LANGUAGE AND VARIATION
Mie Hiramoto 1
1.0 INTRODUCTION. Language variation, often discussed in the field of sociolinguistics, is an important
subject which studies linguistic differences caused by social or regional factors. 2 Most people are aware of
the fact that systematic differences exist between different varieties of the same language; for example,
British English is different from American English. Within American English, there are different varieties
such as Southern English, Boston English, African American English, or even newscaster English. The
systematic differences existing within languages are often referred to as internal variation—the property
of languages that enable speakers to express the same meaning in different ways. This chapter focuses on
how languages vary internally and what contributes to language variation between social groups, places,
and situations.
Variation exists in all languages; people are sensitive to how others use the same language differently
and we often witness these sensitivities. For example, in Hawai‘i, many people speak Pidgin (an informal
term referring to Hawai‘i Creole), yet even among speakers of Pidgin, there are often differences. One may
say there is a difference between ‘city’ and ‘country’ Pidgin, or that titas and mokes speak ‘heavier’ Pidgin.
There are even social situations where a Hawai‘i Creole speaker may switch to English. In this chapter, we
will look at linguistic variation in the following contexts: speech community, regional and geographic
variation, and social variation.
2.0 SPEECH COMMUNITIES. A speech community is the term used to describe a group of people who
speak the same dialect. Membership in a speech community is usually affected by factors like geographic
area, economic class, age, or gender. In a broad sense, the state of Hawai‘i may be considered a speech
community consisting of Hawai‘i Creole speakers. However, even within this community, not all the people
speak Hawai‘i Creole to the same extent—Honolulu may form a speech community of the ‘town’ variety
of Hawai‘i Creole while Wai‘anae may be a separate speech community of ‘country’ Hawai‘i Creole
speakers. Very rarely do we find a speech community where there is no variation. That is because a true
‘untainted’ dialect requires an almost impossible level of communicative isolation, whether that isolation
is geographic, socioeconomic, or ethnic. Communicative isolation is only possible when a group of speakers
forms a coherent speech community isolated from speakers outside the community. While this degree of
isolation might have been possible a long time ago, it is becoming quite rare in an increasingly globalized
world. Social and geographic mobility, mass communication, and internet access make it make it very
difficult to find a situation of communicative isolation. Many people believe that languages can be ‘pure’
or that some people speak a standard variety of a language. Furthermore, many people view these languages
and varieties as superior to others. However, there is no such thing outside of speakers’ ideologies.
Ni‘ihau—the island with an almost exclusively Native Hawaiian population—provides a relevant
example. Ni‘ihau is the only Hawaiian island where Hawaiian is the primary language; however, the
1
Deptment of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore
I thank Tsz-him Tsui for the figures of dialect continuum from his lecture notes and Kent Sakoda for the exercise
from Da Pidgin Coup meeting. I would also like to thank Yukiko Ogawa and Yuichi Endo of SUNRISE Inc.,
International Branch who kindly supplied me with the artwork used in this paper. My thanks are also due to Jake
Terrell, the editor of this volume, as well as Katie Drager, John Kupchik and Amy Schafer, the program coordinator
for Ling 102. Last but not least, my sincere appreciation goes to Ben George for his endless support and encouragement
for my work.
2
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Language Variation
residents are not isolated from the outside world. It was not until 1915 when the owners of the island, the
Robinson family of the Gay & Robinson Sugar Plantation, closed the island to most outsiders. According
to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (1997), although Ni‘ihau is generally restricted to the owners’ family, some
US Navy personnel, government officials and invited guests have access to the island. Even wealthy tourists
are able to fly to the island for a limited supervised tour for snorkeling and picnicking ($250 per person) or
hunting ($1,500 person); both tours operate six days a week. The residents also have electricity, television
and helicopter transportation to Kaua‘i. As such, Ni‘ihau cannot be said to exist in communicative isolation
and any claims about a “pure” language or dialect being spoken on the island would be very suspect. Instead,
the variety spoken by a speech community will most likely be influenced by interactions of many different
factors.
3.0 STYLE AND REGISTER. The notion of appropriateness is something most of us have internalized,
and thus we probably do not give the idea much thought. The ‘inappropriateness’ of an utterance may be
due to culture gaps or insufficient understanding about the nuances of a social situation. Among local
Japanese speakers in Hawai‘i, especially older speakers, a commonly term for a bathroom is benjo, literally
‘place for excrement’. Even though Japanese speakers in Japan would understand the word, it is considered
vulgar and has become almost obsolete. Local Japanese people visiting Japan may elicit shock or surprise
at their use of the term benjo, despite the fact that both the speaker and listener understand the meaning.
The more commonly used word for ‘bathroom’ in Japan is the English loanword toire ‘toilet’, ironically, a
term that American English speakers stopped using for the same reason as the Japanese benjo. A Japanese
visitor asking a local Japanese for toire would probably meet with the same embarrassing situation.
In both cases the two expressions, benjo and toire represent distinct speech styles. Speech styles may
be considered a ‘social’ dialect, because they are usually described in terms of formality depending on
factors like topic, setting, and interlocutor (participant in a discourse), rather than any geographic factors.
Benjo in Hawai‘i belongs to the speech style of local Japanese, while toire is of the style used by Japanese
speakers in Japan. Without paying much attention, people selectively speak their best language to fit certain
contexts. The local Japanese people are unlikely to use terms like benjo when speaking to their non-local
friends, and general local people will probably avoid speaking in Hawai‘i Creole toward outsiders. If you
were given a job as a television newscaster, you would certainly not speak on air in the same way as you
do to your family members or friends. At the same time, you will also almost automatically adjust your
speech style when you are talking to your pets to train them to behave the way you want them to. These
switches from one speech style to another are called style shifting. Style shifting occurs between different
degrees of speech formality such as ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’, ‘casual’ vs. ‘careful’, etc. The different degrees
of speech formality are known as registers and inappropriateness can also be caused by selecting the wrong
speech register.
For example, it is normally considered inappropriate to speak to your pets in a formal speech register.
Some languages, including Korean and Japanese, have complex ways to mark different degrees of formality
according to speakers’ age and social status; these registers are often referred to as honorifics. For this
reason, a language like Japanese requires information regarding the social status of the interlocutors. The
following sentences demonstrate how hierarchical differences between speakers are reflected in their
choices of verbs, all of which have the meaning ‘give’ in English.
(1) Talking about someone in a higher social status:
Otsuka-sensei-ni
ocha-o
sashiageru.
Otsuka-teacher-Dative
tea-Accusative
give (honorific)-non.past
‘I’ll give tea to Professor Otsuka.’
(2) Talking about someone in an equal or in-group social status:
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Language Variation
Tomodachi/Okâ-san-ni
ocha-o
Friend/mother-Dative
tea-Accusative
‘I’ll give tea to my friend/my mother.’
ageru.
give (neutral)-non.past
(3) Talking about someone in a lower social status or non-humans
Otôto/Ueki-ni
mizu-o
yaru.
Younger brother/plant-Dative
water-Accusative
give (non-honorifics)-non.past
‘I’ll give water to my younger brother/plants.’
As seen in the sentences above, a word meaning ‘give’ has many forms in Japanese according to the relevant
relationships among interlocutors.
4.0 STANDARD AND NON-STANDARD DIALECTS. People are generally sensitive about their
language use and sometimes judge one variety to be “correct” and others “bad” or “lazy” (recall our
discussion in A brief look at grammar). In Hawai‘i, we hear crude criticisms against Hawai‘i Creole English
by people who believe it to be broken English. This misunderstanding is rooted in social stereotypes and
biased judgments and is not based on linguistic facts. Generally, linguistics does not propose that people’s
use of any particular variety of language or dialect is a reflection of their intelligence. No one language or
dialect is more systematic, more logical, or more correct than any other language or dialect because all
languages have rule-governed grammar that functions as a means of effective communication.
The notion of a “standard” language or dialect may be useful when describing a variety that is used in
an official capacity. Usually, the standard variety is thought to be used by politicians, public media and in
the school system or other high domains. Because of the domains for which it is deemed appropriate, people
tend to think the standard variety is prestigious. Indeed, socially speaking, the standard variety does
represent prestige and power; the variety that comes to be viewed as the standard is that which is spoken
by people in power. However, the prestige of any speech variety depends on the prestige of the speakers
and their contextual roles. Newscasters’ speech style (e.g. CNN English) is based on the concept of a
prescriptive standard such as Standard American English, and is often considered prestigious. Newscasters
of many different regional and ethnic backgrounds, e.g. a Hawaiian man from Maui or an African American
woman from New Orleans, are all trained to speak in this register. On the other hand, when our hypothetical
Hawaiian newscaster goes surfing at Kīhei, the prestigious language there is probably not CNN English but
Hawai‘i Creole. These two different types of prestige are referred to as overt prestige, the officially
recognized register, and covert prestige, the locally recognized register. Overt prestige is associated with a
specific variety within a broad speech community, often spoken by people of a higher socioeconomic class
or education. On the other hand, covert prestige is usually a non-standard variety spoken in a certain speech
community. This prestige defines how people should speak in order to be considered a member of a specific,
typically smaller, speech community. At a local surf spot, the Hawaiian newscaster may want to refrain
from using a variety with overt prestige (the English he uses on the air), as his desire to belong to the local
surfer community can be an overriding factor in his use of the language with local covert prestige (Hawai‘i
Creole English).
Determining the precise roles that ‘prestige’ plays in situational contexts is not always clear-cut, as
important factors in these situations, such as socioeconomic class, age, or gender, vary greatly and
sometimes overlap. A speech community tends to encompass a large number of members of a specific
language- or dialect-speaking community. For example, ‘the local Japanese speech community in Hawai‘i’
refers to local people throughout the Hawaiian Islands who speak Japanese. The concept of a speech
community may not be fitting to analyze language use among a small group of speakers. Sociolinguists
Penny Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet (1992:464) suggest the idea of a community of practice—“an
aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor.” Unlike a speech
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Language Variation
community, The benefits of a CofP approach are that it recognizes that different individuals and groups of
individuals within a community have different wants and goals
5.0 REGIONAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL VARIATION. Terms like ‘the Chinese language’ or ‘the
Arabic language’ are often used without a thought as to what they imply. These terms, of course, are not
useless, but their meanings are often rather different from the ways in which they are generally used. Both
the Chinese and the Arabic languages are spoken over wide geographic areas with many different varieties
of each language appearing throughout. The website Ethnologue: Languages of the world (Gordon 2005),
for example, lists at least 13 varieties of Chinese that are currently spoken—Gan, Hakka, Huizhou, Jinyu,
Mandarin, Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Nan, Ming Zhong, Pi-Xian, Wu, Xiang and Yue. The problem is that
when one refers to ‘the Chinese language’, there is no knowing which variety is being referred to without
more information. For someone from Hong Kong, their ‘Chinese language’ may be Yue Chinese (aka
Cantonese), yet for those from Shanghai, their ‘Chinese language’ may be Wu Chinese (aka Shanghainese).
Even more problematic, if these ‘Chinese language’ speakers are educated, they may also speak Mandarin
Chinese, the standard language of China; however, neither Yue nor Wu Chinese is mutually intelligible
with Mandarin Chinese. Hong Kong is known for its movie productions; the successful 2002 crime-thriller
film entitled Mou Gaan Dou (in Yue) ‘Non-stop path’ is known as Wu Jian Dao in Mandarin; its English
title is Infernal Affairs. The DVD language choices of this movie include Yue, Mandarin, and English,
demonstrating the mutual unintelligibility between the ‘Chinese’ languages. The movie was remade in
Hollywood in 2006 as The Departed in American English (directed by Martin Scorsese). When the DVD
of the US version was released in different regions like Australia, England, or Singapore, it did not require
language choices such as Australian English, British English, or Singapore English because American
English is mutually intelligible with other varieties of the ‘English’ language.
As mentioned in previous chapters, languages are typically considered to be mutually unintelligible
while dialects are mutually intelligible. But these definitions, although often taken for granted, can also be
very problematic. A group of mutually intelligible varieties congregated in adjacent geographic areas is
called a dialect continuum and there are a number of dialect continuums throughout the world. For
example, the rural dialects between geographically adjacent villages of France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal,
which never lost their mutual intelligibility, constitute the West Romance dialect continuum. This
continuum stretches from the Atlantic coast of France through Italy, Spain, and Portugal (Downes 1998:19).
Throughout this area, there is always some intelligibility between the dialects of neighboring locations;
however, the intelligibility decreases the further one moves away from any particular location. A dialect
continuum usually forms gradually. It is important to remember that a language is never uniform, even
within the same dialect-speaking region, and that we have the ability to tolerate certain degrees of variation.
Imagine that, while there is some variation in the language in Village A, everybody generally
understands one another. One day, some people move to Village B (Stage 1). In the beginning, people in
both villages can still understand each other, but as contact becomes less frequent, both groups start to
develop their own internal variations that are slightly differently than before (Stage 2). If contact gradually
diminishes, speakers in Villages A and B lose their mutually intelligibility and the varieties they speak will
eventually become different languages (Stage 3). If the speakers maintain contact with their neighbors, this
will eventually result in a dialect continuum (Stage 4).
FIGURE: 1STAGE 1
Village A
☺☺☺
Village A

84
Village B
☺☺☺
Language Variation
FIGURE 2: STAGE 2
Village B
Village A
☻☻☻

FIGURE 3: STAGE 3
Village A
Village B


FIGURE 4: STAGE 4 3
Village A

Village B
Village C
☺☺
☺
☻☻
☻
Village D


If mutual intelligibility is something that groups dialects together and separates them from a different
language, then why are mutually unintelligible varieties such as Yue, Wu, and Mandarin all considered
dialects of the same language, Chinese, while mutually intelligible varieties of the West Romance dialect
continuum are considered to be dialects of different languages, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese?
6.0 VARIATION AT DIFFERENT LINGUISTIC LEVELS. While there are some shortcomings in our
definition of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ in certain cases, this is not to say that these terms are not useful in
general. There is little problem recognizing British English and American English as dialects of the same
language. However, despite their mutual intelligibility, these English dialects actually differ on many levels
of linguistic structure including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
Despite the Hawaiian Islands’ relatively small amount of land area there are reported dialect differences
in the Hawaiian language as well. According Albert Schütz, a linguistics professor at the University of
Hawai‘i, Hawaiian does not distinguish between [t] and [k] sounds (Schütz 1994:14-15). (We will look at
this issue in more detail in the chapter Hawaiian: evolution of an alphabet.) Due to the orthographic
representation used to write the Hawaiian language, sounds pronounced either [t] or [k] are all written with
the letter k. However, before the writing system became widely used in Hawai‘i, there was some debate as
to the proper way to spell certain words. Archibald Campbell, a Scottish sailor who traveled across five
oceans from 1806 to 1812, recognized this variation in the Hawaiian language and cataloged the various
spellings of the word ‘Kamehameha’ used by different voyagers—Cameamea by Mr. Samwell, the surgeon
of the Discovery, who published an account of Captain Cook’s death; Comaamaa by Portlock;
Tomyhomyhaw by Meares; Tamaahmaah by Vancouver and Broughton; Tomooma by Langsdorf;
Tamahama Thurnbull; etc. (Campbell 1816:210n, cited in Schütz 1994:77). Moreover, Campbell’s editor
notes that t and k sounds were “frequently substituted for each other”, such as kanaka or tanata
‘person/people’ (Campbell 1816:227, cited in Schütz 1994:78). When the Hawaiian orthography was
developed by a group of American missionaries in the 1820s, the missionaries noticed that the [t] sound
was used more commonly at the northwestern end of the Hawaiian Islands on Kaua‘i, while the [k] sound
3
Figures 1 through 4 were modified from Tsz-him Tsui, LING 102 Spring 2006 Lecture Notes.
85
Language Variation
was more common at the southeastern end on the Big Island. They finally settled on using the letter k to
represent both of these sounds. However this does not mean the t sound is not used by Hawaiian speakers
and Schütz (1994) notes that speakers on the island of Ni‘ihau still use t more than k even today.
FIGURE 5: MAP OF HAWAI‘I, [t] ~ [k] VARIATION 4
The previous example dealt with variation in pronunciation; however dialects may differ in more ways
than just the sounds they use. Morphological variation between dialects can be seen in Standard English’s
reflexive pronouns. In standard English, the singular reflexive pronouns are myself, yourself, himself,
herself, and itself and the plural reflexive pronouns are ourselves, yourselves, and themselves. Many English
dialects, including the southern American English, use hisself and theirselves instead of himself and
themselves as in sentences like ‘He laughed at hisself’ or ‘They took good care of theirselves’.
Japanese is an instructive language when discussing dialects. Prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868,
commoners were not allowed to travel freely from one region to another and only a small percentage of
privileged people could go out of their own provinces. This lack of mobility resulted in regional dialects
being preserved, as relatively limited people had a chance to interact with anyone outside of their own area
directly. Today’s standard Japanese is based on the Tôkyô dialect; however, there are many distinguished
regional dialects such as Ôsaka-ben, Fukuoka-ben, or Tôhoku-ben (ben being the Japanese term for
‘dialect’). The study of dialects is called dialectology and dialectologists compile maps recording the
geographic distributions and boundaries of variations in many different features of a language. A geographic
boundary marking where a certain linguistic feature is found is known as an isogloss. The set of maps is
called a linguistic atlas. The following map indicates the geographic boundary of the regional Japanese
dialect called Tôhoku-ben.
4
Courtesy of About.com: Geography,http://geography.about.com/library/blank/blxushi.ht
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Language Variation
FIGURE 6: MAP OF JAPAN, TÔHOKU DIALECT ISOGLOSS 5
The Tôhoku-ben-speaking region consists of the areas of northern Honshû north and east of the bottom
end of Fukushima and the northern half of Niigata (e.g. Kanno and Iitoyo 1967/1994; Katô 1958; Tokugawa
and Grootaers 1951). This dialect is known for its strong phonological features that differ so that words like
sushi and sashimi are pronounced susu and sasumi.
Additionally, there are some semantic (lexical) variations in Japanese dialects that are easily observable
in Japanese loanwords used in Hawai‘i. Following the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese government
encouraged emigration to Hawai‘i, the US mainland, South America, and many Pacific islands. In Hawai‘i,
the first to arrive were laborers from the Hiroshima and Yamaguchi prefectures who spoke the southwestern
regional Chûgoku-ben. According to historical records, Japanese men in Hawai‘i outnumbered women by
a ratio of four to one before 1900 (Clarke 1994:18; Hawaii Hochisha 2001:53; Hiroshima City 2002:1), and
consequently many Japanese men, unable to find wives in Hawai‘i, started arranging picture brides from
their hometowns, especially between 1908 and 1923 (Hawaii Hochisha 2001:61; Odo 1998:109). This
naturally contributed to maintaining the proportions of Japanese dialects—from the beginning of the
Japanese immigration phase until even after WWII, immigrants from Hiroshima and Yamaguchi
outnumbered others. Naturally, more Chûgoku-ben terms came into Hawai‘i than any other Japanese
dialects during the plantation period. Examples of lexical variation from Chûgoku-ben found in Hawai‘i
include bôbora or bôbura ‘pumpkin’ (originally from Portuguese Cambodia abóbora ‘Cambodian
pumpkin’, Kanbe 1998:147), waya ‘chaotic’ (Tomosada 2000:133), bocha ‘to bathe’ (The National
Language Institute of Japan 1979:145), habuteru ‘to pout’ (Tomosada 2000:99), and obâ-ban or bâ-ban
5
Courtesy of Shigenobu Aoki, http://aoki2.si.gunma-u.ac.jp/map/map.cgi
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Language Variation
(Chiyonobu 1935:58). Due to the historical factors, Japanese spoken in Hawai‘i is heavily influenced by
Chûgoku-ben rather than the standard variety (e.g. Fukazawa and Hiramoto 2004).
7.0 SOCIAL VARIATION. Additional factors contributing to the formation of various dialects of a
language, other than the regional or geographic factors discussed above, include socioeconomic class, age,
gender, and ethnicity.
7.1 SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS. In the same way that physical separation results in a geographical distribution
of dialects, factors that affect socioeconomic class can give rise to the social dialects of a language. Some
groundbreaking work on social variation was conducted by William Labov, the father of variationist
sociolinguistics. One of his more widely known studies on socioeconomic class focuses on the speech of
sales assistants in three Manhattan department stores: the highly prestigious Saks, mildly prestigious
Macy’s and the low-class S. Klein (Labov 1972). These rankings were based on the stores’ locations, prices,
merchandise, and advertisement media. As Labov was interested in the sales associates’ articulations of the
final or preconsonantal [r], data collectors, disguised as customers, asked unwitting store clerks a question
that was designed to elicit the answer ‘fourth floor’. To obtain both casual and emphatic speech styles, the
data collectors pretended that they did not hear the answer the first time so that the clerks would repeat their
answer more carefully and emphatically. The study found that the sales assistants from Saks used r the most
while those from Klein’s used it the least, and those from Macy’s showed the greatest increase in use when
they were asked to repeat the answer. The results from the department store study highlight that the
frequency of use of the prestige variable, final or preconsonantal [r], varied with level of formality (casual
or emphatic) and social class (scales of the stores).
TABLE 1: PERCENTAGES OF ‘R-FULLNESS’ (ADOPTED FROM LABOV 1972/1997:175)
Casual
Saks
Macy’s
S. Klein
Fourth
30
27
5
Emphatic
Floor
63
44
8
Fourth
40
22
13
Floor
64
61
18
7.2 AGE. Another pioneering study done by Labov (1963) on the island of Martha’s Vineyard explores the
effects of age on variation. Martha’s Vineyard lies about three miles off the coast of Massachusetts and at
the time of Labov’s study had a permanent population of only six thousand people. Every summer,
thousands of tourists visit the island with the results that summer tourism replaced fishing and whaling as
the dominant industry. At the time of Labov’s fieldwork, only about 150 of the island’s inhabitants still
engaged in fishing, forming a close-knit social group. In his study, Labov focused on pronunciations of the
diphthongs [aw] (house or how) and [aj] (why or wide) in the onset position of certain words. In the New
England dialect, these diphthongs are often centralized and pronounced [əw] and [əj]. Labov interviewed a
number of speakers from different ages and ethnic groups on the island. His findings indicate that the
younger speakers (under 30 years of age), especially the ones engaged in the summer tourism or the ones
who considered leaving the island at some point, did not use the standard New England pronunciation ([əw]
and [əy]) as much, preferring instead the pronunciation associated with standard English ([aw] and [ay]).
The heaviest users of the New England pronunciation were from the working middle age population (31~45
years old) and were mainly fishermen. These people resented the infringement of summer tourists on the
traditional island way of living and were committed to staying on Martha’s Vineyard despite the declining
fishing business.
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Language Variation
TABLE 2: PERCENTAGES OF CENTRALIZATION (ADOPTED FROM LABOV 1963:167)
Age
(ay)
(aw)
75+
25
22
61~74
35
37
46~60
62
44
31~45
81
88
14~30
37
46
Labov’s (1963) report shows that a group of fishermen started to exaggerate the vowel centralization
pronunciation in order to establish themselves as a local group as opposed to the summer visitors. For these
people, the centralized pronunciation had an emblematic function signaling the difference between insiders
and outsiders.
7.3 GENDER. Japanese is known to have gender-exclusive expressions and there are certain linguistic
characteristics reserved for Japanese women’s language, which are expected to be used by ideal women.
Japanese women’s language features include sentence final particles, pronouns, lexical items, etc., and these
speech styles have been studied extensively. The sentence final particles, for instance ze and zo, are
considered to masculine while kashira and nanoyo are feminine. However, as pointed out by the
anthropological linguist Miyako Inoue (2003), highly idealized Japanese women’s language became the
province of imagined characters like Minnie Mouse or Barbie, as no real Japanese women would speak in
such a manner. Although the concept of Japanese women’s language exists, it has become so idealistic that
real speakers do not bother to maintain its demanding linguistic standards in their everyday speech. On the
other hand, fictional female characters often employ Japanese women’s language to mark their femininity.
In the popular anime Cowboy Bebop, the main female characters are developed through both artwork
and language use. This story takes place in the year 2071, largely on the spaceship Bebop, and follows the
adventures of a group of bounty hunters. The main female character, Faye Valentine, has the body of a
model and in an unrealistically feminine manner, employing sentence final particles like nanoyo and
kashira, discussed above. Other female characters are similarly tailor-made to suit their roles. Older and
less attractive characters can be counted on to use less feminine, less proper language.
FIGURES 7 & 8: FAYE VALENTINE (A MODEL WOMAN IN THE HEGEMONIC HETEROSEXUAL IDEAL, LEFT), AND
ANNIE (AN UNATTRACTIVE WOMAN IN THE HEGEMONIC HETEROSEXUAL IDEAL, RIGHT) 6
6
Figures 7, 8, and 9: Copyright© SUNRISE. Permission for reprint received 2009. All rights reserved.
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Language Variation
As with Faye, the main male characters, Spike and Jet, are similarly constructed through a combination
of artwork and language. They are both physically and mentally skilled, although both have prosthetic body
parts due to previous injuries. Jet is an experienced mechanic and capable programmer who loves bonsai
gardening, and Spike is a martial artist, master of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. In addition, not only do Spike
and Jet speak in an idealized rough, masculine register, they are extraordinary pilots and excellent fighters.
Overall findings of this study show that characters of Cowboy Bebop demonstrate ideal Japanese gendered
speech styles (Hiramoto 2010).
FIGURE 9: ED, SPIKE, JET, AND FAYE
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Language Variation
8.0 CONCLUSION. This chapter has presented a broad overview of language variation, especially as it
pertains to the fields of sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. Two important concepts, speech
community and community of practice, were introduced as tools to aid researchers in the analysis of their
data. A researcher dealing with large amount of data, such as a Census, may employ the notion of a speech
community to answer research questions. By employing this method, the distributions and boundaries of
regional dialects may be depicted. Conversely, researchers interested in observing the language use of a
specific group of people, the community of practice concept will allow them to address such questions as
what types of linguistic variety are used by a certain group of people in order to build solidarity among
themselves.
It is important to keep in mind that there is no one standard language. Standard language exists only as
an ideology. Take, for example, Standard English. While elementary school teachers may claim that they
use Standard English, their use of English may vary significantly from that used in other parts of the United
States or other English speaking areas. Some may claim that British English is the standard English, but
there are many different dialects, both regional and social, spoken in today’s UK. For example, the Geico
gecko may be using the ‘cockney’ variety, while Queen Elizabeth may be using the Queen’s English. A
sociolinguist’s goal is not to decide which variety is more prestigious. Rather, sociolinguistics tend to focus
on how these many varieties are employed by speakers; that is why sociolinguists take notice of ‘covert’
versus ‘overt’ prestige.
Differences between social and regional/geographic varieties have also been raised. In the traditional
view, regional or geographic variations tend to change slowly due to immigration. We have also discussed
why it is hard to separate the concept of dialect from the concept of language, as variations which are
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Language Variation
classified as dialects of the same language may not be mutually intelligible, as was the case with Mandarin,
Cantonese and Shanghainese.
Language variation and linguistic change motivated by social factors have been studied extensively by
William Labov, who has conducted a number of groundbreaking studies. This chapter summarizes a few of
his pioneering works. Labov’s most notable results are that factors other thanthose that are languageinternal, such as socioeconomic classes, age, gender, etc., can be correlated with the linguistic variables
people use. Many researchers in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics have been following in his
footsteps to find more about language variation across languages.
DVDs
Cowboy Bebop: Complete Session Collection. 2003. [video] Directed by Shinichiro Watanabe.
USA: Pioneer Video. [6 videodiscs (10 hr., 50 min.)]
Mou Gaan Dou (Wu Jian Dao Infernal Affairs). 2004. [video] Directed by Siu Fai Mak & Wai-keung
Lau. USA: Buena Vista, Miramax Home Entertainment. [1 videodisc (1 hr., 41 min.)]
The Departed. 2007. [video] Directed by Martin Scorsese. USA: Warner Home Video. [1 videodisc (2
hr., 31 min.)]
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