Example 1

Peter: Why is English so illogical! Look at these words

knight and thorough. How can I possibly explain those to
my Spanish friend? And why does changeable have an e
in the middle when argument doesn‘t?
Helen: It’s not just the spellings that are a problem. It’s the
meanings of words too. My teacher told me that the real
meaning of nice is precise, and I shouldn’t write we had
a nice holiday.
Michelle: What about pronunciation? English sounds are
really hard to pin down. I heard this old guy on the radio
and he was talking about ‘an orphan with a korf in
winter’. I couldn’t make out a word of it till my dad
explained the guy was saying that he often had a cough
in the winter. Talk about weird!!!
(Holmes:2001, 194)
What do you think about the conversation?
LANGUAGE CHANGE
• Talk of language change, like the
discussion between the young people at
the beginning of the presentation, often
treats language as an entity independent
of its speakers and writers. In reality it is
not so much that language itself changes,
as that speakers and writers change the
way they use the language.
(Holmes: 2001, 194-195)
• Speaker innovation is a more accurate
description than language change.
• Speakers innovate, sometimes spontaneously,
but more often by imitating speakers from other
communities.
• If their innovations are adopted by others and
diffuse through the community and beyond into
other communities then linguistic change is the
result.
(Holmes: 2001, 195 )
 Variation and change
• Language varies in three major ways
which are interestingly interrelated:
over time
in physical space
socially

(Holmes: 2001, 195)

• Example 2:
Children these days are putting the language at
risk with their sloppy pronunciations. From many
possible examples I select just one. The
distinctions between witch and which, and
whether and weather, are slowly but surely
disappearing in children’s speech. Do other
listeners regret this loss as I do? When I heard a
child asking which witch? recently, it sounded
as if she had a stutter.
(Holmes: 2001, 195)
• Within a monolingual community the superficial
impression may be that everyone speaks the same.
But a little thought will soon identify areas of
variation, most obviously in vocabulary and
pronunciation.
• All language change has its origins in variation.The
possibility of a linguistic change exists as soon as a
new form develops and begins to be used
alongside an existing form. If the new form spreads,
the change is in progress. If it eventually displaces
the old form, the change has become a “fait
accompli”- it has gone to completion.
(Holmes: 2001, 195)
• One area of vocabulary where this is very easy
to see is in the slang words used by the young
people.
• Similarly, a sound change occurs when one
sound is replaced by another over a period of
time, or when a sound disappears.
• Then, the questions are: “Why do particular
changes spread?” and “How do linguistic
changes spread through the community?”
(Holmes: 2001, 195-196)
• Example 3:Post vocalic [r] its spread and status
Elizabeth lives in the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, a popular
British holiday resort and place for retirement. Her family has lived
there for three generations, originally farming, but they now run a
small grocery business. Elizabeth’s grandfather pronounces [r]
pretty consistently in words like start and car. Elizabeth’s parents
pronounce [r] in such words too, but though not all the time. Her
mother uses fewer than her father, and both tend to use fewer when
serving the mainland visitors in the shop than when they are talking
to the locals. They use most when talking to older relatives and
friends at home. Elizabeth, however, doesn’t use post vocalic [r] at
all. She did occasionally when she started school, but she soon
stopped. Kids from London and the south who have moved to the
island in recent years never use [r], and they know what’s what!

(Holmes: 2001, 196-197)

• Accents with post vocalic [r] are called rhotic. In
large areas of England rhotic English accents
are regarded as rural and uneducated. In large
parts of America, on the other hand, post vocalic
[r] is alive and extremely used.
• A survey in the 1960s found that rhoticism was
increasing in New York, where it was regarded
as prestigious.
(Holmes: 2001, 197)
• So the pronunciation of [r] in English
speaking communities provides a wealth
of examples of the complexity of linguistic
variation and language change, as well as
the arbitrariness of the forms which
happen to be standard in any community.

(Holmes: 2001, 197)

 The spread of vernacular forms
• It is easy to understand that a
pronunciation which is considered
prestigious will be imitated and spread
through a community.
• But there are also many examples of
vernacular pronunciations which have
spread throughout speech communities.

(Holmes: 2001, 198)

• Example 4:
Martha’s Vineyard is a little island about three miles off
the coast of Massachusetts and within reach of people
from Boston and New York as a holiday retreat. There
are about 6000 permanent residents on the island. Every
summer the island is flooded with visitors who
outnumber the residents from seven to one. Not
surprisingly these visitors are resented by the locals,
despite the fact that they have become increasingly
dependent on tourists for their income. The attitudes of
the locals towards the visitors is reflected in the
Vineyarders’ speech.
(Holmes: 2001, 198)
• A 1950s survey revealed that these
attitudes were reflected in the way they
pronounced words like light and house.
• Their pronunciation of the vowels in these
words had gradually become more and
more centralised. (The position of the
tongue at the start of the vowel had moved
towards the centre of the mouth.)
(Holmes: 2001, 198)
• This sound change, which seemed to be
unconscious, was a change to a more
conservative pronunciation which used to be
associated with the area in the past.
• It had been dying out, but it was revitalised to
express solidarity between those who identified
with the island and felt loyalty to its rural values
and peaceful lifestyle.
• Other groups on the island with similar atitudes
imitated the fishermen, and so the use of
centralised vowels spread.
(Holmes: 2001, 198-199)
• So not all linguistic changes involve adopting
new forms from outside the speech community.
Nor do they always involve forms which people
are conscious of as prestigious forms.
• Vowel centralisation is not an overtly prestigious
sound in American speech. On Martha’s
Vineyard, however, it is clear that people
unconsciously valued this speech feature.
• The spread of centralised vowels illustrates how
a vernacular feature can acquire social
significance and spread through a community.
(Holmes: 2001, 199)
 How do changes spread?
• From group to group: (Figure 9.1 pg 201 )
Many linguists have used the metaphor of waves
to explain how linguistic changes spread through
a community.
Any particular change typically spreads
simultaneously in different directions, though not
necessarily at the same rate in all directions.
Social factors such as age, status, gender, and
region affect the rates of change and the
directions in which the waves roll most swiftly.
(Holmes: 2001, 200)
• In any speech community, different sets of
waves intersect. You belong simultaneously to a
particular age group, region, and social group. A
change may spread along any of these
dimensions and into another group. Linguistic
changes infiltrate groups from the speech of
people on the margins between social and
regional groups – via the ‘middle’ people who
have contacts in more than one group.
(Holmes: 2001, 200)
• From style to style: (Figure 9.2 pg 202)
One theory of how a change spreads presents the
process as a very systematic one. In the speech of a
particular individual it suggests the change spreads from
one style to another (say from more formal speech to
more casual speech) ,while at the same time it spreads
from one individual to another within a social group, and
subsequently from one social group to another.
When a change is a prestigious one it usually starts
at the top of the speech community – in the most formal
style of the highest status group and spreads
downwards.
(Holmes: 2001, 200-202)
• Innovating groups who introduce new
vernacular sound changes tend to be
around the middle of the social class
range – in the upper working class, for
instance. And, as one might expect,
younger people tend to adopt new forms
more quickly than older people do and
they use them more extensively.
(Holmes: 2001, 202)
• From word to word:
It seems to be the case that sound changes not only
spread from one person to another and from one style to
another style, they also spread from one word to
another. Sound changes spread through different words
one by one. This is called lexical diffusion.
When a sound change begins, all the words with a
particular vowel don’t change at once in the speech of a
community. Instead the sound change occurs first in one
word, and then later in another and so on.
(Holmes: 2001, 202-203)
 How do we study language
change?
• Why do we pronounce the second [a]of
words such as pastane,hastane, dersane
as a long vowel?
• Because…
• There used to be a glottal fricative [h]
instead of long vowel;pastaHANE,
dersHANE…etc.
 But…
•Glottal fricative [h] is omitted over time.
•Just as it happened in Norwich:
•[h] dropping;
•Substitution of a glottal stop for [t]
(eg.butter=>bu’er)
(Holmes, 2001:9)
 Also
• In prestigious pronunciation of New York prefers [r].
• And also the following shows a language change for
perstigious forms:
– Prestigious forms are used more by people in their middle years.
– The frequency of prestigious forms is low in adolescence and it
declines again in old ages.
• So when a standard or prestigious form occurs more
often in the speech of younger people than older
people, this suggests that it is a new form which is
being introduced and adopted by young people.
(Holmes, 2001:9)
Let’s have a look at the reasons
• AGE DIFFERENCE
• “Comparing the speech of people from different
ages can be a useful clue to language change.
This has been called as apparent-time method
of studying change. But this method is a short-
cut.”(Holmes, 2001:9)
• “Younger speakers tend to use more of the
newer or innovative forms and older speakers
tend to use more of the older forms the ones
they adopted in their teenage years.”(Holmes,
2001:9)
 In a social dialect survey of
Sydney community:
• “HRTs were used far more often by teenagers
than adults.”(Holmes, 2001:9)
• “This suggested that over time HRTs would
become well-established as a feature of Sydney
speech. ”(Holmes, 2001:9)
• “Interpreting this issue as a clue to change
assumes that the teenagers will continue to use
the forms they use now as they grow older so
that these forms will become the norms of adult
community over time. ”(Holmes, 2001:9)
 Think of Turkish
• Do you think that phrases such as ‘sevgili
yapmak’, ‘karakter atmak’ will become a
part of the norms of our language in the
future.
• Do you think that verb ‘çıkmak’ was used
to express the emotional relationship
between pairs ten years ago?
 Something weird just for now…
• LANGUAGE CHANGE IN REAL TIME
• Let’s have a look at 7th example on page 207.
• Peter Trudgill reports a very interesting real time study:
Trudgill returns to Norwich fifteen years after his original
study of the speech patterns of Norwich people. He
discovered that some of the variation he had noted had
led to linguistic change. For instance; the vowels of beer
and bear were distinct for many speakers in 1968. But it
was seen that these vowels had completely merged for
all speakers apart from those who are from the highest
social group.
• There were also other changes. As many
as 30 per cent of young Norwich people
had completely lost the th sound in thing
and substituted [f] .
 Main Reasons for Change

• SOCIAL STATUS
• GENDER
• INTERACTION
 Social Status and Language
Change
• It seems to be that a linguistic change may enter
a speech community through any social group
but that different types of change are associated
with different groups. (Holmes, 2001:9)
• Members of the group with social status tend to
introduce changes into a speech community of
neighboring communities which is considered to
be lower than them. (Holmes, 2001:9)
• Eg.top and dog was pronounced as [ta:p] and
[da:g] by Norwich people but changed to [top]
and [dog] with the effect of prestigious London
pronunciation. (Holmes, 2001:9)
• Apart from this facet lower class men in
particular often adopt speech forms from
nearby local workers to express solidarity
rather than status or prestige. (Holmes,
2001:9)
 Gender and Language Change
• Differences in women’s and men’s speech are
another source of variation which can result in
linguistic change. Sometimes women are
innovators leading a linguistic change, and
sometimes men. (Holmes, 2001:9)
• Women tend to be associated with changes
towards both prestige and vernacular norms,
whereas men more often introduce vernacular
changes. (Holmes, 2001:9)
 Women In Ucieda

• In Ucieda men have been forced to look outside the village to find
wives because many of the village women do not want to get marry
the local working dairy farmers because they do not want to remain
in the farming villages. These women’s speech reflect their social
aspirations. In general in the village the women’s speech is closer to
standard or prestige pronunciation of Spanish than the men’s. They
have seen different life styles and been exposed to the standard
dialect. This situation reflects both their social contacts and also
their values and aspirations. In short women in Ucieda are leading
change towards Castilian Spanish and introducing prestige variants
into Ucieda speech.
 Interaction and Language
Change
• Linguistic change generally progresses
most slowly in tightly knit communities
which have little contact with the outside
world. (Holmes, 2001:9)
• Eg. Scottish Gaelic of Western Isles of
Scotland, Maori from East Cape of New
Zealand, Sardinia.
 Iceland
• Iceland is one of the best known examples
of linguistic conservatism. Icelandic has
altered relatively little since 13th century
and it has developed very little dialectal
variation. By contrast during the same
period English has changed radically and
has been characterised by gross dialectal
variaton. (Holmes, 2001:9)
What can be the reason?
Iceland is much more gegraphically isolated
than England. Also the Icelandic communities
were scattered around the coast and the
communication between them was very
difficult in the past especially in winter. This
kind of a geographical situation leads to a
great deal of dialect divergence.
ICELAND and ENGLAND
 Quotation From
Shakespeare,18th Sonnet
Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And
Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
 Let’s Think of Some ‘Turkish’
Words
• Kitap from Arabic
• Kalp from Arabic
• Aşk from Arabic
• Hoca from Persian
• Futbol from English
• and it goes on importing new words and
changing.
 Last words on Interaction and
Change
• New forms can gain
prestige from the
media.
Let’s look at the chart:

Kupwar

Urdu pala jera Kat ke le ke a ya

Marathi pala jera kap un ghe un a l o

Kannada tapla jera khod i tegond i be Y

n
greens a little cut having taken Having come past I
• Which actually means: ‘I cut some greens and
brought them.’
At the first glance these three sentences seem to
be dialects of the same language. But they are
from three different languages of India and they
do not belong to the same language family. In
many places these languages are quite distinct
and word-for-word translation of the kind
illustrated above would be considered
impossible. (Holmes, 2001:9)
 But what is the reason?
Kupwar has about three thousand people and for centuries
three socially distinct groups lived together there, each
speaking a different language as their home language.
The Jains use Kannada, the Muslims use Urdu and the
Untouchables speak Marathi, the regional language and
principal literary language of the area. The villagers use
all three languages in their daily activities. Over time with
constant switching between at least two languages in
any interaction, the languages have become more and
more alike.The word order is now identical and there are
extensive similarities in the structure of words and use of
inflections too. (Holmes, 2001:9)
 In conclusion
• People’s need to interact easily has led to
a merging of the grammars. On the other
hand each group also wants to be
identifiably distinct which led to the
maintenance of differences at the
vocabulary level. (Holmes, 2001:9)
• And this situation clearly exemplifies
interaction and language change issue.
(Holmes, 2001:9)
LANGUAGE VARIATION
AND CHANGE
 Two main focuses:

• It examines a key feature of the

variationist school of linguistics- its
interest in language change.
• It presents new methodologies and
analyses which have modified and
extended the approaches developed by
the Labovian school.
 A language change example
Faeder ure thu the art on heofonum,
si thin nama gehalgod. To becume
thin rice.

( West Saxon text, end of 10th century, in

W. B. Lockwood 1972:132.)
 Our father who is in heaven, may
your name be sacred. Let your
kingdom come.

( A modern rendition)
1st one: Old English ( 400 AD to 1100)

2nd one: Modern English ( from 1800)

• That languages can change dramatically
over a long period of time can be seen
from specimens of the same language
English, from its earliest written records to
the present day.
• There are no sharp breaks between one
phrase of English and another: labels like
“old and middle” are ones used by
scholars.
• All speakers would have considered using
not just “english” but a “modern” type of
English.
1. Prescriptivism ,the dominant ideology in
language education, holds that changes
in language norms occur to the detriment
of the lannguage, and are a result of
sloppiness, laziness and a lack of
attention to logic.
2. Sociologists have shown that variation
and change in language go hand in
hand. Changes within a speech
community are preceded by linguistic
variation. (chpr 2,3). If a change occurs
in one speech community but not in
another, such change is the cause of
variation between the two communities.
3. Social groups within the same speech
community may react differently to
changes that are occuring, in terms of their
attitudes and choices of variants.
 TWO MODELS OF LANGUGE
CHANGE
Focus: the way in which sound changes
spread through a speech community.

1. Variationist Model of Change

2. Lexical Diffusion
Variationist Approaches to Change
• Weinreich et al showed that tracking
down changes required close attention to
the language system as well as the social
system.
• All change is preceded by variation. But
not all variation leads to change(-in and –
ing)
• In USA, England and Australia the variant
–in occurs in the following environments in
decreasing order of frequency:

1. progressives and participles

2. adjectives
3. gerunds
4. nouns
 Two Kinds of Sound Change
• Changes from above: New sounds
introduced by the dominant social class.
• Changes from below: sounds that are
originally part of vernacular and which
represent the phonetic processes that are
based on articulatory process that makes
pronunciation easier.
 EXAMPLES
• Half- pas’ five
• Trus’ me
• Don’ know
• Lexical Diffusion:
Theory that proposes that sound changes
occur word by word. It was evolved
independently of the Labovian school, but
it is complementary to and compatible with
the interest of Weinreich et al. (1968) in
long-term processes of change.
• 1st hypothesis:
A sound change does not occur in all
words or environments simultaneously.
Rather, some environments are more
conductive to the change. And the change
might be incorporated in some words
before others.
• M. Chen(1972-76) analysed sound
changes that appear to have come about
in this way.
• One is the loss of nasal consonants at the
ends of words in French and the
accompanying nasalisation of the vowel.
• Bon(good)
• There is no longer –n, it is dropped. The
vowel is nasal.
• Chen argued that this rule at first involved
a few words, spread to others and then
affected the entire vocabulary of French.
• 2nd hypothesis: It concerns the rate at
which sound changes are effected in
language.
• Chen introduced the idea of an S-curve
that reflected the general rate of change in
a language.
 Real and Apparent Time
• To overcome the problems, linguists
undertake “apparent-time” studies.
• A community is divided into age groups
which are studied for a short period to
examine whether any differences occur.
• If the older shows low use of a variant and
the younger shows greater use = there is
a change in “real time”.
• In the case of slangs an apparent-time
comparison of two age groups may show
that the younger uses slangs more.
• “age grading” is used to refer to
differences in age groups.
 A Real-time Verification of an
Apparent-time Study
• The summary of the study of Labov(1994)
• The sociolinguistic structure of the speech
community is more stable than anticipated.
• The change did not occur as sudden as
anticipated
 Two possibilities
1st: Labov’s “hypercorrection” hypothesis
has not held up.
Hypercorrection may not have an effect in
change in vernacular norms.
2nd: change in –r usage is still at early
stage.
In this view the variant –r is at the lowest
segment of the S-curve of change.
Vernacular Maintenance and Change

• LABOVian tradition: investigations focused

on the role of “the upwardly mobile lower
middle class in processes of change”.
Vernacular Maintenance and Change

• LABOVian tradition: investigations focused

on the role of “the upwardly mobile lower
middle class in processes of change”.
• Lower middle class members would rather
adopt linguistic variants which are
associated with high social prestige than
low-status variants
 assumed social advantage
 Vernacular Maintenance and Change

• Despite the assumed social advantage of

the use of prestige forms, lower middle-
class people continue to maintain low-
status variants.
Why?
 Vernacular Maintenance and Change

• Despite the assumed social advantage of

the use of prestige forms, lower middle-
class people continue to maintain low-
status variants.
Why?
• Sociolinguists argue that the concept of
social network is the clue to understand
such adoption strategies
The Concept of Social Network

– Used in anthropological research

The Concept of Social Network

– Used in anthropological research

– Refers to the informal and formal social
relationships that individuals maintain with
one another
The Concept of Social Network

– Used in anthropological research

– Refers to the informal and formal social
relationships that individuals maintain with
one another
– Criteria of description:
density and multiplexity
The Concept of Social Network
• Network density:
– Refers to the number of network links

Low density: individuals know the central

member but not each other
High density: members know each other and
interact regularly
The Concept of Social Network
• Multiplexity:
– Refers to the content of the network links

Multiplex network: members linked in more

than one function (co-employee, relative,
friend, neighbor, member of same sports club)
Uniplex network: members only linked in one
function (for example co-employee)
Language and Social Networks
• James and Lesley MILROY:
The Belfast Study
They applied the concept of social networks to
their fieldwork.

• The MILROYs’ hypothesis:

– The use of vernacular forms is associated
positively with the speaker’s degree of
integration into the community’s social
network.
 The Belfast Study
• MILROYs carried out fieldwork in 3
working-class areas of Belfast (1975-6)
– all areas featured ‘social malaise’:
unemployment, sickness, juvenile crime,
illegitimacy and premature death from
disease.
isolation from mainstream, upwardly mobile society
solidarity within the community
dense, multiplex network patterns
 The Belfast Study
• MILROYs wanted to gain access to the
vernacular in its most natural form
Participant observation
neither being an insider nor a real outsider
they could collect natural speech style
samples of 46 speakers in different situational
contexts without violating community norms of
interaction
Afterwards: Quantitative analysis
 The Belfast Study
• Findings:
– The use of several phonological variables was
clearly stratified according to gender in the 3
working-class areas.
 The Belfast Study
• Ballymacarrett:
The effect of gender on linguistic variation was most
prominent for the voiced interdental fricative (th): [mɔər]
for mother
Women used noticeably fewer vernacular variants than
men  women were less integrated into the community
network than men, mostly because women worked
outside the area (weak local ties).
Stronger network ties of men were seen as cause for their
higher level of vernacular use.
 The Belfast Study
• Clonard:
Young women had stronger network ties, they worked
altogether outside the area in the same shop  contact
to customers from other areas
Their stronger network ties made the new variants be
spread and maintained.
Women as ‘early adopters’ of a linguistic change
• The Belfast study shows that language use is influenced
by status and solidarity :
– Use of standard language is associated with high
social status
– Use of vernacular indicates solidarity with local
people, customs and norms
 vernacular use is typical in dense and multiplex
network structures as found in rural areas and old
urban working-class districts
– Dense and multiplex networks function as
conservative force for the maintenance of the
vernacular forms
– A break-up of the traditional network patterns can
initiate linguistic change
Dialect Loss and Maintenance in a
Divided City: The Berlin Vernacular

• Berlin Urban Vernacular Project (BUV)

carried out in the early 1980’s by
DITTMAR and SCHLOBINSKI

• Gives further support to MILROY’s

hypothesis of the strong relationship
between vernacular maintenance and
integration in a local community
 Berlin Urban Vernacular

• Berlin used to be divided into East (GDR) and

West (FRG) Berlin
• West Berliners were scarcely allowed to cross
the Berlin Wall until 1989
• East Berliners (GDR) under the age of 65 (62 for
women) were not allowed or visit the western
part at all.
 isolated language communities
BUV study showed that the pattern of
linguistic variation reflected the
political division of Berlin:
• Vernacular maintenance in the East Berlin
working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg
• Loss of typical BUV variants in the affluent
middle-class district of Zehlendorf in West
Berlin
• Speakers in the West Berlin working-class
area of Wedding were situated between
the two extremes
Research on speakers’ attitudes
• West Berliners stigmatized BUV as “vulgar, working
class and an indicator of lack of education”.
• Standard German => legitimate prestige variety
• But in East Berlin, BUV was not only commonly used but
also perceived as highly prestigious.
• Stigmatized variety in East Berlin was Saxon, a German
dialect spoken in a region south of Berlin.
• Saxon was stigmatized partly because many of its
speakers occupied key political posts in the repressive
GDR government and administration.
 NEW APPROACHES TO
VARIATION AND CHANGE
• There is a need for integration.
• Researchers who are dissatisfied with
atomistic approach have focused on the
interplay between different variables.
• They achieve this through statistical
techniques which are able to consider
several variables simultaneously.
Patterns of Variation and Change in
Sydney: A Case Study
• The Sydney social dialect survey was
carried out in the early 1980’s under the
leadership of Barbara Horvath.(Horvath
1985)
• This survey was carried out to investigate
the sociolinguistic patterns of variation and
change in Australian English.
Patterns of Variation and Change in
Sydney: A Case Study
• This study includes methodological innovations in
terms of definition of speech community.
• Horvath included in her study not only the speakers
from different social backgrounds but also speakers
of different ethnic origin: Anglos(Australians of
English speaking origin), Italians and Greeks.
• Both native and non native speakers of English were
seen as being part of the Sydney speech
community.
Patterns of Variation and Change in
Sydney: A Case Study

• This is different from Labov’s original

definition of a speech community, that
excluded non-native speakers.
(Labov,1966)
• Ethnicity was included as an additional
social variable with the more conventional
variables of age, gender and
socioeconomic class.
Patterns of Variation and Change in
Sydney: A Case Study
• The second important innovation of this
study concerns the analytical
methodology. Horvath used a multivariate
statistical procedure called principal
components analysis.
• Principal components analysis helps to
discover the structure of relationships
between the variables to see if certain
variables are correlated.
Three sociolinguistic categories of
Australian English
1. CULTIVATED

2. GENERAL

3. BROAD
• Accented refers to variants that are the results of
transfer from native language of the speaker.
Generally, these variants are not passed on to
children and they have no influence on the
development of the sound system of other
varieties of Australian English.
• Ethnic Broad includes variants that have
become ethnic markers of the English of
immigrants. They are frequently passed on
intergenerationally.
Five vowel variables(diphtongs)were investigated in
the study.
 Two new categories were added
The inclusion of non-native speakers in
the Sydney dialect survey made it
necessary to add two new
categories.These categories are:

1. ACCENTED

2. ETHNIC BROAD
 Deep division within the Sydney
speech community
• A Core Speech Community
• A Peripheral Speech Community

These were found to be clearly seperated

from each other.
 Deep division within the Sydney
speech community
• Periphery was characterized by the dominant
use of vowel variants in the categories Accented
and Ethnic Broad. Most of the members in this
group were born outside of Australia and had
acquired English as a second language around
the age of 20.
• An important non-linguistic characteristics of the
core speech community was the
disproportionate age distribution(90 teenagers,
only 40 adults).
• Accented and Ethnic Broad variants were never
used by members of core speech community.
• Horvath’s description involved formation of a
peripheral community by the first generation,
and then movement into the core speech
community by the second generation.(1985:
178)
• Horvath also showed that the core speech
community could be divided further into four
sociolects(social varieties)
• Speakers in four groups used quantitatively
varying mixes of Broad, General and Cultivated
variants.
Figure 4.8 and 4.9(pg. 135-136)
• The general pattern from sociolect 1 to sociolect
4 shows a decrease of the “Broad” and
“General” variants of the vowel variables and an
increase of “Cultivated” forms.
• An investigation of the relationship between
social variables and linguistic variation indicated
that these four sociolects were primarily
correlated with the social variables age and
gender, while the effect of the class was less
pronounced.
Figure 4.8 and 4.9(pg. 135-136)

• The use of “Broad” variants is most

pronounced in sociolects 1 and 2.The two
sociolects are characterised by a high
percentage of male speakers.(over 60 per
cent).
• Sociolect 3 and 4 are characterised by a
high percentage of “Cultivated” variables
as well as a high percentage of female
speakers.
Figure 4.8 and 4.9(pg. 135-136)
• In the linguistic continuum from sociolect 1
to 2, there is a gradual increase of middle
class speakers and equally gradual
decrease of lower working-class speakers.
This parallels with the gradual increase of
“Cultivated” and the decrease of “Broad”
variants across the four sociolects. The
percentage of upper working class
speakers across the sociolects is more or
less stable.
• Broad=34 per cent, General=55 per cent and
Cultivated=11 per cent.(1965, Mitchell and Delbridge)
• Broad=13 per cent,(sociolect 1) General=81 per
cent(sociolect 2 and 3) and Cultivated=6
percent(sociolect 4). (Horvath 1985: 90)
• Adults were mainly found in sociolect 4, teenagers
dominated in sociolects 2 and 3 where General variants
of the vowel variables used most frequently.
• Differences between the distribution figures(1965 vs.
1985) and the different linguistic behaviour of two
generations can be interpreted as indicators of language
change in progress.
• BROAD -> GENERAL <- CULTIVATED
 VOWEL SHIFTS: Towards a holistic approach
to dialect and change
• Vowel shifts are changes that operate across a whole
set of vowels.
• Current attempts to study clusters of features such as
Horvath’s Australian study are promising in the area of
vowel shifts.
• The Northern Cities Chain Shift and The Southern
Hemisphere Shift.
• Speakers of English in these southern hemisphere are
classified by linguists as Cultivated, General and Broad
according to a host of variables. (Mitchell and Delbridge
1965). In South Africa, cultivated speakers use a vowel
system close to RP without any vowel shift.
 CONCLUSION
• Three approaches: Labov’s model, Chen’s
model of lexical diffusion and Milroy’s
model of social networks.
• In sociolinguistics, there is a increasing
emphasis on studying sets of variables
rather than isolated variables in relation to
societal patterns.
 REFERENCES
Mesthrie, R. , et al. (2000). Introducing
Sociolinguistics: Ch.4: Language Variation and
Change. (pp. 114-147). Edinburgh: University
Press.

Holmes,J. (2001). An Introduction to Linguistics:

Ch.9: Language Change. (pp. 194-219). 2nd ed.
Harlow: Pearson Education.