The Evolution of Egalitarian Sociolinguistic Conventions

Half a century ago, two works laid the foundation for modern sociolinguistics. Lewis (1969) studied a speech community using a system of symbols and grammatical rules and coordinating on the mapping from symbols to states of the world in order to communicate effectively. Economists and others built on Lewis’ work to erect the modern theory of conventions, their persistence and occasional transformations (Young 1998). Subsequent research has shown that languages that are likely to emerge and persist in an evolutionary dynamic are informationally efficient under the constraints imposed by human cognitive and sensory systems. At about the same time, Brown and Gilman (1960) published their “Pronouns of Power and Solidarity” exploring the fact that “a man’s consistent pronoun style gives away his class position” and that this “power semantic” had been the norm in many Indo-European languages for at least half a millennium despite recurrent contestation by egalitarian language innovators. We focus in this paper on what Brown and Gilman (1960) called the T-V distinctions (e.g., the familiar “ Tu” versus the formal “ Vous” in French), the semantics of which typically involve an ambiguity in that the V pronoun may denote superordinate status as well as plurality (Tabellini 2008). The T-V status markers are far from unique as linguistic features of group interests and identity. Labov (2011) and other sociolinguists have established, for example, that AQ 1 The Evolution of Egalitarian Sociolinguistic Conventions