Dear Kate, dear all,

This will be a somewhat unformed e-mail containing no doubt unformed 
thoughts; I don't have much time online today, but I wanted to put this in 
in enough time for it to possibly be useful to Kate at Saturday's meeting.

>In particular, have members any views on;
>
>a) REF - particularly the references to the  'impact' French Lingusitics =
>research might have (on wider society)

My PhD sociolinguistic fieldwork in two locations in Normandy (one rural, 
one urban) showed me that in many cases people really appreciated being 
part of my study. I was looking at the Regional French of Normandy (ie a 
regional variety of the national language, as opposed to the autochthonous 
Romance variety), but my rural location was a place where some Norman is 
still spoken. People were of course aware that I wanted to talk to them 
about French and not about 'patois', but still they felt that by giving 
their time for the study they were doing something worthwhile. This is a 
very intangible 'impact on society', but important for all that in my view.

It's also true, I think, that research like this has a more tangible impact 
on wider society in that research which involves people's attitudes to 
language can give important information about the makeup of a society. This 
can be crucial in showing, for example, how unified or divided a 
geographical territory of interest is. In this way, for example, language 
attitudes could be used in Normandy as part of the argument about whether 
the former province, now two modern regions of France, should be 
politically re-unified. Both regions are still identified as 'Normandie' 
('Haute' and 'Basse'), but they're administratively separate, of course. I 
found that the language attitudes about Norman were very different in the 
two areas, and yet people still thought of the other area as having a 
different variant of the same variety, not as having a different 
autochthonous variety altogether. I don't mean to draw any conclusions here 
about the complex Norman situation, but the research does illustrate how 
the effect of linguistic facts can potentially be important even to society 
which doesn't care particularly about the linguistic facts themselves. I 
used this and the situation on the Scottish-English border (where I'm 
working at present) as the examples in a poster I did in April called 'Why 
Study Sociolinguistics?', at a postgrad / research-staff conference on 
'Communicating to the Public'. The whole point of the conference was to 
give people practice at communicating the wider 'impact' of their research 
to non-specialists outside academia.

Possibly others who do research in a similar vein, like Tim Pooley, David 
Hornsby, Aidan Coveney and Zoe Boughton, or others, might have more to add 
to this - either agreeing or not?

In any case, just my unformed two-penn'orth, while I have time to write it. 
If anyone wants to talk further about this, try me on my mobile (see below) 
- I won't be online much before Saturday's meeting.

All the best

Damien

-- 
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

BORDERS AND IDENTITIES CONFERENCE, JAN 2010:
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/bic2010/

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm