Chapter 2 - Part 1

Language & Social Class

SOCIOLINGUISTICS - LANE 422

DR. AMEL SHOAIB
Outline

§ Social Class Dialects (Sociolects)

§ Social Stratification

§ Caste System

§ Rural Dialectology & Urban Sociolinguistics

§ The Rise of Sociolinguistic Research

§ Labov’s New York Study & Its Results

Activity cont.,
Social Class Dialects (Sociolects)

§ If you know the English-speaking societies well, you will be

able to tell a speaker’s social status on the basis of the
variety of language he/she uses.
Social Class Dialects (Sociolects)

EXAMPLE:

Speaker A Speaker B
I done it yesterday. I did it yesterday.
He ain’t got it. He hasn’t got it.
It was her what said it. It was her that said it.
Social Class Dialects (Sociolects)

§ The variety of language that is used by a particular social

class is called a social class dialect or a sociolect.

§ Differences in a sociolect may be:

- Phonological
- Grammatical
- Lexical
- Phonetic
 Social Stratification

§ The different classes of society are separated by:

- Social barriers: social class, age, race, religion, etc.

- Social distance (which may also have the same effect as

geographical distance)

§ This type of social differentiation is known as social stratification.

Social Stratification

§ Social stratification is a term used to explain the

hierarchical ordering of a society, especially in terms of
wealth, power, and social status.
 Social Stratification

§ In the industrialized Western World, societies are stratified into social

classes, which gave rise to social class dialects.

§ Social classes are not clearly defined or labeled entities.

§ Social classes are simply groups of people with similar socioeconomic

characteristics.

§ Social mobility – movement up or down the social hierarchy – is

possible.
 Social Stratification

§ Sociolects are not particularly easy to study, and describe. WHY?

Because
- they form a continuum
- are rather complex and fluid entities (similar to regional dialects)

§ The more heterogeneous a society is, the more heterogeneous is its

language.

§ Western-type social-class stratification is not universal.

Caste System

Video of Caste System in India

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF0oR8TRKHE
Caste System

In India, traditional society is stratified into different castes (unlike in the

Western societies).
§ Castes are:

- relatively stable
- clearly named groups
- rigidly separated from each other, with hereditary membership
- little possibility of in and out movement
 Caste System

§ Different castes speak different varieties of language.

§ Because of rigid separation between different castes, caste dialects

tend to be relatively clear-cut, and caste dialect differences are
sometimes greater than regional dialect differences.

§ That is the reason “caste dialects” are easier to study and describe
than social class dialect.
Social Classes

EXAMPLES:
Caste System in India:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1dbksj22Ds

American Social Class

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU5MtVM_zFs
From Rural Dialects to Urban
Sociolinguistics

§ Dialectologists (in the past) focused their study of

language variation on geographical dialects of rural
areas.

§ They were concerned to record many dialect features

before they were lost.

§ They thought that, unlike in the city, in the rural speech

of older and uneducated speakers, there were the
‘real’ and ‘pure’ dialects.
From Rural Dialects to Urban
Sociolinguistics
§ It turned out later that the ‘pure’ homogeneous
dialect is a myth since all language varieties are
subject to variation and change.

§ Dialectologists, then, began to incorporate social as

well as geographical information into their dialect
surveys.

§ This paved the way for ‘urban dialectology’ which

then became ‘sociolinguistics’.
Labov’s New York Study

§ Sociolinguistic investigation
of language variation
gained momentum in 1966
when the American linguist
William Labov published The
Social Stratification of English
in New York City.
Labov’s New York Study

§ Labov carried out tape-recorded interviews with 340

informants who were selected randomly from three
different department stores.

§ Since informants were a representative sample, the

linguistic description could therefore be an accurate
description of the varieties of English in New York.

§ The study is probably the first of its kind which correlated

linguistic variation with social variation.
Labov’s New York Study

Labov looked at the speech of sales assistants in three Manhattan

stores drawn from the:
§ Top (Saks)

§ Middle (Macy's)

§ Bottom (Kleins)
Labov’s New York Study

§ Each unwitting informant was approached with

a factual inquiry designed to elicit the answer -
“fourth floor" - which may or may not contain the
variable final or preconsonantal (r).

§ Labov pretended not to have heard the answer

and obtained a repeat performance by the
informants in careful, emphatic style.
Labov’s New York Study

The Results were:

§ Sales assistants from Saks (top) used it most

§ Sales assistants from Kleins (bottom) used it the least

§ Sales assistants from Macy's (middle) showed the

greatest upward shift when they were asked to repeat
Labov’s New York Study

The Results were:

§ Variation is not random, but determined by extra-linguistic factors in
a predictable way.

§ It is not possible to select individual speakers and to generalize from

them to the rest of the speakers in their social-class group.

§ A relatively trivial feature of accent can be socially important.

 Conclusion

§ Social Class Dialects (Sociolects)

§ Social Stratification

§ Caste System

§ Rural Dialectology & Urban Sociolinguistics

§ The Rise of Sociolinguistic Research

§ Labov’s New York Study

Thank You
 Summarized from the book:
§ Trudgill, P. (2000). Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and
society (4th ed.). London: Penguin.
§ and other sources.

§ Prepared by Dr. Abdullah Al-Shehri and then updated and revised

by Dr. Aziza Al-Essa. This present version was updated and revised
again by Dr. Amel Shoaib during the 2017/2018 academic year.