Teaching & Learning Guide for Speech Variation, Utility, and Game Theory

This article proposes a new way for viewing, analyzing, interpreting, and understanding speech variation, divergence of dialects, and linguistic change. We do so by examining a spectrum of linguistic descriptions of speech behavior and articulation patterns in a manner similar to economists’ analytic depiction of the interplay in economic interactions. That is, we posit that the full gamut of Game Theory fundamentals, as developed in the last 70 years by mathematical economists, bears on attributes of speech as used in real life. ‘A game is being played whenever people interact with each other’ – Ken Binmore, p.3, Fun and games – a serious text on Game Theory. Speech certainly qualifies. The mathematical presentation of game theory, with its language for communicating concepts, ideas, and findings, might at first appear as a forbidding barrier to the sociolinguistic community. In an attempt to facilitate breaching this barrier, we present (and illustrate) in Section 2 game theory basic concepts by means of familiar linguistic situations. To make a transparent connection between game theory and sociolinguistics, we conclude Section 2 with a hypothetical example of a linguistic Prisoners’ Dilemma. In Section 3, we attempt to tighten the understanding of the conceptual parallels with illustrations and examples derived mostly from linguistic literature. In Section 4, we propose a new way of examining and interpreting the experimental findings of social psychologists of language use as presented by Genesee and Bourhis (1982, 1988). That is, we offer a new perspective on two classic studies by Genesee and Bourhis demonstrating that their observed behavioral account exemplifies a version of a linguistic Prisoners’ Dilemma. In the next four sections, we follow up with a number of additional detailed demonstrations of game theory relevance to sociolinguistics by discussing the evidence in studies of articulation and linguistic shift patterns that are more clearly interpreted using game theoretical models and tools.