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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 177

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Field methods in multicultural megacities

Authors: Mendes, Ronald; Walker, James; Oushiro, Livia; Guy, Gregory; Hoffman, Michol; Blake, Renee
Submitted by: Mendes, Ronald (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)

Multicultural megacities — large urban centres characterized by ethnically heterogeneous populations — pose particular methodological challenges for the study of sociolinguistic variation and change. Although a number of large-scale projects (beginning with Labov, 1966) have developed a toolbox of sociolinguistic methods, not all of them are applicable to every community, each of which features its own sociolinguistic situation. A comparison of three cities in the Americas demonstrate that speakers can be organized along different social dimensions, which in turn holds consequences for methods of data collection and patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change. In New York City, Labov’s (2006) choice of the Lower East Side was determined in part by the neighbourhood’s representativeness of the ethnic and socioeconomic character of the city as a whole. In Toronto, where settlement patterns have led to the development of ‘ethnic enclaves’, Hoffman & Walker (2010:41) targeted the largest and most salient ethnic groups on the basis of their degree of participation in ethnically-defined social networks. In São Paulo, there is no single neighborhood that reflects the complexity of the whole city, nor are there ethnic enclaves where people of the same origin and background are concentrated (Mendes, 2011:7–8).

In all such studies, sociolinguists are confronted with two conflicting requirements: recruiting a large sample of informants that is representative of the larger speech community; and gathering detailed ethnographic information from each informant (Poplack, 1989). In the highly complex speech communities found in large multicultural cities, it is unlikely that traditional social factors will coincide with the speakers’ own categorizations and perceptions of social differentiation. While the integration of sociological and ethnographic approaches may produce more realistic sociolinguistic accounts, they suffer from the limitations inherent to large data collection projects.

In this thematic session, we discuss questions of research design and data collection in megacities characterized by ethnically and/or linguistically heterogeneous populations, including methods of sampling, representativeness, interview schedules, dialect leveling, the indexical field and the perception of sociolinguistic identities.

References

Hoffman, M. F. and J. Walker (2010) Ethnolects and the City: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22, 37–67.

Labov, W. (2006) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Mendes, R. (2011) SP2010 – Construção de uma amostra da fala paulistana. Research Project.

Poplack, S. (1989) The care and handling of a mega-corpus: the Ottawa-Hull French Project. In: Fasold, R. and D. Schiffrin (eds.) Language Change and Variation. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.