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    The linguistic market and the statistical explanation of variability

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    The Linguistic Market and The Statistical Explanation of Variability

    Uploaded by

    Claire Ye

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    ne Sona Gal Ties (Eh The cory ecommerce Ahr. ‘GungreJ Te soci eee of comer cole sig, Ura tne A gn Mapa Sanna: (The Hangin i on ‘cai ono ak nea ce) ove M4 ee or Mp Th Oervat Hangar isd. Baap Later On he necontan o B ange. In Charles W. Krier (El) “Goran Unt Morr Snes tagged Enns Sta Above sl teyond posse) varase wisn). Baey & RWS Th he ay of anne oon ni Wn BES Cen Suma Go & Lamy, $n The scuin of eave spats by «apie. Wench: ator. Weg, Mpc unos fr har of ge Shs Laan Boor pecans Language ia. Soeely Qcaclemic Paso, 1978. 18 The Linguistic Market and the Statistical Explanation of Variability David Sankoff / Suzanne Laberge ‘Though itis well known that the internal differentiation of spoken language I elated to social class, the scintifc study ofthis relationship poses a number of very difficult problems. Our experience with the ‘analysis of the Moniteal French corpus leads to the telization that “irety correlating linguistically variable behavior with social class mem ally oF dialecticaly, is nota well re. TC ignores established facts such as that teachers, 'sctors, and receptionists tend to speak a more standard varity than other people of similar social or economic postion. Adapting the notion of lingostie market developed by Bourdieu and Boltanski (1975), we under- took to construct an index which measures specially how speakers" economic activity, taken in ie widest sense, requires orf necessarily ‘ssocited with, competence in the legimlzed language (or standard, ‘elite, educated, ete, language). bea relatively easy notion to operationalize esignment of index values, Spenkers could be grouped according to occupation, and high valves could be asigned to those working i educational, teary, plea, and adminsteative Fels, 240 Dl Sekt Samm ater and low values to those for whom the mastery ofthe lesitimized speech ‘arety isnot a erterion of selection: laborers, manual workers, and so ‘on. This approach, however, is unworkable for a varity of reasons Fefated to the fact thal our task so classify individuals, not occupations ‘Thus, this method would be inadequate without a good deal of ad hoe patching up’ for howsewives, students, the unemployed, and retired purtons who make up about hai of our sample, and whose occupations Ere not comparable with those mote directly involved inthe system of ‘production In addition, an objective” classification of speakers accord {gto occupation would tend tobe static taking into account ther current tution ony, No mechanistic weighting of occupations fo arrive at some Kind ot average seore on an occupational history could really do justice to the fat that speakers roles inthe linguistic market and their patterns of Tinguistic Behavior) change and evolve throughout thei ifetime, Thirdly {he notion ofan cbjective classification of occupations, in terms of the Tingustic marke. i lusory, Constraction of such a classification would egesaaily depend in many wayson more a less subjective judgments, on the part of experts or laymen, with fespect to the nature, the derition, find the measurement of the various entra used to evaluate a given ‘ccupation, Finally the constrction of soch a classification, prompted by hopes of cross-language comparisons, would tend toimply that theres ome astocation of & particular occupation wth » particular role inthe Tinguiatie market independent of the sociohistorcal conjoncture, an a umption we reject. The clase structure of different societies at diferent imes is not the same, nor #8 the situation of a particular occupational tategory. The methodological dictum that one should standardize such {dex categories forthe sake of comparability trvalzes the socohistor- tal analysis which fs crucial to the understanding of the guste market in each ease Tne approach we took toward solving this methodological problem was rot to try to improve the objectivity of the classification procedure, But {nversely o ty to use a8 fully and as egorously as possible the richness ofthe intuitions or subjective reactions of individuals who participate in the daily life of the community. Of course, using this type of data also Implies a whole range of methodological problems. The two most impor tant ar follows. Fist ti posible that a judge, that is, person whose tessment is being used 48 data, fs not experienced or informed enough to evaluate adequately the participation of a given individual in the in fuistc market. Second, such assessments inevitably elect the do {Geology ofthe society about equality of opportunity for economic suc- est ndependent of social background, about relationships between in- gence and linguistic behavior, about the nature of the legitimized ‘oe Line a and Yea ma language, and so on. These two types of problem can never be totally Clminated from this type of study, ut our choice of judges was dsiened fo take into account their effects. We selected eight professional and fraduate student socilinguists who ad all observed and worked for Ecveral years on sociolinguistic relationships within the francophone SSinmunty of Montreal. This ensured that all Judges were as. well informed as posible. Asfor the second problem, athe judges had shown intheirown work acitial approach vis vis the sociolinguistic situation in Quebec, trying to unmask the ideological prejudices prevalent about testing of language and society. OF course itis impossible to avoid Completely the influence ofthe dominant ideology, but a critical atitude best penetrates the tse of beliefs and values which disguises the rla- tions of power operating in the Hinguisie market. “Certain sovilingusts(ncliding oe of the authors—S. L.) were not included inthe panel because thee fart with the inguistic behavior land interview content of the speakers inthe corpus was foo great Some judges had previously worked onthe corpus, but were not familar enough with the interviews 80 that this could affect ther evaluation. “THE JUDGMENTS. “The task assigned to each judge was relatively simple. He or she ws presented with 120 slips of paper, on each of which was described the ocioeconomic ile history of one of the speakers inthe corpus. This was fceompanied by an instruction sheet containing essentially the material in the fst and second sections ofthis chapter. The task, carried out inde- pendently by each judge, consisted of assigning the individuals to ranked [rou according to. single criterion, the relative importance of the age inthe socioeconomic ie ofthe speaker, The number the umber of speakers in any ofthe groups were not pected. The judges were instructed to try not to apply objective or ‘explicit eritera fixed a prior (or example, education required to function inva given poston, whether a job iavolves extensive contact withthe publ, and soon), bu tobe guided by gencral knowledge and reaction to the whole of the description to be evaluated ‘Cleary, we were notable to make all description slips strictly compar. able. This is de in part tothe nature of economic activities; when it Comes to occupations, for example, it did not seem worthwhile for the purposes of eliciting judges responses, to elaborate on the specific act fies of nursery schoolteacher, whereas this would be essential inthe (mac ofa foreman or supervisor. Furthermore, we deliberately omitted or ma Dod Set Suton abr left vague explicit reference to age and edcatinal level. This may have ‘resulted in les accuracy and less comparable judgments, butt seemed desirable methodological choice since we wanted to inchue age and ‘education as independent variables in subsequent statistical analyses. On {he other hand, to take particularities of individual personal histories into account, we often included in the descriptions details about parents ot spouses to allow a better perception of the economic context in which Speakers are situated, Thus the occupation of the head of the household ‘was given whenever possible in the ease of younger students since this indicates the background from which they come. For housewives, details bout ther husbands are indicative of thet socal interaction, with which [roups and to what end ‘The slips were presented to each judge in a random order and were ‘denied only by 8 temporary code CONSTRUCTION OF THE INDEX AND QUESTIONS (OF CONSISTENCY ‘The classification task caried out by each judge resulted in a numberof. ranked groups the rank of each group indicating the importance tot of the legitimized language ‘The first step in manipulating these data was to convert exch judge's ‘rouping to a numerical seale. To render comparable the seals from ferent judges, gven the variability inthe number of groups constructed (anging between 4 and. 12), we simply assigned the value 0 10 each ‘member ofthe group judged most peripheral othe linguistic market. and 140 the group most central. The remaining groups were spaced at sql imervals between 0 and ‘The aggregate index foreach speaker was thus defined asthe mean of the values assigned to him or herby the eight judges. Figure 1 shows the

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