Beyond Western Variationist Sociolinguistics: Insights from Asante Twi’s Language Community
Since the 1960s, variationist sociolinguistic studies have mainly focused on well-studied languages within Western social contexts and on predominantly monolingual communities, leading to generalizations that feature strongly in sociolinguistic theory. For example, current sociolinguistic theories posit that women generally lead linguistic innovations. However, these generalizations are usually based on a small set of the world’s languages, overlooking many multilingual communities. Moreover, most research focuses on variation in speech production, with limited complementary studies on speech perception. In this talk, I will discuss production and perception data from Asante Twi, an understudied language spoken in Ghana, Africa. This data reveals a pattern of vocalic raising and merger within Asante Twi’s vowel harmony system, suggesting an ongoing sound change that affects both speech production and perception. I will demonstrate that this change originated in a non-traditional (urban) Twi-speaking community and is gradually spreading to traditional Twi-speaking communities. Younger speakers and, crucially, male speakers are the primary drivers of this innovation, and they often struggle to perceive the vowel undergoing change, consistent with less distinct mental representations influenced by their own productions. Additionally, I will present results that show no significant relationship between production and perception, suggesting a potential co-evolving link between these two modalities. Overall, I will argue that the linguistic contexts in non-Western societies, such as Ghana, offer valuable opportunities for variationist sociolinguistic research. These contexts not only remain understudied but also reveal patterns absent in Western languages and societies, enabling the development of a richer and more nuanced sociolinguistic theory.