12/02/2021

Dialectology may principally focus on studies of dialect

as a revealing aspect of history, society and language
Social Dialectology development.

Dr Negadi

From Rural Dialectology to Urban Sociolinguistics

In the past, dialectologists focused their study of language variation
on geographical dialects of rural areas.
They were concerned with recording many dialect features before
they were lost.
They thought that, unlike in the city, in the rural speech of older The Rise of Sociolinguistic
and uneducated speakers, there were the „real‟ and „pure‟ dialects. Research. How and Why?
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’.

Dr Negadi Dr Negadi

The Rise of Sociolinguistic

Research
Sociolinguistic investigation of language variation gained
impetus beginning 1966 when the American linguist Sociolect or social dialect “is a variety which is
William Labov published The Social Stratification of English thought of as being related to its speakers‟
in New York City.
social background rather than geographical
Labov carried out a tape-recorded interviews with 340 background.” (Trudgill: 2003:122).
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.
Dr Negadi

1

• Social dialect also sociolect
a variety of language that reflects social
variation in language use, according to certain
factors related to the social group of the
speaker such as education, occupation, income
level etc.
Sociolect or social dialect “is a variety which is
thought of as being related to its speakers‟
social background rather than geographical
background.” (Trudgill: 2003:122).
The most important development of that time,
however, was the rapid growth of methods for
investigating the social variation of dialects (i.e.,
social variation vs to geographic variation)
In cities such as New York with Labov, a whole
scale of speech variation can be found to
correlate with the social status and educational
level of the speakers.
12/02/2021
During the 1960s, dialectology relied on
- the methodology of generative grammar (a
structural description, or syntactic analysis)
- the use of statistical means to measure the
similarity or difference between dialects also
became increasingly common.
Age groups exhibit different patterns, but such
patterns of variation differ from one social
stratum to another. Still another dimension of
variation, especially important in the United
States, is connected with the race and ethnic
origin of a speaker as well as with the speaker‟s
date of immigration.
Black English or Black English vernacular or
African American English (BEV) has been
influenced by the southeastern U.S. origin of
most of the African American population of
non-southern U.S. regions: many Black
English peculiarities are in reality
transplanted southeastern dialectal traits.
[ai] = [a:] ride, life, etc.
2
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• Factors affecting social dialect or sociolects:

• Social class
• Education
• Age
• Gender
• Religion
• Race

• Daily contacts with speakers of the various social

dialects of a city, elements of the other dialects are
imperceptibly drawn into his/her dialect.
• The collective result of such experiences is the ‘he don’t’ and ‘he doesn’t’
spread of linguistic variables—i.e., groups of
variants (sounds or grammatical phenomena) ‘Swimming’ and ‘swimmin’
primarily determined by social (educational, racial,
age, class) influences, an example being the
existence of the two forms:
• “He don‟t know” and the standard “He doesn‟t
know.”

• The study of variables is one of the central

tasks of any investigation of the dialects of
American cities.
Thank you!