1. Towards a Postvariationist Sociolinguistics?

I have often had cause to wonder whether C.P. Snow's classic concept of “two cultures” vis à vis the sciences and the arts in British social life might also usefully apply to the field of sociolinguistics. For at any Sociolinguistics Symposium—the key bi-annual meeting of minds in this now vast academic field—one will typically find a split between two kinds of scholars. On the one hand, there are those who continue to work within the Labovian paradigm with its commitment to empiricist traditions of recording and analysing “real” language informed by analytical frameworks that rest on the explanatory potential of correlative social variables such as class, ethnicity, gender and age. On the other hand, there are those who work with altogether more contingent qualitative, ethnographic and/or discourse-oriented models of linguistic analysis, and for whom a focus on variation and identity per se may or may not be paramount. Though the scope of latter-day sociolinguistics is of course far broader than this opening polemic suggests, it is the general divide between what might be termed structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to the study of language in social life that Nikolas Coupland seeks to explore in his new book. Though the author cleverly avoids embroiling himself in debates around poststructuralism and/or post-modernism per se, his aim is nonetheless to offer up a fresh approach to the study of language variation and identity that might well be characterised as postvariationist (my term, not his). Crucially, however, without throwing out the “variation baby” with the “variationist bathwater” (as befits the long-term former editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics), Coupland works towards a constructive synthesis of four decades of research in this field, and it is in this context that he deconstructs and then reconceptualises the original notion of sociolinguistic style.

In the first three chapters, Coupland sets out the case as to why he believes the study of language variation and identity is in need of such a radical rethink. Here the author argues how the variationist paradigm pioneered by Labov (for example, 1966, 1972) no longer befits the study of language in Western contexts where identities have long since ceased to be shaped by clear-cut social variables, least of all class (or, of course, where the nature of the social variables themselves can no longer simply be taken for granted—assuming they ever could). Coupland begins by flagging up the problematical empirical status of such constructs as “standard” and “nonstandard” varieties, emphasising instead their role as powerful sociolinguistic myths (Lippi-Green Reference Lippi-Green1997) that nonetheless inform so many of the choices and evaluations made by language users. However, the main problem with variationist work for Coupland is its focus on language variation at the level of the group. Though he certainly identifies greater explanatory potential in Bell's (Reference Bell1984) notion of audience design and Giles' accommodation theory (Giles & Powesland Reference Giles and Peter1975), the fundamental issue with all of these early frameworks is that at no time is it really clear to what extent identifying sociolinguistic patterns in relation to groups of speakers is meaningful in the context of actual linguistic encounters. So, for example, whilst speakers of social class x may well be shown to employ the standard variant of the linguistic variable y in approximately 40% of their casual conversational usage, what does it actually mean—in social semiotic terms—when an individual speaker upwardly shifts to 70% usage in a more formal sociolinguistic interview or when engaging in a service encounter with a customer deemed to be “posh?” As Coupland convincingly demonstrates, whilst we may well know quite a bit by now about the what of language variation, there is still so much more to be learned when it comes to the why.

It is in the fourth chapter where we begin to get a stronger sense of the alternative theoretical literature that informs Coupland's own approach to language variation and identity. Drawing on concepts and traditions rooted in the study of style and speech repertoires (Hymes Reference Hymes1974), discourse and ideology (Fairclough Reference Fairclough1992), habitus and cultural capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991), voicing (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981), performativity (Butler Reference Butler1997), and metalanguage/linguistic reflexivity (Jaworski et al. Reference Jaworski, Coupland and Galasiński2004), Coupland seeks to shift the analytical focus to actual contexts of usage akin to approaches traditionally more typical of, say, interactional sociolinguistics. Here there is less concern as to how linguistic variation reflects already existing social categories such as class, gender, etc., and a greater push towards understanding how such variation is itself discursively deployed as a means with which to index particular social identities at given moments in time, thereby emphasising how such social identities are themselves by no means pre-discursive. To this end, Coupland moves away from the study of style in the singular (as static end-product) to a greater emphasis on styling (as social process) and stylisation (as social practice). Central to this endeavour is then the concept of sociolinguistic resources, that is, the particular features of language that function semiotically, that is to say, in the making of meaning within specific communicative encounters.

Any argument in favour of the deployment of sociolinguistic resources in the process of identity-styling presupposes, of course, a detailed treatment of the structure versus agency debate, a debate that is re-cast here in terms of constraints and creativity. In other words, any analysis of styling needs to consider the extent to which speakers are free to choose the sociolinguistic resources to be deployed—and, if so, at what level of conscious awareness. This has then to be coupled with the more specifically political consideration regarding those contextual constraints that apply to individuals or groups of speakers as informed by Bourdieu's notion of habitus. These include, for example, speakers’ prior exposure to restricted or elaborated codes within the critical period for language learning, level of education, and/or the linguistic demands of workplace/professional roles (to which one may or may not want to add “personality” in the sense of an individual's psychological predisposition to linguistic dexterity). In terms of linguistic analysis, a particularly liberating aspect of the focus on style as envisaged by Coupland is that the sociolinguist is no longer tied to (and indeed will have little use for) a narrow focus on a limited number of sociolinguistic variables taken from within a given linguistic class, for example, phonological, lexical and/or morphosyntactic. Instead, the analyst is free—indeed obliged—to explore the co-deployment of a range of sociolinguistic resources at any given moment, something that surely takes us much closer to the reality of speakers’ everyday usage (and will also offer up a rather different perspective on the diachronic dimension of language variation and change). In this sense, the study of styling brings us closer to the field of stylistics, though perhaps with added emphasis on the phonetic dimension of resources and repertoires.

In the fifth and sixth chapters, Coupland revisits LePage & Tabouret-Keller's (Reference LePage and Andrée1985) notion of “acts of identity” before moving on to Rampton's (Reference Rampton1995) concept of “crossing” as a means of exploring how speakers deploy the manifold sociolinguistic resources at their disposal in order to move in and out of different social identities. So, for example, we may find that speakers draw on language as a way of styling themselves not only in order to identify with others, a process which may or may not include the borrowing of linguistic resources from out-groups in Rampton's classic sense of crossing (for example, white teenagers using Stylised Asian English). More intriguingly, perhaps, Coupland shows how styling may also involve the creative use of language as a means of realigning oneself in order to retain—or regain—access to one's own social group. Similarly, such (re)styling can occur at the level of the group as in, for example, the use or mere evocation of stylised language varieties (particularly local dialects) in heritage tourism and/or the marketing of place. It is in the sixth chapter, however, that we really see how a focus on style can lead to a radical shift in the form and function of sociolinguistic research. Here Coupland looks at examples of what he refers to as “high” performance, that is, consciously and extensively stylised linguistic performances that typically occur in tightly scripted contexts such as politics, media and/or the entertainment industries. The detailed analysis of a performance of Widow Twankey in the pantomime Aladdin at a theatre in the South Wales Valleys provides an inspiring glimpse of the potential for the study of style as a means of deconstructing traditional concepts of language variation and identity. Coupland shows, for example, how the pantomime dame (played, of course, by a man) moves in and out of stylised “posh” and “local” language repertoires in ways that index the inherent—and crucially ludic—ambivalence towards his/her own class, gender and possibly sexual identities. The chapter ends, moreover, with an enlightening discussion of so-called “exposed dialects”—media representations in television/radio comedies, soap operas and advertisements, including for example the now infamous and widely mimicked th-fronted catchphrase,Am I bovvered?, inspired by the character of the adolescent Lauren in BBC TV's The Catherine Tate Show.

In the final chapter, Coupland offers a more programmatic account of his reconfigured concept of style and its potential relevance for a 21st century sociolinguistics. Central to his vision is a new role for the study of mediated language, a genre typically discounted by mainstream (socio)linguistics in view of its apparent artificiality (but see Johnson & Ensslin Reference Johnson and Ensslin2007). In this context Coupland reminds us how variationist sociolinguistics has traditionally placed a high premium on access to “natural” or “real” language (themselves, of course, entirely essentialist constructs), going to considerable technical and methodological lengths to overcome the so-called observer's paradox and thereby gain access to vernacular language. But through his discussion of “sociolinguistic authenticities” (see also Coupland Reference Coupland2003), we see how the very notion of the “vernacular” is also the product of styling of a sort—a stylisation, that is to say, on the part of sociolinguists themselves with regard to what counts as real language and hence a legitimate object of linguistic enquiry. One consequence of this has been that the nagging but nonetheless crucial question of the extent to which everyday language usage is influenced by the mass media has been largely sidestepped (though see Stuart-Smith Reference Stuart-Smith2005 on Glasgow for a notable exception). In sum, what we lose sight of through our inattention to mediated language, and crucially the mediatisation of language, are the myriad ways in which language is not only styled for particular audiences per se but is then creatively reworked by those audiences (that is, “real” people) into their everyday sociolinguistic repertoires.

This is a bold book that is ultimately trying to overturn a four-decade tradition of mainstream sociolinguistic research, much (though by no means all) of which has been shaped by the variationist paradigm. That said, the tone is admirably level headed and remarkably undogmatic. It is also suitably reflexive. Coupland is well aware, for example, of some of the potential epistemological trade-offs for what he is proposing—an approach to language variation and identity that is undeniably more tentative, fragmentary and contingent than the apparent sociolinguistic certainties afforded by the empiricist, quantitative tradition of mainstream variationism. But as he also shows, whilst class-based approaches to language variation were a product of their time—societal functionalism coupled with the economic Fordism of the postwar era—the explanatory power of the Labovian paradigm is well past its use-by date. What we need in its place are theoretical models that can help us to get to grips with the role of language variation and identity in relation to the late-modern, global age in which we now live. Style is a major step in that direction and—without wishing to overstate the point about “authenticity”—is one of those texts that every serious sociolinguist really does need to read.