Variationist Sociolinguistics

William Labov pioneered the development of quantitative studies of speech in modern Sociolinguistics, which were designed to investigate the variation of language use as a function of sociological categories such as social class, sex and age in a systematic fashion ... variously called Labovian paradigm... An important concept developed by Labov to facilitate the quantification of language variation is that of the sociolinguistic variable a linguistic unit known to have different realisations, called variants. For example, a phonetic variable has different phonetic realisations, such as the English phoneme /t/ which can be pronounced variously as []. The variable itself is given within parentheses, for e.g., (t); a variant of the variable concerned is written after it separated by a colon, for e.g., (t):[t] (Hudson 1996). The method of data elicitation usually used in the Labovian paradigm has been termed a structured or sociolinguistic interview, which allows the sampling of a number of speech styles. A typical interview comprised of conversational speech and the reading of specific texts collected by the researcher. Labov recognised five speech styles from his recordings, ordered here according to the amount of attention to speech commanded by the speaker: Casual - Speech outside the structure of the interview or description of a near-death experience Formal - Conversations with the interviewer Reading passage Word-list Minimal pair Labov used sociolinguistic variables as units of analyses in both of the studies discussed below, but structured interviews were conducted only for the Lower East Side Study.