Lauren Hall-Lew is Professor and Personal Chair of Sociolinguistics in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She is a sociophonetician, which means that her research focuses on analysing the social aspects of fine-grained variability in speech production and perception. She is co-editor of a 2021 volume with Cambridge University Press on “Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation,” and co-editor of two forthcoming volumes with Oxford University press, “Dimensions of Linguistic Variation” and “Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology.” She is the director of The Lothian Diary Project and founder of the national social group for Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic families in Gaelic Medium Education.

Social indexicality and its potential influence on language learning

Variationist sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between linguistic variation and social structure, social practice, and social meaning. The field has developed from first identifying the ways in which patterns of language use correlate with speaker identities to asking why those correlations exist in the first place and how social information is encoded in the linguistic variants themselves. The linguistic phenomena in question can be within- language, e.g., the difference between alternate words or pronunciations, or it can be between-languages, where each potential language is a possible ‘variant’. For example, a speaker of both Scottish English and Scottish Gaelic might choose to pronounce ‘Alba’ in Gaelic even if the rest of the sentence is in English. The sociolinguistic question would be: what social meanings are indexed by either variant? And more broadly, what social meanings are indexed by the English and Gaelic languages, in any bilingual interaction? Some of the indexes that might come to mind include aspects of identity: heritage, community, and a sense of belonging. They might include one’s political stance towards language preservation, or one’s political stance towards Scottish independence, or one’s desire to perform their learnedness by orienting to whichever pronunciation they believe is ‘correct’. The possible meanings form what Eckert (2012) calls an indexical field. In this talk, I will introduce these concepts through the lens of my personal language learning journey, and discuss the impact on my learning that each language’s indexical value has had.