Felix Kpogo

Felix Kpogo will speak at the UC San Diego Linguistics department on February 3rd at 9:00 a.m. in AP&M 4301.

Variationist sociolinguistics beyond Western borders

Languages of Africa represent one-third of the world’s linguistic diversity but are severely underrepresented in linguistic research, including sociolinguistics. The majority of sociolinguistic studies published since the 1960s have focused on English and other Indo-European languages, resulting in a knowledge base that is biased toward Western social contexts. This bias calls into question the generalizability of current sociolinguistic theory, given that the social milieu of Western industrialized speech communities may differ significantly from that of non-Western and/or non-industrialized ones. In this talk, I will enrich our knowledge base on language variation and change by discussing the social predictors of an ongoing sound change in the Twi Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony system. I will acoustically examine production variation in a stratified sample of 105 speakers representing urban and traditional localities in Ghana. I will show that the sound change originated in the urban community, and it is evident in all age groups but near completion in the youngest generation. The change is, however, gradually spreading to traditional community but it is only evident in some younger speakers. I will further show that the effect of gender differs between localities: urban men are more advanced in the change than urban women whereas traditional speakers showing the change are predominantly women. Overall, by reflecting the gender dynamics of societal engagement and contact in Ghana, I will argue that these findings highlight the importance of local social contexts for the manifestation of variation and the unique insights of non-Western communities for sociolinguistic theory.