Bilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact by Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine E. Travis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018

Abstract

<p>Since William Labov established quantitative sociolinguistics as a field of study in its own right, research into the nature and scope of linguistic variation has continued to expand its frontiers. Variation has been examined in the context of second language acquisition (Adamson 2009), substrate influence on creole languages (Meyerhoff 2009), historical relatedness of creole varieties (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001) and bi-varietal language use (Dixon 2017), to name but a few. While each of these applications is motivated by distinct theoretical concerns, they are united by a shared understanding: that language change is predicated on instability in the linguistic system, and that this instability comes in the form of intra-speaker variation. For change to happen, individual speakers have to stop doing one thing and instead do another. Rarely does this involve a singular leap from 'doer-of-one-thing' to 'doer-of-the-other'. Rather, there is a process of acclimation, during which speakers maintain a foot in both camps. In short, you can't have change without variation (Weinreich et al. 1968: 188). The close examination of intra-speaker variation, therefore, is the study of potential or nascent language change.</p>