英国社会语言学五十年述评

A Review of Fifty Years of British Sociolinguistics

半个多世纪以来,英国社会语言学在方言接触与演变、社会语音、语言习得、媒体对语言的影响、地域差异、比较社会语言学、地域变异、双语、少数民族与语言选择等领域都取得了可观成就,但以特鲁吉尔和柯斯威尔为代表的变异社会语言学一直是主流,特色是方言接触引起的各种演变,尤其是城市移民语言演变及新变体的形成。从20世纪70年代起,英国社会语言学家就一直在探索适合英国国情的理论和方法,没被变异研究“沙文主义”所束缚。经过多年努力,英国社会语言学形成了独有特色,方言接触(特别是城市语言接触)研究领域处于世界领先地位。英国社会语言学研究不仅给中国社会语言学研究提供了理论和方法指导,也带来了有益的启示。

For over half a century,British sociolinguistics has made fruitful achievements in areas such as dialect contact and change,socio-phonetics,language acquisition,influence of media,comparative sociolinguistics,regional variation,bilingualism,ethnicity and code choice.But Variationist Sociolinguistics,or Language Variation and Change(LVC),represented by Peter Trudgill and Paul Kerswill,has long been the mainstream in this area.The distinctness of British sociolinguistics is contact-induced dialect changes,especially changes resulting from urban migration and new dialect formation.Since the 1970s,British sociolinguists have been exploring sociolinguistic theories and methodologies applicable to the British language contexts,without being confined to“chauvinistic”studies on variation.With more than fifty years of efforts,British sociolinguistics has formed its unique features,and its theory on dialect contact and changes(especially urban language contact)is at present most influential in the world.Its theory and methods provide useful insights for sociolinguistics research in China.