Plenary Abstract: Prof. Dr. Susan M. Fitzmaurice

Sociolinguists and dialectologists investigating the language practices of speakers in a range of settings have unparalleled access to styles, performances and linguistic behaviours. Or do they? Ethnographic methods and the rise of the researcher as participant-observer have advanced considerably our understanding of the complexity and range of the performance repertoires of the speakers we study. However, we cannot escape from the Observer's paradox. Regardless of how 'undercover' the observation is, the ethical standards governing research today prohibit the use of surreptitious methods of recording. In short, although we may imagine we have the full picture of a subject’s linguistic life, we cannot hope to have because we cannot reach into the recesses of private language use.

In this talk, I argue that some of the gaps left in our account of language practices and linguistic behaviour may be filled by the evidence yielded by literary texts, in other words, by writing that constructs fictional worlds peopled by the characters who are exponents of the varieties we wish to investigate. Of course, the practice of mining literary texts for evidence of linguistic practice and language change is not new.  Indeed scholars have relied heavily on literary resources for the study of historical dialects and varieties, as exemplified in canonical work on the history of English.  What is, I think, rarer, is the consultation of current fictional texts for evidence that enables us to construct ways of speaking that tend not to be aired in public, the intimate unguarded use of language that conveys more about the speaker than about what the speaker is talking about. I draw upon literature written in English in Africa, to illustrate the extent to which this practice may illuminate the role of race and ideology in shaping layers and varieties of language use that rarely surface in the research interview. 

Keywords: sociolinguistics, linguistic analysis of literature, ideology and language use