22 Social Networks

An individual’s social network is straightforwardly the aggregate of relationships contracted with others, and social network analysis examines the differing structures and properties of these relationships. Such analysis has been applied by variationists fairly extensively over the last two decades or so to explicate informal social mechanisms supporting language varieties specific to particular social groups. Researchers have also addressed the question of how some social groups maintain nonstandard dialects or minority languages, often over centuries, despite pressures (of the kind described by Lippi-Green 1997) to adopt publicly legitimized national languages or varieties. Social network is better treated as a means of capturing the dynamics underlying speakers’ interactional behaviors than as a fixed social category (see Eckert 2000: 1–33 for a discussion of different concepts of “speaker variables” in sociolinguistics). Given that the ties contracted by individuals within and between speech communities may change for many reasons, analysis of change in the operation of the same social network mechanisms which support localized linguistic codes can illuminate the phenomenon of linguistic change. Network-oriented accounts of linguistic change have emerged both in variationist studies of contemporary speech communities, and as post hoc sociohistorical studies of changes completed at earlier stages of the language (Lippi-Green 1989, Milroy 1992, Milroy and Milroy 1985, Nevalainen 2000).