language variation

william labov - social stratification of /r/ in new york city

in british RP there is no /r/ sound within words like 'car' even though there is an 'r' in the spelling. accents containing the /r/ sound are described as 'rolling the r' = rhotic

however in america, pronouncing the /r/ is a sign of the middle class and not the working class. sociolinguists found that sales people subconsciously mimic their consumers accent.

hypothesis: sales people in the highest -ranked store would have the highest values of /r/ - those in the middle-ranked store would have intermediate values of /r/ - those in the lowest-ranked store would show lowest values

upper class store: Saks - middle ranking store: Macy's - lower ranked store: S.Klein

method: question asked ;excuse me, where are the women shoes? - reply: fourth floor. when repeated it was said with more emphatic stress

the social differentiation of english in norwitch by peter trudgill

trudgill studied three phonological variables in norwitch: /ng/ as in 'singin' rather than the RP 'singing. /t/ as it 'bo'l' rather than the RP bottle. /h/ in 'eart' rather than the RP heart

he divided his subjects into five social classes: lower working class - middle working class - upper working class - lower middle class - middle middle class

his findings showed that: the lower social class, the more frequent the regional pronunciation. women tended to prefer RP to regional pronunciation. in casual speech MMC men used the regional form 'singin' whereas in careful speech they used the RP variants

these findings suggest that the phonological variable /ng/ in norwich is affected by the social class, gender and social context. these were user-related variations. another grammatical variables was the 's' in the third person singular such as 'he sings' this grammatical variable is always used in standard english but is omitted in vernacular speech, therefore transformed to 'he sing'

jenny cheshire study of adolescents in reading (norm enforcement mechanisms)

within reading, a moderately big town about fifty miles west of london, it was uncommon to hear sentences such like the following:

  1. non-standard '-s' for example 'they calls me'
  1. non-standard 'has' - you just has to do...
  1. negative concord - it ain't got no pedigree or nothing
  1. ain't - copular - you ain't no boss
  1. non-standard 'never' - I never went to school today

she studied those non-standard verb forms in the speech of a number of adolescents in adventure playgrounds. these were seen as 'trouble spots' in the eyes of local residents because of fights that took place

Noddy vs Kevin situation. Noddy has a higher frequency of non-standard variations and Kevin has a lower frequency, because of the set norm. Kevin only used 14%. same thing occurred with a female group

milroy's belfast study: social networds

a person whose personal contacts all know each other belong to a closed network

an individual whose contacts tend not to know each other belong to an open network

closed networks are said to be of high density. open networks are said to be of low density. people can relate to others. relatively dense networks are claimed to function as norm-enforcement mechanisms

milroy investigated three working-class communities. ballymacarret / the hammer / clonard. all three areas are poor-working class districts with high unemployment. she investigated the correlation between the integration of individuals in the community and the way those individuals speak - to do this she gave a network strength score from 1-5. 5 being the highest.

what she found was that a higher network strength was correlated with non-standard forms

ethnicity - mark sebba London-Jamaican + sue fox who studied MLE

he defines london-jamaican as a language with combination of phonological, lexical and grammatical elements from. cockey, RP and creole forms

sue fox - researched is based on the dialect of youths from a variety of ethnic backgrounds across London. she suggests that higher frequencies were used in large cities such as Birmingham (growing rates)

features included: blad, nang, buff etc.

MLE is short-term and can be adapted constantly