Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics

Citation

Eckert, P. (2018). Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a career-long collection rather than a conventional textbook: eleven chapters in three parts, framed by a preface ("The Ant's Eye View"), a postscript and an index of about 210 pages in all. Most chapters build on a paper Eckert published earlier, with new introductions and conclusions that tie the pieces into one account of how the study of sociolinguistic variation moved from social categories to social meaning. The publisher presents it as a history of the field told through her own work, and the reviewer Ulrike Stange (LINGUIST List, 2020) calls it an intellectual autobiography.

Part I, Beginnings: Chapter 1, Gascon; Chapter 2, Stigma and Meaning in Language Shift

The two opening chapters come from Eckert's early work on Occitania in southern France. They deal with the movement to revive Occitan and the way a standardised variety can override local ones, and with language shift in a diglossic setting, where a prestigious language takes over more and more speech events and the other becomes stigmatised. They are the least connected to the later chapters in topic, but they introduce her interest in what a variety means to its speakers.

Part II, My Participation in the Second Wave: Chapters 3–7

Chapter 3, Jocks and Burnouts, uses clothing, especially jeans width, to show how two school-based social categories map onto territory in a Detroit-area high school. Chapter 4, Jocks, Burnouts and Sound Change, links those categories and their social networks to the spread of innovative vowels. Chapter 5, The Local and the Extra-Local, asks how change spreads across a region and how the "inside" and "outside" of a community meet. Chapter 6, On the Outs, argues for treating gender as a social construct to be analysed rather than assumed when interpreting sex differences in variation. Chapter 7, Foregrounding Style, follows a cohort of preadolescent girls and the emergence of a local style.

Part III, The Third Wave: Chapters 8–11

Chapter 8, The SLIC Generation, discusses the social nature of desire, personae and category identities, and questions the notion of the "authentic speaker". Chapter 9, The Nature of Indexicality in Variation, is the theoretical centre: it presents the idea that a variable carries a field of potential meanings that speakers activate in context, and treats style as the construction of ways of being. Chapter 10, What Kinds of Signs Are These?, asks whether a variable points directly or indirectly to categories such as ethnicity, using a study of Chicano and white students in California. Chapter 11, The Semiotic Landscape, is a short closing chapter that proposes directions for further work.

Key Concepts

Part I: Beginnings

• Diglossia and language shift: the division of speech events between a high and a low variety, and the loss of the low variety as the high one expands.
• Standardisation and local difference: a unifying standard can suppress regional varieties even within a revival movement.

Part II: The Second Wave

• Jocks and Burnouts: the two opposed school-based categories used throughout the book to link social practice and linguistic variation.
• Social networks and sound change: the way different patterns of association shape who leads innovation.
• Sex and gender: the distinction between the biological and the social, applied to variation data.
• Style: a clustering of linguistic resources that has social meaning.

Part III: The Third Wave

• Indexicality and the indexical field: variables carry sets of potential meanings that are activated in use.
• Persona and category identity: how styles are assembled to present kinds of people.
• Semiotic landscape: the view that meaning is spread across language, dress, place and practice.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A first-hand history of a research programme. Because the author lived the sequence from demographic correlation to stylistic practice, the book shows why the third wave arose and what each stage left unexplained, which a survey textbook cannot do as concretely.
• Reprints made coherent. Stange finds that the new transitions and the separate introduction and conclusion of each chapter make the whole read as a coherent narrative, and that the order of papers within each part is sensible.
• One field site returns throughout. The Detroit-area school study reappears in Chapters 3 to 5, 9 and 10, so readers can watch the same data reinterpreted as the framework changes.

Limitations

• Not a general introduction. All the papers are by one author, so the book gives a personal path through the field and not a balanced survey. Stange would not set it as a main text and would assign selected chapters.
• Repetition. The same Jocks and Burnouts material recurs, which Stange attributes to the reprint format.
• The subtitle promises more than the book's proportions. Only Part III is about the third wave; Parts I and II cover diglossia in France and second-wave studies, and several chapters lean towards linguistic anthropology.
• Prerequisites. Readers are expected to know the Labovian variationist tradition the book responds to.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the sociolinguistics books on this list, Holmes and Wilson's An Introduction to Sociolinguistics and Trudgill's Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society are short first courses, and Wardhaugh and Fuller's An Introduction to Sociolinguistics is a broader introduction to language and society. Eckert belongs after those. Chambers's Sociolinguistic Theory is the natural companion: it synthesises the correlational findings of the first and second waves, while Eckert explains why those findings left the question of meaning open. Li Wei's The Bilingualism Reader covers a different part of the field.

How to Use This Book

The book suits graduate students and advanced undergraduates who have completed a sociolinguistics course including Labov's variationist studies; basic phonetics helps with the vowel chapters.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapter 9 for the theory of indexicality; Chapters 4 and 7 for the empirical work behind it; Chapter 10 for a worked application.
• Context: Chapters 3, 5 and 6 fill in the school study, place and gender; the preface and chapter introductions give the author's own account of why each step followed.
• Optional: Chapters 1 and 2 for diglossia and language shift; Chapter 8 for desire, persona and authenticity; Chapter 11 for her suggested directions.

Read Chambers first or in parallel, so that the second-wave findings Eckert reinterprets are already familiar.