Shuy et al. (1967), Wolfram (1969) – were funded by the US Department of Education and/or the Center for Applied Linguistics as a means of better understanding and redressing educational inequities linked to vernacular dialects. Despite this, applied issues have usually taken a back seat to analytical and theoretical issues in sociolinguistics, although several leading figures manage to combine all three. The diminution of application relative to theory is especially prevalent in the so-called First World, e.g. N. America, W. Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. (In Third World countries, e.g. in the Caribbean and West Africa, linguists, as part of a relatively small intelligentsia, and with students, contacts and interests in education or government, are much more frequently drawn into educational, nation-development and other applied issues.)
For instance, although Labov’s applied work from the first twenty years of his linguistics career (e.g. Labov 1969, 1982) is almost as well known as his earliest descriptive or theoretical work (e.g. Labov 1963, 1980), this is not true of his work over the last twenty years. His three-volume Principles of Linguistic Change (Labov 1994, 2001a, 2010) is deservedly famous, but his invaluable work on improving reading for AAVE speakers (e.g. Labov 1995, 2001b, Labov and Baker 2010) is much less so. Moreover, outside of his current/recent colleagues and students, few if any linguists know of the vibrant Penn Reading Initiative he spearheaded at the University of Pennsylvania, or its associated Reading Road instructional program ( And fewer still know of the Portals Real World Reading Bounce B stories he crafted to help elementary students master “silent e” (hatvs. hate) and other challenges of the English orthography, although his book (Labov 1990) is very widely used in schools in California and Texas.
Speaking more broadly, there is only one book (Trudgill 1984) carrying the title Applied Sociolinguistics, which pursued “the application of linguistic research to the solution of practical, education and social problems of all types” (p.1). And most introductory sociolinguistics texts include at most a chapter or two at the end about applications to societal problems. One can see this, to varying extents, in the three most recent Handbooks.Chambers and Schilling’s (2013) Handbook of Language Variation and Change (which most readers will recognize as a moniker for quantitative sociolinguistics), includes a final chapter by Wolfram on “Community Commitment and Responsibility.” Wolfram’s chapter is the only one in the book’s final section, “Sociolinguists and Their Communities,” and as the only chapter dealing with applied sociolinguists, it represents 3.8% (1/26) of the book’s contents—an improvement on the 2002 first edition, which had no such chapter. Bayley et al’s (2013) Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics is better in this regard, with the fifteen chapters in the book’s final two sections (“Language Policy, Language Ideology, and Language Attitudes” and “Sociolinguistics, The Professions and Public Interest”) representing 37.5% (15/40) of the book’s contents. Wodak et al’s (2011) SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics is somewhere in between. It has a five-chapter final section on “Applications,” as well as various policy and practice-relevant chapters in other sections, for an overall percentage of about 28%.
One reason for the under-representation of “applied issues” in sociolinguistics (apart from individual scholars’ interests and inclinations) is the relative status of theory and application in linguistics departments and in academia more generally. In many research universities, not least in North America, theory is highly valued, and applied issues at best ignored. Within linguistics, the situation was exacerbated for many years by the centrality of “theoretical linguistics” (core syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics) and the marginality of “hyphenated linguistics.” Over the past two decades, this linguistics-specific distinction has weakened considerably, for various reasons (more “theory” by sociolinguists and psycholinguists, more interest in corpora/usage data by “theoretical linguists,” more collaboration between them), but the primacy of “theory” in research universities remains.
Another possible reason for the under-representation of applied issues in sociolinguistics texts is the existence of “applied linguistics” as a separate subfield, with its own conferences and texts, for instance applied linguistics handbooks from publishers including Blackwell (Davies and Elder 2004), Oxford (Kaplan 2010), and Routledge (Simpson 2001). Routledge has a whole series of specialized applied Handbooks, dealing separately with interpreting, multilingualism, language testing, Hispanic applied linguistics, and so on. It would take us too far afield to discuss the relations between applied linguistics and sociolinguistics in detail, but a couple quick observations are in order. The first is that while this varies by continent and individual, many sociolinguists don’t consider themselves applied linguists, or attend applied linguistics conferences. The reverse is also true. Shuy (2015: 434) notes, for instance, that he was “often pigeonholed as a sociolinguist and not thought of as an applied linguist,” partly because of the traditional focus of applied linguistics on [second] “language learning, teaching and testing.” Shuy’s paper is rich in suggestions for broadening the vision and reach of applied linguistics, and for increasing its relation to theoretical linguistics and enhancing its prestige, and this is indeed the focus of the entire special issue of Applied Linguistics in which it appears. (See for instance, Hellerman’s 2015 introduction and other papers in the issue.) This expanded tent is one in which many sociolinguists with an applied bent could comfortably find themselves, and indeed, applied sociolinguists could benefit from a similar soul-searching and reconceptualization, as this volume itself demonstrates.
Whatever the reasons for the traditional under-representation of applied sociolinguistics, we are at a historical point where the academic rewards for applied work (in terms of promotion, research grants, funding for individuals and departments) are gradually increasing. And sociolinguists, who typically gather data in speech communities and communities of practice in the “real world,” are very well positioned to pursue and demonstrate “impact.” The rise of “impact” as a key element in the five-year research evaluation by which universities in the UK are assessed is documented in revealing detail by Lawson and Sayers in their Introduction to this volume. From their account, 2014 was a pivotal year, not only because of the name change that year from Research Assessment Exercise to Research Excellence Framework, but also because “esteem” was replaced then as a criterion by “impact.” As they note, “impact” includes not only a 2010 definition as “effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia,” but an additional 2012 criterion that “public debate has been stimulated or informed by research.”
Universities in the USA are not required to demonstrate “impact” in their assessment exercises in quite the same way as our UK counterparts are, but the National Science Foundation, especially since 2013, assesses grant proposals both in terms of “Intellectual Merit” and “Broader Impacts,” the latter defined as “the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes” ( and So we are increasingly subject to the same pressures or incentives.
Of course, for many, perhaps all of us, interest in sociolinguistic application or impact does not derive solely from recent carrots or sticks, but from longer standing stirrings to “do justice” and “love mercy” (Micah 6:8), especially since the people “whose data fuel our theories and descriptions” (Rickford 1997: 186) are often poor, and oppressed or disadvantaged in schools, housing, courtrooms, interactions with the police, and opportunities to offer significant improvements to their children. These stirrings are reflected in Labov’s (1982: 172) principle of debt incurred (“An investigator who has obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community has an obligation to use the knowledge based on that data for the benefit of the community, when it has need of it”) and Wolfram’s (1993) principle of linguistic gratuity (“Investigators who have obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community should actively pursue positive ways in which they can return linguistic favors to the community”).
The chapters in this volume richly exemplify the spirit of the older principles and the intent of the newer impact criteria.Given the editors’ detailed summaries in their introduction, and my own wish to avoid specific comparisons, it is unnecessary for me to discuss the contents of this book chapter by chapter. I would say, however, that I am impressed, as a group, by the range of their research foci and/or goals (reduced discrimination, improved teaching and learning, fairer courtroom verdicts and refugee decisions, more language-enriched public exhibits, better language policy) and by the variety of their institutional settings (schools, museums, workplaces, social media, entire countries). The geographical settings constitute a relatively broad range too, from Canada and the USA, to the UK, other parts of Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Gabon, Pakistan and Indonesia get some coverage too, although it would be terrific to see more so called “Second” and “Third World” countries included in future editions.
What is really new and exciting about this volume is the explicit and extended discussion in each chapter of the five Ws and H of “impact” (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How), explored in insightful and stimulating ways. I have already started to tell my students and colleagues about the terrific chapters in this book, and we are all avidly awaiting its publication. The editors tell me they plan to follow this book with the creation of an open access journal provisionally named Applied Sociolinguistics. If that comes to fruition, it could productively extend this book’s focus on how we conceptualize and carry out “applied” work in sociolinguistics, and on the proportion and standing of application relative to analysis and theory.
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