Uniformity and discontinuity

A speech community in the Labovian tradition is characterized by a relatively uniform distribution of linguistic variants across social entities, and an evaluative consensus pertaining to the status of such forms. Explicit debate on the opposite situation, in which variation is marked by sharp contrasts between social groups, which are termed discontinuities, has tended to center on specific social constructs (e.g. social networks), or on specific interactional complexes (e.g. restricted and semirestricted speakers). Discontinuity is often viewed negatively as the absence of uniform variation. In this paper it is argued that discontinuity in speech communities should be viewed as having its own internal structure, a point of view that is developed in the form of a uniformity/discontinuity typology. After a brief exemplification of better-documented cases of discontinuity, detailed attention is given to the spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, as an example of how the typology can be expanded to deal with relatively unfamiliar non-Western urban settings, and which extralinguistic parameters such variation might be associated with

Classification of discontinuities · Discontinuity (linguistics) · Exemplification · Geometry · Linguistics · Point (geometry) · Sketch · Sociology · Typology · Variation (astronomy) · Anthropology · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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