2022/06/29 by Miriam Meyerhoff, Norma Mendoza‐Denton · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Multilingual Education and Policy
paper · pdf · doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-101819-110056
openalex publication_date 2022/06/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Speaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to aesthetics ( rasa and “everyday aesthetics”) that emphasize the interplay between receiver and the aesthetic stimulus. We present two case studies. One, from fieldwork on Nkep (an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu), draws attention to the way aesthetic factors seem to slow language change. The other, from fieldwork on Spanish in California, shows how aesthetic evaluations of linguistic features facilitate the transfer of variation in a situation of language contact.