LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL VARIATION

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

- is the study of the connection between language and society. This necessitates a cooperation with
many other academic areas (anthropology, sociology, social psychology).

SOCIAL DIALECTS

- surveys mostly concern themselves with urbanites, dividing these into middle/working class.

- Features that are surveyed are pronunciation, vocabulary and word/sentence structure.

- Class is the social variable, pronunciation is the linguistic variable. This is never an all-or-nothing
situation. Percentages.

EDUCATION AND OCCUPATION

- While we all have our own idiolects, we tend to sound more like the people with whom we share
our educational/occupational background. People with more time in school tend to take more of
their language from the written form. “Sounding like a book. Time spent in the education system also
usually reflects itself in the occupation one has afterwards.

- In an experiment, Labow tested the linguistic variable of the postvocalic /r/ by going to three
different department stores, catering to differently classed clientele, and eliciting the response
“fourth floor” from the clerks. The result: The higher the status of the clerk, the more the /r/ was
pronounced.

- Careful, this depends on region, the study was done in New York, in British city the opposite result
was achieved. The higher the social status, the less the /r/ was pronounced.

SOCIAL MARKERS

- In both groups however, /r/ works as a social marker. That is, the feature of one’s speech that
(either having it or not) marks one as a part of a certain social group.

Percentage of groups pronouncing postvocalic /r/

Social class New York City British city

Upper-middle 32 0

Lower-middle 20 28

Upper-working 12 44

Lower-working 0 49

- More social markers: -ing, if one pronounces it as a sitting or sittin’; h-dropping, horse or ‘orse; at or
hat.
SPEECH STYLE AND STYLE SHIFTING

- Labov also tested for speech style, which is at its most basic expressed in two parts. A change from
one to the other is called style-shifting. At first try, the clerk used informal style to answer the
question, however, when Labov asked for a repetition with his ‘Excuse me?’ he got the hear the
clerk’s formal style version.

- When speakers repeated the phrase fourth floor, the frequency of the postvocalic /r/ increased in
all groups. The highest increase, which was later found to be a global trend, occurred with the lower-
middle class group trying to sound more like the upper-middle class group, to the point where they
pronounced the /r/ even more heavily than those they were trying to imitate. When speakers in a
middle-class group try to use a prestige form associated with a higher-status group in a formal
situation, they have a tendency to overuse the form. Social ambition?

PRESTIGE

- is divided into two sub-types. Overt prestige, which is achieved by shifting one’s speech style to the
form that is more frequently used by those whom one’s presumes to have higher social status than
oneself. Generally, more valued in the larger community.

- Covert prestige on the other hand is the refusal to change one’s form of speech for the better,
perhaps in an attempt to show solidarity with one’s own social group.

SPEECH ACCOMODATION

- is our ability to shift our speech away or towards the speech style of the person we are talking to.
We can either try to adopt a speech style that reduces social distance, convergence, or one that
emphasizes it, divergence.

Convergence: We wuz kangz.

Divergence: Indeed brother, it does seem that we stem from a royal bloodline. One must therefore
ask oneself what exactly occurred for us to find ourselves in our current situation. Surely it must have
been due to some outside factor that we couldn’t control, as our ancestors were wise in the ways of
the world. I speculate that it was a convergence of many factors, for nothing else could have toppled
the dynasty of our forefathers. I imagine that the only sufficient explanation can be the dastardly
betrayal of nature in the forms of several simultaneous natural disasters along with an invasion from
the barbarian north exploiting this misfortune, as they had always coveted our resources, knowledge
and women.

REGISTER AND JARGON

- A register is a speech style that is appropriate in a specific context. E.g. church, among lawyers, at
home.

- Jargon is special technical vocabulary associated with a specific area of work or interest. In social
terms, it helps group cohesion and excludes outsiders.
SLANG

- is the opposite of jargon in that it is used by those outside established higher-status groups. E.g.
younger people saying bummer, or that sucks instead of, the situation appears to be deteriorating, I
see nothing good coming from this.

- The use of slang among younger groups varies as well, of course, since they themselves are simply a
microcosm of adult life. This is illustrated by the use of taboo words (words that people avoid out of
politeness, religion, prohibited behaviour. In a study of linguistic differences between ‘Jocks’ (higher
status) and ‘Burnouts’ (lower status). In Detroit high schools, taboo words saw use in both genders of
the Burnouts, but only in the male gender of the Jocks, and even then, only when they were talking
with other males.

SOCIAL BARRIERS

- such as discrimination and segregation go a long way in creating different social dialects. The social
dialects of the ‘oppressed’ class are then regarded as ‘bad’, due to their association with ‘scoundrels’.

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE

- Vernacular is a general expression used to describe the social dialect typically spoken by the lower-
status group.

THE SOUNDS OF A VERNACULAR

- Common features of a vernacular: reduce final consonant clusters (left hand; lef han); Initial dental
consonants (think, that; tink, dat); the -s of possessive and plural does not see use.

THE GRAMMAR OF VERNACULAR

- Double negative construction: “I dindu nuffin?” So, you did do something?

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. An idiolect is one’s own personal style of speech.

2. A speech community is a group of people sharing a social dialect

3. Labov tried to elicit answers containing fourth floor because he was looking for the linguistic
variable of the postvocalic /r/

4. the pronunciation of -ing can be used as a social marker due to lower-status people dropping the
-g. Sittin’, hittin’.

5. A register is a certain speech style reserved for the appropriate social context. E.g. church, law etc.

6. /
RESEARCH TASK

A. Micro-sociolinguistics is concerned with investigating the relationships between languages and

society with the goal of better understanding language. Macro-sociolinguistics on the other hand is
trying to understand social structures (society) through the study of language. So, one can say that
both are studying the same relationship, just that their focus is on different sides of it.

B. The observer’s paradox in in the social sciences refers to the fact that the simple presence of an
obvious observer changes the situation that he is observing into something inauthentic.

C. Style-shifting is how well one can switch between styles, e.g. formal/informal. Code-switching is
switching between different languages or variations thereof.

D. Ebonics was originally intended to refer to all languages of the descendants of enslaved Africans.