ABSTRACT
It appears to be a regular part of North American culture that when something is declared to be new, few people care to ask a question about what in effect distinguishes this allegedly novel idea, project or product from the old. The past is soon forgotten and people are happy to be part of a trendy present which holds out the promise of becoming the future. There are reasons for this phenomenon, historical, socio-political, and economic; however, an analysis of these reasons is not my concern here. I am simply trying to explain to myself why linguists on this continent often lack a historical consciousness regarding their own field of study and, as a result, can be easily led into believing claims of novelty, discontinuity, breakthrough, and revolution made by someone in favour of a new approach or, for that matter, a theoretical stance. I still recall my own astonishment about the enthusiasm of some of my teachers about ‘sociolinguistics’ during the late 1960s, which then was, as it is still today, largely associated with the name of William Labov (cf. Macaulay 1988: 154-157 passim),1 at least in North America. Indeed, the opinio communis regarding the origins of sociolinguistics still today appears to be what the editor of the 1,000-page Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics has noted, namely, that “sociolinguistics as a specially demarcated area of language study only dates to the early 1960s” (Mesthrie 2001: 1).2
