1 Introduction

William Labov has long argued that the individual is not a suitable object of linguistic study because the speech patterns of the individual do not exist independently of the larger patterns of the community. I carry this claim one step further, with the proposal that change spreads by virtue of its role in a system of social meaning, and meaning is not constructed by individuals. This is an extreme hypothesis, and while I cannot say that sound change never progresses without taking on social meaning, I have never seen a contemporary example of one that did. The evidence of complex indexicality in variation is sufficiently strong at this point (e.g. Zhang 2005; Podesva 2011; Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2016) that I would not be satisfied with the claim that a sound change was meaningless unless every effort had been made to prove otherwise.

Before I turn to my argument, I should point out that I am engaging in a different discourse from the one that examines cognitive and articulatory abilities or styles that are individually, not socially, variable such as those discussed in several papers in this volume (MacKenzie To appear; Yu To appear). Some of these differences may well lead to social differences but in order for them to affect the spread of change, they need to rise to a social level, transcending the individual. As Alan Yu (To appear) points out, the spread of change ultimately depends on the innovative speaker’s social influence, and this is unlikely to be a direct result of differences in modes of production and processing.

I will be arguing that however they originate, sound changes enter into a semiotic landscape, taking on meaning as components of styles. These styles are part of the construction of personae that inhabit and define the social landscape. Underlying this argument is the recognition that style is not trivial or an add-on to language, but fundamental to social – hence linguistic – life. In my focus on the semiotic landscape, I challenge two basic approaches to variation and change. The first is the treatment of sound change as autonomous. We examine a sound change as having a life of its own, whether alone or in the company of related sounds, as in a chain shift. But a sound change, or even an entire shift, does not occur on its own in speech but in the company of an endless variety of other variables, specifically as a component not just of a dialect but of styles. The second is the linear perspective in which a change is seen as spreading through social networks, from individual to individual by imitation or accommodation and as a function of contact. I do not mean to minimize the importance of social networks in the spread of change, but question any view of networks as mere conduits, and contact as the sole force in the adoption of change (e.g. Bloomfield 1933; Bermúdez-Otero To appear). This mechanistic approach, I note, is not the perspective of most sociolinguistic work on networks (e.g. Milroy 1980; Cheshire 1982; Bortoni-Ricardo 1985), which focuses on motivations for adoption of change in and across local clusters. While social networks clearly structure exposure to change across large populations, such as between cities or between city and country, network clusters are commonly sites of local practice in which speakers jointly orient to their proximal and distal surroundings (Eckert 2000; 2004). It is not individual-to-individual contact that spreads change at this local level, but the joint indexical process that establishes a change as locally meaningful. I argue that whatever its origins, sound change spreads by virtue of its incorporation into the social-semiotic landscape.

2 The semiotic landscape

The social stratification of variables found in urban studies shows the spread of sound change, such as the raising of (aeh) and (oh) in New York (Labov 1966), via class-based social networks. The resulting class stratification applies not only to sound changes in progress but to variables that are relatively stable over time, such as (-ing) and (dh-stopping). This pattern is the result of the centrality of class to the social order. But while all of these variables correlate on the macrosocial level with class, they do so differently. (oh) and (aeh) raising in New York City show a complex class pattern known as the “lower middle class crossover”, while (-ing) and (dh-stopping) show a regular class and stylistic stratification. And even (-ing) and (dh-stopping) show different gender-by-class correlations (Labov 2001), with only (dh-stopping) showing gender crossing over with class. These differences lie in the fact that these variables are expressing slightly different things. Linguistic correlations with membership in macrosocial categories are not directly caused by these abstract structures, but are the result of behavior patterned by the constraints that this structure imposes on social life across the social order. The resulting patterns are a reflection of ideological differences both major and minor, ultimately local manifestations of global issues. The landscape perspective is not a replacement for the macro-social structure in the study of variation, but an elaboration of it – a perspective on that structure from the ground up. The macrosocial structure creates constraints on life at different places in the political economy, as does the physical environment, migration, sexuality, life stage. People in different places live differently, work differently, do different things, talk about different things. They have different perspectives on the world and to a great extent different needs and desires, all in response to material and other differences in the conditions of their joint everyday lives. And they express these differences in subtle and not-so-subtle stylistic patterns.

The acoustic frequency of /s/ is well known as a stereotype of sexuality – a high frequency (or fronted) variant is popularly known as the “gay lisp.” In a study across California, Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2016) have shown that not only do women have fronter /s/ than men, and gay men have fronter /s/ than straight men, but in the rural north of California, town-oriented speakers have fronter /s/ than country-oriented speakers. A change is currently in progress, whereby younger country-oriented men are fronting their /s/, perhaps in a move away from hyper-masculinity. The sheer complexity of this pattern, and its relation to change is a clear indication that sound change moves through a social-semiotic landscape in which ideological connections – in this case among gender, sexuality, and rurality – motivate indexical construals and indexical moves. Hence, the mere finding that a change in progress does not correlate with the usual macrosocial categories is not an indication that it has no social meaning, for there are changes in progress that show a variety of social patterns related to local and global concerns.

Sound change emerges in multiple ways. We generally make a distinction between changes from below and from above the level of consciousness. In the former case, phonological pressures offer up changes, which are then recruited into ideological projects. In the latter, ideological projects go looking for linguistic material. This distinction between changes from above and from below is a useful one, but like the vernacular construct, it is too strict a dichotomy. Certainly the sound changes that we tend to be interested in are those that emerge from pressures in the phonological system. And these get called changes “from below.” And we have changes that are commonly called changes “from above” – such as the insertion of rhoticity in New York or the reversal of (ay) centralization on Martha’s Vineyard – which seem to come about by virtue of their potential for social meaning. But how about contact variables like (dh stopping), which originate in bilingual communities and become nativized? The belief in a strict conscious-unconscious divide is an unsubstantiated one, but it pervades the field, with change from below enjoying status by virtue of its purely language-structural origins, independent of social agency. This link between consciousness and agency makes many uncomfortable with the picture I’m presenting because stylistic practice involves agency, and there is a common belief that agency must be conscious. In fact, work in cognitive science (e.g. Smith & Kosslyn 2007) has made it clear that most of what we do, we do unconsciously. And if we never ask whether the use of a passive construction or dative alternation is the result of conscious agency, why would we ask that of the use of a sociolinguistic variable?

Sociolinguistic variables are indexical signs (Peirce 1931–6), that is signs in which the relation between form and content is one of association in the world. An indexical sign points to, or indexes, something in the context, and a sociolinguistic variable indexes something about the speaker in the situation. While a sound change may begin as a perturbation in form, it becomes a sign as soon as it begins to take on meaning. And I would say that it takes on meaning as soon as it has a social distribution that can be construed in some way. This begins quite early in the change process: Tamminga (2016) has shown that hearers can be unconsciously sensitive to the social distributions of variables that show no stylistic variability – i.e. Labov’s (1971) indicators. The process of construal begins with the initial social distribution of the sign, so while a sound change starts out indexing the population in which it originates, it may well be re-construed as indexing some associations with that population. This process of reconstrual gives rise to new orders of indexicality (Silverstein 2003), and competing re-construals may emerge to give rise to an ideologically structured array of potential meanings – an indexical field (Eckert 2008a). The role of sound changes in the stylistic system is no doubt not random, but structured at least by the locality of their origins, which in some sense predetermines the kinds of indexicality they are likely to take on (Eckert 2018). And sound changes that are part of a single larger process are likely to have similar meanings, as the meanings of earlier members of the process are likely to bleed into subsequent members. Thus we may find that adjacent members of a chain shift have similar meanings (Eckert & Labov 2017). But as sound changes take on this indexicality, they combine with variables indexing other aspects of the speaker’s self in the moment – stance, mood, desired qualities – the result of a process of bricolage. This process is not random (pace Guy & Hinskens 2016) but structured by the semiotic potential of different kinds of variables (Eckert 2018).

This should not be too much to accept when we recognize that language is not simply a referential system, but quite centrally an expressive one as well (e.g. Jakobson 1960). Human sociality requires that we be able to communicate some kinds of information non-sententially. And variability, particularly phonetic variability, provides non-referential material with which we can do this. The social meaningfulness of variation, in other words, is not an incidental or marginal fact, not a side-product of the spread of change, but a design feature of language. Sociolinguistic variables combine into speech styles, and these styles in turn combine with other semiotic systems (e.g. clothing, movement, demeanor) in the construction of personae. It is at this stylistic level, the level of the persona, that variation most clearly connects to the social world, playing out the details of identity and practice in the local spaces that populate the macrosocial categories that give structural sense to variation.

The social-semiotic landscape is an imagined array of social types, distinguished on the basis of social issues and grounding linguistic variability in ideology. It is through participation in this landscape that individual speakers produce and perceive – and accelerate – changes in progress. Speakers engage in stylistic practice to construct personae in the moment, based on their orientation to the range of possibilities offered in the landscape. Thus the adoption of a change is a performative act, not necessarily a conscious one, by which individuals resolve their immediate place in the social landscape. The landscape is structured by stylistic landmarks in the form of what Agha (2003) calls Characterological Figures. These figures are widely conventionalized stereotypes (e.g. Valley Girl, Hippy, Cholo) that articulate social distinctions specific to time and place. The speaker, a stylistic agent, parses figures in the landscape, relating linguistic differences to social differences. Thus change doesn’t just “arrive” at a speaker; it is already there in the landscape, and the speaker adopts it if it is useful.

It is also at the stylistic level that variation plays a role in social change. For social change importantly involves changes in the array of personae that make up the social world, as hippies disappear and punks appear, as hobos give way to migrant workers, and as male lawyers, doctors, professors and politicians give way to female ones. Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of the relation between style and social change is Zhang’s (2005; 2017) study of the emergence of Yuppies in Beijing, as part of China’s move into the global economy. Zhang documents the construction of a new cosmopolitan style of Beijing Mandarin among young managers in foreign-based financial companies. This style took on meaning in distinction from other Beijing styles, most centrally, the more conservative style of financial managers in state-owned businesses. But the stylistic moves that resulted in the cosmopolitan style involved linguistic choices that referred to a variety of other social types, such as “smooth operators”, “alley saunterers”, and Taiwan-Hong Kong capitalists. In other words, the Yuppies looked to the semiotic landscape around them to locate their choice of resources to construct a new and needed persona. And with their choices, they changed the landscape itself. For while one might say that this new speech style mirrored, or resulted from economic change, it also played a role in bringing this change about. Although stylistic practice is not the cause of social change, it is a necessary vehicle for change. The Yuppies’ cosmopolitan speech style served as cultural capital for the foreign businesses, whose distinctiveness and prestige depended on a visibly and auditorily cosmopolitan workforce. And the Yuppies’ elaborate lifestyles contributed to the general awareness of China’s increasing economic divide, and drew consumerism into Chinese culture.

Landscape is a metaphor that pops up all over social science in the form of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes (Appadurai 1996), even selfscapes (Hollan 2014). It is a useful metaphor not only because spatializing social relations is a cognitive aid (Camp 2007), but because every landscape embodies a perspective. The maps of our dialect atlases provide a bird’s eye view of the material facts, but meaning is enregistered in virtue of local perspectives. An individual’s, or a community’s, landscape is constructed in the interests of producing a local that embodies relations to the non-local (e.g. Johnstone et al 2006). Indeed, the places through which change spreads all have their own characters in the wider landscape, which contributes to the meanings of changes as they take off or pass through. Appadurai (1996: Chap. 9) speaks of localness as an active construction, which involves what the local is not, as well as what it is. One could say that a stylistic landscape is constructed in the service of the production of locality, combining resources that are available through direct everyday exposure with resources encountered at a greater social (and geographic) distance. Stylistic practice picks out and arranges elements to create a “here,” in relation to diverse “theres,” which will be constrained, but not determined, by physical and social locality.

It is not uncommon to think of sound changes as flowing along a network, arriving de novo in one community after another. But ethnographic evidence clearly indicates that people hear these changes coming. Studies of sound change have tended to focus on speech communities, with little attention to the wider and immediate surroundings. But the identity of every community is based in its relation to its surroundings, and this relation is key to the everyday lives and identities of community residents. A landscape is a perspective on one’s surroundings, and one’s social-semiotic landscape develops throughout life as one’s time, place and social engagement expand. Every individual has a unique landscape, but what is individual is located within – and constructed in dialogue with – those who co-occupy the landscape. This process begins in infancy, and one’s linguistic productive and receptive repertoire is a continual process of making one’s way through the landscape.

3 Language development and the semiotic landscape

Language development from the very start is based in the individual’s emerging social-semiotic landscape, and the meaning of variation is both prior to, and continuous with, the development of the referential system. The association of language variability with distinctions in the social world is just a fundamental aspect of the constant search for patterns that underlies our linguistic competence. Children’s earliest linguistic distinctions, no doubt, are in prosody and voice quality (Fernald 1989), as they come to associate patterns with caretakers’ expressions of affect. This pattern recognition expands to individuals, and to age and role differences within the family, and beyond. Andersen’s (1990) study of small children’s role playing observes stylistic portrayals of character types emanating from family life (doctors, fathers, mothers) that attend to phonetic differences. No doubt kids develop early on a sensitivity to “baby talk,” as not being a baby emerges as a major social concern for children. Inasmuch as age is a fundamental hierarchy, it is not surprising that features of this “baby talk” style emerge as important resources among adults for expressing intimacy as well as belittlement. So far, studies of small children’s patterns of variation (e.g. Foulkes et al 2005; Smith et al 2009) have focused on parent-child interactions, and an understanding of how very small children’s patterns change as their social worlds expand is yet to come. There is no question that quite early on, children become aware of status among peers, stemming not only from age but from what one might call coolness.

From the very earliest years, children are subject to what I have called (Eckert 2000) the developmental imperative – a desire to be older, to move on to the next stage. This is encouraged by adults up to a point, as they praise children for the development of new abilities, and even for physical maturation. It is also motivated by the desire to acquire new skills, freedoms, and prerogatives, and a desire for adventure. These specific desires may have their own places in the social landscape. I have often heard colleagues talk about sound change spreading by kids imitating or emulating older kids. There is no question that small children imitate older people, but imitation is considered childish, and among older kids it’s definitely considered uncool. But even imitation is selective, done in virtue of what the imitator associates with the person – or the feature – they’re imitating. Little girls put on high heels, lipstick and hats. Little boys swagger and carry big things around. They aren’t trying to be adults but to be like adults in some way, to be older in virtue of what they value about being older, the rights or qualities they wish to get older for. And maturation involves developing a sense of what those things are and where they live out in the social landscape. In other words, maturity brings stylistic engagement not so much with individuals as with the landscape. As I approached each life stage, it was as important to me to differentiate myself from my parents and siblings as to emulate them. My differentiation of myself from elders was embedded in ongoing social changes, and all the personal practices that went with those changes made me strive to be a “more advanced” kind of person. One might see my having moved into a different social milieu than my older sister as just a result of different choices, but those particular choices had not been available to my sister eight years before. We are indeed quite different from each other, but some of those differences are a result of historical circumstance. We spent our adolescences in very different social-semiotic landscapes: Benny Goodman vs. Elvis. We do not just imitate our elders; we also move away from them, and we compete with them. In the process, I might emphasize, we participate in social change.

While small children are competent sociolinguistic actors, they take on a more dramatic role in change as they move into adolescence. There is a clear acceleration of sound change during preadolescence and adolescence, a pattern commonly called the “adolescent peak” (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2009) which, it is important to point out, is part of a more general acceleration of the use of other kinds of expressive, notably nonstandard, features (Holmes 1992; Eckert 2000). Sociolinguists have focused on the acceleration of sound change and nonstandard features in this period, but the role of adolescents in innovations in other kinds of expressive forms such as quotatives (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2004) and intensifiers (Tagliamonte 2008; Beltrama & Casasanto 2017) indicates the increased social intensity of this life stage. My ethnographic work with preadolescents and adolescents, among other things, follows the opening up of the social landscape and its concomitant structuring and elaboration of the semiotic landscape.

4 Conclusion

It is common to acknowledge the social meaning of variation but to treat it as epiphenomenal. What I propose here is that while the origin of a sound change may be purely phonological, it must take on meaning to spread. And that meaning emerges as part of a semiotic system that expresses everything from macro-social membership to affect – a system that is essential to human society, hence to language. Stylistic practice involves a variety of linguistic variables that are not changes in progress, but sound changes inevitably become sociolinguistic variables. Any change will become part of a stylistic construction, and it will be by virtue of its role in this construction that it spreads through the landscape. One could say that every individual is always playing a role in sound change simply by participating in the semiotic landscape. But the question is whether any particular individual can have a greater influence than any other or whether the spread of change is a completely collective endeavor. Those who have been found to be leaders in sound change (e.g. Labov 2001) – women with moral authority in their neighborhood and with diverse contacts beyond – do not determine the direction of change, but accelerate it in their extreme stylistic activity. But they may well also play an important role in the social construal of a change, inasmuch as their use of that change is likely to be more noticed and carefully construed, and by a more diverse and mobile audience. But any construal requires legibility, and no individual innovation will catch on unless it is already legible – unless it is skillfully used with reference to the existing indexical system. Needless to say, those who are less sensitive to social or linguistic nuance will play a minimal role in the structuring of the landscape, and the leaders in change will be those who are both sensitive to the landscape and sufficiently influential to motivate others. But their influence itself will lie in their ability to construe the landscape and to innovate in a way that is already meaningful to those around them. The perspective I am offering is not substantially different from Labov’s perspective, except inasmuch as it focuses on the collective construction of meaning that underlies the larger patterns of community norms. I acknowledge, furthermore, that the claim that sound change spreads by virtue of social meaning is a somewhat radical hypothesis, but presumably a testable one that merits serious exploration.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.