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Janet Holmes and the Language in the Workplace Project: Exploring the foundations of modern views and research paths in sociolinguistics1
Janet Holmes is Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Warwick (2010-2016) and in 2010 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Uppsala University, Sweden. She is Associate Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace project and she was also Director of the project which produced the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English. She has published on a range of sociolinguistic and pragmatics topics, including New Zealand English, sexist language, pragmatic particles and hedges, compliments, apologies, disagreement, humour and small talk. Her publications include a textbook: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, a book of readings: Sociolinguistics, co-edited with John Pride, New Zealand Ways of Speaking English, co-edited with Allan Bell, and several books on language and gender, including Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity, Gendered Talk at Work, Women, Men and Politeness, and the Blackwell Handbook of Language and Gender.
Whaťs your perception of the evolution of the field of sociolinguistics since when you started developing research in this area of inquiry? - Sociolinguistics has become very much more dynamic in every area. Researchers are using social constructionist theories and investigating how social actors construct their identities through their language choices as an on-going process. People constantly adjust the way they present themselves according to what they perceive are the expectations of others, for instance, and maybe during the process of an interaction that may change. So it's a constantly dynamic, changing perception of how language is used, which wasn't the case when sociolinguistics first developed in the 1970s. Sociolinguistics back then was much more static. A good example would be the sort of studies that William Labov did. Adopting a sociological classification, he used social class as a basic category and correlated people's language with their social backgrounds in a very useful way, which is still a very useful starting point for any social dialect survey. Progressively, however, researchers have realized that language is much more dynamic and that people shift quite dramatically in different situations, that they could get involved...