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LANE 422

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Summarized from SOCIOLINGUISTICS An Introduction to Language and Society Peter Trudgill 4 th^ edition. 2000, and other sources Prepared by Dr. Abdullah S. Al-Shehri

Chapter 2

Language and Social Class

Social Stratification  (^) Social stratification is a term used to the hierarchical ordering of a society, especially in terms of wealth, power and social status.  (^) 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. They are simply aggregates of people with similar socioeconomic characteristics.  (^) Social mobility – movement up or down the social hierarch – is possible.  (^) Sociolects are not particularly easy to study, and describe, because, like regional dialects, they form a continuum and are rather complex and fluid entities.  (^) The more heterogeneous a society is, the more heterogeneous is its language.  (^) Western-type social-class stratification is not universal..

Caste System  (^) In India, unlike in the Western societies, traditional society is stratified into different castes.  (^) Castes are relatively stable, clearly named groups, rigidly separated from each other, with hereditary membership, and with little possibility of in and out movement.  (^) 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.  (^) Caste dialects are thus easier to study and describe than social class dialect.

The Rise of Sociolinguistic Research

 Sociolinguistic investigation of language variation gained

momentum beginning 1966 when the American linguist William

Labov published The Social Stratification of English in New York

City.

 Labov carried out a tape-recorded interviews with 340

informants selected randomly.

 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  (^) The study tests Labov’s hypothesis that non-prevocalic /r/ usage (as in farm, fair) correlates with social class of the speaker.  (^) Labov examined the speech of shop assistants in three different department stores, of high, medium and low social status.  (^) The procedure was to find out which departments were on the 4th^ floor and then ask as many assistants as possible a question like: Excuse me, where are the women’s shoes?  (^) The answer to this question would be 4th^ floor, with two possible occurrences of non-prevocalic /r/.  (^) Information on /r/ usage was obtained from 264 informants.

Quantitative Sociolinguistic Research

Following the “classical Labovian” approach to quantitative studies,

sociolinguistic research differentiates five different stages.

 A. Selecting speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables.

 B. Collecting the sample.

 C. Identifying the linguistic variables and their variants in the

texts.

 D. Processing the figures.

 E. Interpreting the results.

A. Selecting Speakers, Circumstances and Linguistic Variables.  (^) The selection of speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables involves some extremely important decisions, which are to a certain extent dictated by hypotheses about the expected results.  (^) It is similarly important that all the speech should be collected under the same circumstances, so far as this is possible.  (^) There is a major problem of definition here, both for social variables relating to speaker and circumstances, and for the linguistic variables themselves.  (^) How can we define 'manual worker'? How can we distinguish old from young? Even worse is the problem of defining the community to be studied, since 'speech communities' are not self-defining.  (^) The researcher has to provide solutions which are at least reasonably satisfactory, to avoid the real danger that his results will be valueless because of ambiguities in defining the variables.

C. Identifying the Linguistic Variables and their Variants in the Speech Sample.

 At this stage, one might expect the least difficulty, since we already

know what the variants to be distinguished are, and all we need to

do is listen for them.

 However, there is a considerable degree of subjectivity in

recognizing phonetic variants, and different researchers can

produce different analyses of the same sample.

 One may also need to record information about the social context in

which each linguistic variant is used since this often influences the

choice of one variant over another, specially if context is specified

by the hypothesis as to which social contexts are relevant.

D. Processing the figures.

 The processing of the figures involves counting the number of

occurrences of each variant in each sample, and comparing the

figures for different samples.

 The obvious step is to reduce all the figures to percentages,

since this makes comparison much easier.

 The next step is to discover which differences between samples

are significant, i.e. which would form a reasonable basis for

generalizing to other samples of the same types.

 The investigator has to use statistical tests in order to decide

how significant the figures are.