Table Of ContentNorms and the Study of Language in Social Life
Language and Social Life
Editors
David Britain
Crispin Thurlow
Volume 24
Norms and the
Study of Language
in Social Life
Edited by
Janus Mortensen
Kamilla Kraft
ISBN 978-1-5015-1914-7
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1188-2
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1189-9
ISSN 2364-4303
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950675
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
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Chapter “Multilingual creativity and emerging norms in interaction: Towards a methodology for
micro-diachronic analysis” © Marie-Luise Pitzl
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Preface and acknowledgements
The present book is the result of a Colloquium organized as part of Sociolinguis-
tic Symposium 22 in Auckland in June 2018 (Norms in sociolinguistics – revisit-
ing familiar ground and exploring new frontiers), and a two-day follow-up Round
Table held at the University of Copenhagen in March 2019 (Norms and the Study
of Language in Social Life). At both events, scholars were invited to debate theo-
retical and methodological questions related to the notion of norms on the basis
of original research.
The resulting book (which also features an epilogue that was commissioned
at a later stage) contributes to current understandings of norms as a theoretical
construct and empirical object of research in sociolinguistics and related fields,
based on research from a range of geographical contexts, including Austria,
Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway and the UK, providing a multifaceted
view of norms as a central but under-theorised notion in the study of language in
social life. The contributors approach the common topic of the book from a range
of complementary disciplinary perspectives, including sociolinguistics, linguistic
anthropology, ethnomethodology, socio-cognitive linguistics, and pragmatics.
The round table in Copenhagen, hosted by the TMC project (www.tmc.ku.dk),
was based on pre-circulated chapter drafts in which all participants were asked to
address the following questions in relation to their own research contexts:
– What are “norms”? How are norms conceptualized in your work, and which
frameworks do you draw upon?
– How can norms be studied? What sort of data is needed, what sort of methods?
– Why are norms (not) important as a theoretical construct in sociolinguis-
tics? How does the notion of norm relate to other concepts in the literature,
inter alia ideology and practice?
– What can be achieved by studying norms? What are the implications for socio-
linguistics as a discipline? What (if any) are the implications beyond aca-
demia?
While the final versions of the chapters included here do not offer neat list-like
answers to these questions, they all offer perspectives on the questions which we
believe will be of interest to a wide range of readers who take an interest in the
topic of norms in language and social life.
Following the meeting in Copenhagen, discussions concerning norms have
continued amongst the editors and authors in multiple ways, and we would like
to thank all contributors for the time and energy they have devoted to the project,
not only by working tirelessly on their own chapters, but also by reviewing other
chapters in the volume. Similarly, we would like to thank the participants at the
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501511882-202
VI Preface and acknowledgements
Colloquium and the Round Table for supporting the project and engaging in
stimulating discussions, either by presenting work of their own or, in the case
of Jürgen Jaspers and Katherine Kappa, by serving as invited discussants. We are
also grateful to the members of the TMC project advisory board, Nikolas Coup-
land, Hartmut Haberland, Anne Holmen, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Elizabeth Lanza,
Meredith Marra, and Celia Roberts, for the help and guidance they have offered at
several important junctures along the way.
Our work on the book has been financially supported by The Danish Council
for Independent Research | Humanities through grant no. 6107-00351, Transient
Multilingual Communities and the Formation of Social and Linguistic Norms (2016–
2019), and this support is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank
the series editors and Natalie Fecher and Kirstin Börgen at De Gruyter for their
patience and unfaltering support, as well as the Centre for Internationalisation
and Parallel Language Use at the University of Copenhagen for hosting the TMC
project and the Round Table in 2018.
JM and KK
Copenhagen
May 2021
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements V
Janus Mortensen and Kamilla Kraft
1 Introduction: ‘Behind a veil, unseen yet present’ – on norms
in sociolinguistics and social life 1
Peter Harder
2 Attitudes, norms and emergent communities 21
Spencer Hazel and Dorte Lønsmann
3 Norms, accountability and socialisation in a refugee language
classroom 43
Irina Piippo
4 Norms in the making – exploring the norms of the teaching register
selkosuomi in immigrant integration training classrooms in Finland 69
Kamilla Kraft and Janus Mortensen
5 Norms and stereotypes: Studying the emergence and sedimentation
of social meaning 97
Marie-Luise Pitzl
6 Multilingual creativity and emerging norms in interaction: Towards
a methodology for micro-diachronic analysis 125
Anne Fabricius
7 What’s in a sociolinguistic norm? The case of change in prevocalic /r/
in Received Pronunciation 157
Meredith Marra, Janet Holmes and Bernadette Vine
8 What we share: The impact of norms on successful interaction 185
Nikolas Coupland
9 Normativity, language and Covid-19 211
Index 233
Janus Mortensen and Kamilla Kraft
1 Introduction: ‘Behind a veil, unseen yet
present’ – on norms in sociolinguistics
and social life
There is no shortage of sources that stipulate the dos and don’ts of social life. Yet,
to be a socially competent member of a community, individuals need to be sen-
sitive to social norms beyond what is available as explicitly formulated rules for
appropriate behavior. Norms are indispensable and ubiquitous in social interac-
tion, but often exist “behind a veil, unseen yet present” to use a suggestive image
from Britannicus by the French dramatist, Jean Racine (1670, act 1, scene 1).1 Dom-
inant thinkers in sociology, with Durkheim (1893) as the perhaps most prominent
example, attribute great importance to social norms, treating them as constitutive
elements of human societies. In a similar vein, the philosopher Bicchieri (2006)
has proposed, using another evocative metaphor, that social norms may be seen
as “the grammar of society”. So, even though they may often be hidden from
view, social norms are arguably fundamental, not only in our everyday lives, but
also in the way human sociality has been theorized.
Because of their everyday and theoretical importance, the need to theorize
norms and the processes that create and sustain them continues to be a central
but challenging task for the social sciences (Hechter & Opp 2001; Xenitidou &
Edmonds 2014; Hechter 2018). The chapters in this book explore the notion of
1 The words, derrière un voile, invisible et présente, are spoken by Aggrapine, Nero’s mother,
as she describes (with bitter regret) the influence, now lost, she used to exert over her son, the
emperor, and the Roman Senate. English translations vary, of course, in their rendition of the
French original. The translation included here is taken from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_
Racine (May 2021). In Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translation (Racine 2014), the full passage reads:
“Those days are past when Nero would report / The heartfelt wishes of his doting court, / When,
my hand guiding the affairs of state, / The senate, at my call, would congregate. / Then, veiled
but present, I would play my role: / That august body’s all-controlling soul.”
Acknowledgements: Work on this Introduction has been supported by The Danish Council for
Independent Research | Humanities through grant no. 6107-00351, Transient Multilingual Com-
munities and the Formation of Social and Linguistic Norms (2016–2019), www.tmc.ku.dk. We
would like to thank our collaborators on the TMC project, Dorte Lønsmann, Katherine Kappa,
Spencer Hazel, for many inspiring discussions about norms over the years and Nikolas Coupland
for his insightful comments on an earlier version of the present text. All remaining shortcomings
remain our responsibility.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501511882-001
2 Janus Mortensen and Kamilla Kraft
norms from a range of different perspectives, but they all focus specifically on
norms related to language and language use, drawing on or engaging with the-
oretical and methodological approaches which may be broadly categorized as
sociolinguistic. The importance of norms is easily discernible in the sociolinguis-
tic canon (as we will discuss below), but there is no abundance of work within
the field focusing specifically on the notion of norms (as opposed to work devoted
to the related notion of language ideology). Norms are often treated as concep-
tual primes – convenient building blocks, ready-made for sociolinguistic theo-
rizing – rather than theoretical constructs in need of reflexive attention as part
of the sociolinguistic endeavor (cf. Blommaert 2006: 520). The overall aim of this
book is therefore to explore and advance current understandings of norms as a
theoretical construct and empirical object of research in sociolinguistics.
In this Introduction we set the scene for the ensuing chapters by providing an
overview of the way the notion of norms has been used in sociolinguistics, and
how it is approached in the present book. As we will explain, this involves chal-
lenging the idea of norms as unchanging and uniform abstract entities. Norms
are messy, continuously reconstructed, and often contested in social interaction.
We argue that the use of language in social life is a prime site for the study of
the (re)production of social norms in general (and not just linguistic norms) and
should therefore be of interest not only to sociolinguists, but also social scientists
more generally. Norms may often exist behind a veil, but by exploring how indi-
viduals and groups enact – or resist – norms through language use and how they
reflexively orient to emerging and sedimented norms through language as part
of social interaction, we may catch a glimpse of the processes that continuously
help create, sustain, and transform norms as the foundation of human sociality.
1 Norms in the sociolinguistic tradition
As indicated above, the notion of norms has a long history in sociolinguistics.
Norms have been of interest not only in the variationist tradition but also in inter-
actional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking, just as norms can
be said to be of central concern in the neighboring fields of ethnomethodology,
conversation analysis and linguistic anthropology. Labov famously defined the
speech community as “participation in a set of shared norms” (1972: 120–121),
while Gumperz noted that “the speech varieties employed within a speech com-
munity form a system because they are related to a shared set of social norms”
(1968: 381 our emphasis). Hymes similarly emphasized the importance of norms
by devoting the letter ‘N’ in his SPEAKING mnemonic to a dual focus on “norms of
interaction” and “norms of interpretation” (1972: 63). In other words, the notion of
