What is sociophonetics?

The term sociophonetics has been in currency, according to Foulkes and Docherty (in press), at least since Deschaies-Lafontaine (1974) used the term for a study of Québec French. In the span of time since then, it has come to be used in slightly different ways by experimental phoneticians and by sociolinguists. To phoneticians, it generally means any kind of phonetic research that incorporates dialectal variation, as sessions at recent meetings of the Acoustical Society of America and the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing attest. To sociolinguists, however, it has taken on a somewhat narrower meaning. Sociolinguists generally use the term to refer to variationist studies that incorporate methods borrowed from modern phonetics. As a result, sociolinguistic studies that employ only impressionistic, IPA-style phonetic transcription are usually not thought of as “sociophonetics.” However, studies that use a variety of techniques used by contemporary phoneticians, ranging from acoustic analysis to perception experiments, certainly are.

The split between phonetic and sociolinguistic notions of what constitutes sociophonetics goes further. Phoneticians tend to use the term for studies that address issues of interest primarily to phoneticians, such as differences in the phasing of articulatory gestures (e.g. Fourakis and Port 1986), differences in the cues used for phonological distinctions (e.g. Kingston and Diehl 1994), or ways that listeners understand the speech of speakers with differing mouth sizes (e.g. Strand 1999).