Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T04:23:47.869Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Parents and their children's variable language: Is it acquisition or more?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2016

RANIA HABIB
RANIA HABIB*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
*
Address for correspondence: Rania Habib, Syracuse University, 325 H. B. Crouse, Syracuse, NY 13244-0001; tel: 01-315-443-5490; fax: 01-315-443-5376; e-mail: rhabib@syr.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study compares the use of the variable (q), which is realized as rural [q] and urban [ʔ], in the speech of twenty-two parents and their twenty-one children from the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. The study shows that children acquire the general gendered linguistic pattern of the community but do not replicate the linguistic frequencies that exist in their immediate environment. Boys and girls exhibit different linguistic behavior. Boys deviate from the non-local caregivers' proportions and approach men's local linguistic behavior, although their local variant proportions remain lower; girls, even those with local mothers, approach the women's supralocal variant proportions. The study shows that sociolinguistic variation is not acquired from adults from a very early age; it is acquired later in life after accepting and ascertaining the gendered linguistic differences and appropriateness norms.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 628 - 649
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

I would like to thank the children and their parents who participated in this study and made this research project possible. I am also grateful to Dr Paul H. Bern, who confirmed the accuracy of the statistics during the review process. I would also like to thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this paper.

References

REFERENCES

Abd-el-Jawad, H. R. (1986). The emergence of an urban dialect in the Jordanian urban centers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 61, 53–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abu-Haidar, F. (1987). The treatment of the reflexes of /q/ and /k/ in the Muslim dialect of Baghdad. Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik 17, 41–57.Google Scholar
Al-Wer, E. & Herin, B. (2011). The lifecycle of Qaf in Jordan. Langage et société 138, 59–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amara, M. (2005). Language, migration and urbanization: the case of Bethlehem. Linguistics 43(5), 883–901.Google Scholar
Andersen, E. S., Brizuela, M., DuPuy, B. & Gonnerman, L. (1999). Cross-linguistic evidence for the early acquisition of discourse markers as register variables. Journal of Pragmatics 31, 1339–51.Google Scholar
Barbu, S., Nardy, A., Chevrot, J. & Juhel, J. (2013). Language evaluation and use during early childhood: adhesion to social norms or integration of environmental regularities? Linguistics 51(2), 381–411.Google Scholar
Chevrot, J., Beaud, L. & Varga, R. (2000). Developmental data on a French sociolinguistic variable: the word-final post-consonantal /R/. Language Variation and Change 12(3), 295–319.Google Scholar
Chevrot, J. & Foulkes, P. (2013). Introduction: language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation. Linguistics 51(2), 251–4.Google Scholar
Daher, J. (1998). Gender in linguistic variation: the variable (q) in Damascus Arabic. In Benmamoun, E., Eid, M. & McCarthy, J. (eds), Perspectives on Arabic linguistics XI: papers from the Eleventh Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, 183–206. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, M. (2005). The emergence of adult-like command of sociolinguistic variables: a study of consonant weakening in Spanish-speaking children. In Eddington, D. (ed.), Selected proceedings of the 6th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages, 56–65. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Docherty, G., Foulkes, P., Tillotson, J. & Watt, D. (2006). On the scope of phonological learning: issues arising from socially-structured variation. In Goldstein, L., Whalen, D. H. & Best, C. T. (eds), Laboratory phonology 8, 393–421. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Fischer, J. L. (1958). Social influences on the choice of a linguistic variant. Word 14(1), 47–56.Google Scholar
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. & Watt, D. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language 8(1), 177–206.Google Scholar
Ghimenton, A., Chevrot, J. & Billiez, J. (2013). Language choice adjustments in child production during dyadic and multiparty interactions: a quantitative approach to multilingual interactions. Linguistics 51(2), 413–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habib, R. (2010a). Rural migration and language variation in Hims, Syria. SKY Journal of Linguistics 23, 61–99.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (2010b). Word frequency and the acquisition of the Arabic urban prestigious form [ʔ]. Glossa 5(2), 198–219.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (2010c). Towards determining social class in Arabic-speaking communities and implications for linguistic variation. Sociolinguistic Studies 4(1), 175–200.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (2011a). Meaningful variation and bidirectional change in rural child and adolescent language. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2), 81–90.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (2011b). New model for bilingual minds in sociolinguistic variation situations: interacting social and linguistic constraints. International Journal of Psychology Research 6(6), 707–60.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (2013). How to uncover social variables. In Mallinson, C., Childs, B. & Van Herk, G. Data collection in sociolinguistics: methods and applications, 29–32. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (2014). Vowel variation and reverse acquisition in rural Syrian child and adolescent language. Language Variation and Change 26(1), 45–75.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (to appear). Identity, ideology, and attitude in child and adolescent speech. Linguistic Variation. Google Scholar
Haeri, N. (1997). The sociolinguistic market in Cairo: gender, class and education. London: Kegan Paul International.Google Scholar
Hill, S. E. & Flom, R. (2007). 18- and 24-month-olds’ discrimination of gender-consistent and inconsistent activities. Infant Behavior & Development 30, 168–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hirschfeld, L. A. & Gelman, S. A. (1997). What young children think about the relationship between language variation and social difference. Cognitive Development 12, 213–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson-Kam, C. L. & Newport, E. L. (2005). Regularizing unpredictable variation: the roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language Learning and Development 1(2), 151–95.Google Scholar
Hudson Kam, C. L. & Newport, E. L. (2009). Getting it right by getting it wrong: when learners change languages. Cognitive Psychology 59, 30–66.Google Scholar
Kerswill, P. (1996). Children, adolescents, and language change. Language Variation and Change 8(2), 177–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, P. & Williams, A. (2000). Creating a new town koine: children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29, 65–115.Google Scholar
Khattab, G. (2013). Phonetic convergence and divergence strategies in English-Arabic bilingual children. Linguistics 51(2), 439–72.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1964). Stages in the acquisition of Standard English. In Shuy, R., Davis, A. & Hogan, R. (eds), Social dialects and language learning, 77–104. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1989). The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1, 85–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2), 344–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (2010). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 3: Cognitive and cultural factors. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (2012). What is to be learned? The community as the focus of social cognition. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 10(2), 265–93.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (2013). Preface: the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. Linguistics 51(2), 247–50.Google Scholar
Macaulay, R. K. S. (1977). Language, social class, and education: a Glasgow study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, C. & Fabes, R. (2001). The stability and consequences of young children's same-sex interactions. Developmental Psychology 37, 431–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, C. (2005). Between accommodation and resistance: Upper Egyptian migrants in Cairo. Linguistics 43(5), 903–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, K. (2013). Acquisition of variable rules: /s/-lenition in the speech of Chilean Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers. Language Variation and Change 25, 311–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montanari, S. (2009). Pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development. Journal of Child Language 36, 697–27.Google Scholar
Nardy, A., Chevrot, J. & Barbu, S. (2013). The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: looking back and thinking ahead. Linguistics 51(2), 255–84.Google Scholar
Patterson, J. L. (1992). The development of sociolinguistic phonological variation patterns for (ing) in young children. Unpublished dissertation, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico.Google Scholar
Roberts, J. (1994). Acquisition of variable rules: (-t,d) deletion and (ing) production in preschool children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Roberts, J. (1997). Acquisition of variable rules: a study of (-t, d) deletion in preschool children. Journal of Child Language 24(2), 351–72.Google Scholar
Roberts, J. (2005). Acquisition of variation. In Ball, M. (ed.), Clinical sociolinguistics, 153–64. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Romaine, S. (1984). The language of children and adolescents: the acquisition of communicative competence. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M. & Fortune, L. (2007). ‘Mam, my trousers is fa'in doon!’: community, caregiver and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and Change 19(1), 63–99.Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M. & Richards, H. (2013). The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: caregivers, children, and variation. Linguistics 51(2), 285–324.Google Scholar
Starks, D. & Bayard, D. (2002). Individual variation in the acquisition of postvocalic /r/: day care and sibling order as potential variables. American Speech 77, 184–94.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. & D'Arcy, A. (2009). Peaks beyond phonology: adolescence, incrementation, and language change. Language 85(1), 58–108.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. & Molfenter, S. (2007). ‘How'd you get that accent?’ Acquiring a second dialect of the same language. Language in Society 36, 649–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. (1975). Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. In Thorne, B. & Henley, N. (eds), Language and sex: difference and dominance, 88–104. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W., Carter, P. & Moriello, B. (2004). Emerging Hispanic English: new dialect formation in the American South. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(3), 339–58.Google Scholar
Wonnacott, E. (2011). Balancing generalization and lexical conservatism: an artificial language study with child learners. Journal of Memory and Language 65, 1–14.Google Scholar