Lesley Milroy is currently the Hans Kurath Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. Together with her husband James Milroy, she is best known for her pioneering research on working-class speech in Belfast in the 1970s during the height of the Troubles. Since then they have lectured worldwide and published extensively on authority in language, dialects and language change and language and social networks.

The lectures celebrated the launch of the University's new Centre for Linguistic Research and the opening of a new Phonetics Laboratory within the School of Language and Literature.

We are all very familiar with lively public discussions of linguistic issues, generally carried out with reference to an assumed ideal form of  language. Measured against this ideal form (Standard English in our case) other varieties are generally thought to be inadequate in some way. Typically, professional linguists contest this view, arguing that language is a unique human endowment and that no language or dialect can be said to be better or worse than another. All languages and dialects can be shown to have a complex architecture requiring formidable cognitive capacities on the part of their users. There is thus a considerable gap between 'lay' and 'professional' views of language, and one consequence of this gap is that linguists' contributions to public debates are seldom treated seriously and are often thought to be self-evidently wrong. It appears in fact that professional linguists treat language in structural, mentalistic terms, while the general public treat it quite differently, as a social and cultural object. In this lecture it is argued that beliefs about language articulated by users (language ideologies) constitute an attempt to rationalize observed connections between language and the social world. As such, they are an important part of the sociolinguistic landscape which should not  be dismissed as mere ill-informed misunderstandings. Their importance is demonstrated with reference to particular language ideologies in different speech communities, both historical and contemporary. Finally, it is argued that a systematic study of language ideologies can yield not only important insights into the nature of the social world, but can go some way towards helping linguists engage in a dialogue with the general public.
 

The theme of this lecture is a continuation of that of Lecture 1, emphasizing the conflicting attitudes to language that are held by lay persons, on the one hand, and by academic linguists on the other. It is frequently claimed that lay attitudes are shaped by ideological positions, whereas linguists' attitudes are objective and scientific. We notice first that this is not strictly accurate: linguists' pronouncements are not always scientific and they often have aims that are ideological.  'Leave your language alone', for example, is an ideological statement.  We will see that both views of language (lay and professional) are valid and defensible: it is not the case that the academic linguist's approach is always right and the layperson's always wrong.  However, the non-specialist views expressed are often not really about language at all, but about social and political matters, such as national identity. This of course does not in itself make them invalid, but it should be admitted that lay views are often badly expressed and confused about linguistic details.

Here I would like to discuss two topics that are typically not well understood by non-professionals. The first is the nature of a standard language and the consequences of language standardization. The second, related, topic is the idea of purity in language. I take the main intra-linguistic characteristic of standardization to be uniformity or invariance. The other characteristics normally attributed to standardization (e.g. the standard as a yardstick or level of achievement) are consequences of ideological, not linguistic, positions; taken together they constitute 'the standard ideology'.  As for purism, one aspect of this can be involved in standardization, the standard language being thought of as the 'pure' language.  More commonly, however, purism in action is about resisting the influence of other languages or dialects on a language which may already be a standard language. We consider various examples of this. Finally, we notice that the standard language is never absolutely standardized, but is subject to change. Likewise, no language or variety of language is ever literally 'pure'.

Dr. Johnson's witty articulation of a still popular theory of linguistic change is examined in light of the contribution of modern variationist sociolinguistics, whose most influential exponent is William Labov. It is argued that we can best understand the dynamics of change if we see it as emerging from the variable use of  two or more variants which allow users to choose between 'two different ways of  saying the same thing' in terms of semantic structure, although not always in terms of social indexicality. Examples of changes which have gone to completion in English are examined, and social evaluations of  conservative and innovatory variants are seen to have changed as the innovatory variant becomes established. Sometimes however both variants remain in competition for a very long time, as is the case with some changes currently in progress in Scottish, English and North American speech communities. These changes are examined with reference both to the distribution of variants in the speech community, and to changes in social evaluation of variants. Such changes in social evaluation can often be seen as  responses to social and demographic changes.

James Murray Brown graduated from Edinburgh University in 1951 and taught mathematics at Elgin Academy until 1980.