Following a meeting with President Obama at the White House, Svanberg said of the president, “He’s frustrated because he cares, about the small people. And we care about the small people.”

Svanberg later apologized, saying he “spoke clumsily” when he used the phrase. Some people have suggested that he meant to refer to small business people. (I could swear that I heard Tony Hayward offer this explanation on the radio yesterday, but can’t find evidence of it in print. The link is to a blog at The Guardian where a similar explanation is offered in the comments section.) Others suggest that Svanberg, who is Swedish, produced a calque of den lilla människan “the little people”.

My first reaction when I heard Svanberg’s remarks was that he must have been aiming for “the little guy” and produced a near miss.

Where many seem to hear “the small people” as condescending and elitist, “the little guy” has always seemed to me like an attempt to appeal to democratic, even populist sentiment. Consider these examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English:

A broad swathe of the investor world, including the little guy, is yelling at Chairman Greenspan. (PBS Newshour, 1997)

[It's] not going to be the rich who are hurt; it’s going to be the little guy that gets hurt, like my aunt and uncle out in Pittsburgh. (CNN, 1993)

Rockne saw Notre Dame as the tough little guy, the outsider, just as he himself had been while growing up. (Smithsonian magazine, 1993)

Whatever the merits of Pyle’s case against San Jose, he looks like a little guy getting stepped on by a high-profile bureaucrat. (San Francisco Chronicle, 1990)

To me, Svanberg seemed to talking about individual people, as opposed to powerful institutions such as government or corporations. Of course, my home and livelihood have not recently been threatened by the company Svanberg represents. If they had, my first reactions to whatever he said might be less generous.

In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition. The statement was sent to Governor Jan Brewer and to Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne. A PDF version of the statement is also publicly available here.

The statement points out eight facts about language and language acquisition drawn from linguistic research ranging from William Labov (1963) and Eric Lenneberg (1967) to recent (2009) publications in psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, etc.

I will  quote the statement’s eight bullet points here. Check out the PDF for the detailed descriptions.

1. ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2. Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3. Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
4. Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5. It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
6. There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
7. Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
8. There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.
   (University of Arizona Department of Linguistics, May 26 2010)

That publication is K. Kinzler, K. Shutts, J. DeJesus, and E. Spelke, “Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences,” Social Cognition 27(4), 2009, pp. 623–634. (It is available here, but only if you or your institution subscribes to the journal.)

The authors, social psychologists from Harvard University, suggest that their subjects, white English-monolingual 5 and 6 year olds in the Boston area, relied as strongly on language cues in choosing friends as they did on visual cues. This supports work in social psychology suggesting that people use non-visual cues, including ethnic categories or language choice, in various types of identity work.

In a series of experiments Kinzler and her colleagues showed 5- and 6-year-old white children pairs of photographs of children’s faces, matched with audio clips of children speaking. Subjects were asked to put a sticker on the picture of the child they would like to be friends with. In one experiment, when pictures were shown without any audio children chose to be friends with a child of their own race about 75% of the time. When audio clips showed the white pictures “speaking” French-accented English, however, the subjects chose the black, native-English speaking pictures more than 70% of the time. One way to interpret these findings, according to the authors, is “that children privilege information about how individuals sound over how they look in guiding their social preferences” (p. 629).

As I say, the findings are interesting and fairly persuasive (though of course I hardly need to be persuaded that language use is an important constituent of cultural identity). I do have some minor criticisms of the work as presented. For example, they find that white, English-speaking subjects prefer black children who speak with a native English accent over white children who speak French-accented English, but do not compare this to other possible combinations (black and French-accent, white and American accented). Its possible that including such comparisons would not have significantly changed the outcome, but it would be interesting to compare.

It was also slightly odd to see Mark Baker’s The Atoms of Language cited to support the assertion that language may have served as a better indicator of group membership than visual cues throughout evolutionary history. It has been some time since I read Baker’s book, but I recall him making almost the opposite argument – that languages, especially their syntactic parameters, are not strongly correlated with other aspects of culture.

Still, the paper is well done, generally persuasive in its conclusions, and relatively accessible even for non-psychologists with an interest in the social psychology of identity and language. The questions for future research raised in the paper might be profitably addressed by linguistic anthropologists as well as social psychologists: Do similar accent preferences hold for children from multilingual settings? How do language or accent preferences compare to gender or age preferences? Does in-group preference trump the social prestige of particular languages? Do these patterns change as children get older? Can children be led to overcome these prejudices?

I read your article ‘Code Switching’ in Sociocultural Linguistics. What I wonder is [why] you didn’t write something about the author Grosjean (1982, Life with Two Languages). He also used the term Code Switching as one of the first. And I can’t get the differences between ‘ language alternation’ and ‘ code switching’? Can you describe the differences?

These are excellent questions. There are two principal reasons that I do not discuss the work of Professor Grosjean in my 2005 paper. The intent of the paper is to highlight work by linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and sociologists of language; I would classify Grosjean’s earlier work in speech production, perception, and comprehension as works of psycholinguistics. There is a large and important literature on bilingualism in psycholinguistics which, as my introduction warns, the paper neglects.

Second, by the time Grosjean’s work on bilingualism and biculturalism came to the fore people like Einar Haugen (e.g. 1953), Roman Jakobson (e.g. 1961), and John J. Gumperz (e.g. 1964) had been discussing these issues – albeit in somewhat different ways – for quite some time.

Perhaps a third reason is simply space constraints. The paper as originally written is more than 18,000 words and still neglects many linguists and other scholars who made important contributions to the study of code switching.

The more substantive question is: what is the difference between language alternation and code switching? This is a controversial question, and my answer to the question is not the most widely used one in the field. I will therefore offer two answers.

First, I believe that the more standard practice is to make little distinction. Many linguists use the term code switching to mean the use of two languages within one conversation or text. Romaine (1989) attributes this definition to Gumperz (1982), though as my paper suggests, Gumperz did not actually use the word “languages” in his definition of conversational code switching.

The distinction between language alternation on one hand and code switching on the other comes from the work of Celso Alvarez (e.g. 1998, 2000). My definitions of language alternation and code switching are deeply indebted to Alvarez, and also owe debts to work by Gumperz (1982, 1992) and Auer (Auer and di Luzo 1992, Auer 1998), among many others.

Second, then, I will try to describe how I use the terms in that paper. You may think of language alternation and code switching as two different ways of thinking about language output, the first relating to grammatical form and the second to communicative function. Language alternation describes the alternating use of two recognizable grammatical systems – two “languages” in some sense of that word. For example, if a conversation contains some utterances in, say, Mandarin and others in, say, French, you may say that the conversation features language alternation. Recognize that the definition of what counts as a language is not an uncontroversial one. While most people will probably accept the suggestion that Mandarin and French are discrete languages, it may be more difficult to make the same assertion about Dyirbal and Giramay or about English and Scots. There may also be argument over whether an English speaker who utters the string “je ne sais quoi” is speaking French or using a stock English phrase that was borrowed from French.

Where language alternation concerns linguistic form, code switching concerns the contextualization of communication. In my own work, code switching is defined as a use of language alternation or of code choice (that is, deciding to speak one language rather than another) in order to contextualize an utterance. Contextualization refers to Gumperz’s (1982) description of the ways in which speakers give cues about how to understand an utterance. These cues are generally subtle and not related to propositional content, for example signalling the formality of the situation, the relationship between speakers, or other elements of context.

When a change in linguistic form (language alternation) signals a change in context (contextualization) the practice may be described as code switching. It is therefore possible to use code switching without switching “language” per se, for example by switching registers. It is also possible, at least in theory, to observe language alternation that does not effect contextualization and therefore does not count as code switching under this definition. This may be the case, for example, in what Myers-Scotton (1993) calls “codeswitching as unmarked choice.”

References

Alvarez, Celso. 1998. From ‘switching code’ to ‘code-switching’: towards a reconceptualization of communicative codes.” In P. Auer (ed.) Code-switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity, 29-48. London: Routledge.

– 2000. Para um modelo do ‘code-switching’ e a alternancia de variedades como fenomenos distintos: dados do discurso Galego-Portuges/Espanhol na Galiza. Sociolinguistic Studies 1(1), 111-128.

Auer, Peter. 1998. Code-switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. London: Routledge.

Auer, Peter, and di Luzo. 1992. The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Grosjean, Francois. 1982. Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gumperz, John J. 1964. Linguistic and social interaction in two communities. American Anthropologist 66(6): part 2, 137-153.

– 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– 1992. Contextualization revisted. In P. Auer and A. di Luzo (eds.) The Contextualization of Language, 39-53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Haugen, Einer. 1953. The Norwegian Language in America: A Study of Bilingual Behavior volume 1. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1961. Linguistics and communication theory. In R. Jakobson (ed.) Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects: Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics volume XII. American Mathematical Society.

Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon.

Romaine, Suzanne. 1989. Bilingualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.