Languages: Class and Social Group

Languages: Class and Social Group (08-Mar-2004)

Variationalist sociolinguistics refers to the study of variation and change in language within a speech community - that is, a group of people who speak in a characteristic way, i.e. with common accent or dialect features. Particular linguistic variables are chosen, and then incidence of variation can be measured and counted by acquiring samples of speech from members of the speech community.

The precursor to variation studies was dialectology, which was typically motivated to capture information about dialects which were perceived to be dying out. In the mid 20th century, Fischer carried out a study by counting how often students pronounced "~ing" vs "~in" at the end of words such as "swimming", "doing" etc..

The significant results of this study (see handout) were that individuals did not always maintain a consistent pronunciation: for example, the more formal the setting, the more likely they were to use the "ing" form, which is seen as having higher prestige value. This effect was also noticed for certain words - for example, "reading" and "writing" were likely to be pronounced with "ing" compared to "running" and "swimming" - suggesting that the typical context for a given word might be associated with a more or less formal setting.

Labov famously carried out an experiment where he recorded the responses of department store assistants: he asked them a question for which he knew the answer would be "fourth floor", and then affected not to have heard, prompting them to repeat the answer. In this case, the linguistic variable he was interested in was whether or not the individual pronounced the non-prevocalic "r" (NPR) in New York: his hypothesis being that this is a prestige marker, which would be more in evidence in "up-market" stores.

The results of Labov's study showed that:

the more upmarket the store, the more likely that NPR would be pronounced
the second (repeated) answer tended to be more likely to have the NPR

Labov subsequently conducted interviews with NY inhabitants who had previously been interviewed and classified on a socal class scale as e.g. lower class, lower middle class. He was able to obtain samples of speech from situations of varying formality, e.g. casual speech, reading text. The results from this study showed that the "social class" from the previous study correlated almost exactly with the incidence of NPRs by that person: the higher the social class, the more likely they were to pronounce NPR. The incidence of NPR also rose as speech became more formal: plotted on a graph, the slopes for each class rise in the same direction.

Trudgill's "triangles" are an attempt to show that in England, the greatest variation in both accent and dialect occurs at the lower end of the social scale: the higher the social class, the more likely the speaker will have an RP accent and use standard English.

Key Points (from handout)

the linguistic variable
the effect of class on linguistic variables
the effect of formality on linguistic variables
the speech community, speakers who agree on the evaluation of linguistic variables (that is, they share linguistic attitudes)
how to read Labov's "sloping lines" model of the speech community
Trudgill's triangular model of social class variation in Britain
understand why there is more variation at the "bottom" of the social scale than at the "top": less privileged people are less mobile and associate more with their community; non-standard speech has covert prestige

Language in the Individual and in Society notes index