LANE 422

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Summarized from
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
An Introduction to Language and Society
Peter Trudgill
4 edition. 2000,
th

and other sources

Prepared by
Dr. Abdullah S. Al-Shehri

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Chapter 2

Language and Social Class

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Social Class Dialects
(Sociolects)
 If you know the English-speaking societies well, you will be able to tell a
speaker’s social status on the basis of the variety of language he/she
uses.

 The variety of language that is used by a particular social class is called

a sociolect.

 A sociolect may include phonological, grammatical, lexical, and

phonetic (accent) differences.

 The different classes of society are separated by social barriers and

distance, similar to ‘geographical ones’.

 So, the diffusion of linguistic features may be halted by barriers of

social class, age, race, religion, etc, and social distance may also have
the same effect as geographical distance.

 This type of social differentiation is known as social stratification.

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Social Stratification
 Social stratification is a term used to the hierarchical ordering of a society, especially
in terms of wealth, power and social status.

 In the industrialized Western World, societies are stratified into social classes, which
gave rise to social class dialects.

 Social classes are not clearly defined or labeled entities. They are simply aggregates
of people with similar socioeconomic characteristics.

 Social mobility – movement up or down the social hierarch – is possible.

 Sociolects are not particularly easy to study, and describe, because, like regional
dialects, they form a continuum and are rather complex and fluid entities.

 The more heterogeneous a society is, the more heterogeneous is its language.

 Western-type social-class stratification is not universal..

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Caste System
 In India, unlike in the Western societies, traditional society is stratified
into different castes.

 Castes are relatively stable, clearly named groups, rigidly separated

from each other, with hereditary membership, and with little possibility
of in and out movement.

 Different castes speak different varieties of language.

 Because of rigid separation between different castes, caste dialects

tend to be relatively clear-cut, and caste dialect differences are
sometimes greater than regional dialect differences.

 Caste dialects are thus easier to study and describe than social class
dialect.

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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 to record many dialect features before they were
lost.

 They thought that, unlike in the city, in the rural speech of older and
uneducated speakers, there were the ‘real’ and ‘pure’ dialects.

 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’.

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The Rise of Sociolinguistic
Research
 Sociolinguistic investigation of language variation gained
momentum beginning 1966 when the American linguist William
Labov published The Social Stratification of English in New York
City.

 Labov carried out a tape-recorded interviews with 340

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.

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Labov’s New York Study

 The study tests Labov’s hypothesis that non-prevocalic /r/ usage (as in farm,
fair) correlates with social class of the speaker.

 Labov examined the speech of shop assistants in three different department

stores, of high, medium and low social status.

 The procedure was to find out which departments were on the 4th floor and
then ask as many assistants as possible a question like: Excuse me, where
are the women’s shoes?

 The answer to this question would be 4th floor, with two possible
occurrences of non-prevocalic /r/.

 Information on /r/ usage was obtained from 264 informants.

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Results of Labov’s New York Study
 38% of the high ranking store assistants used no /r/.

 49% in the middle ranking store used no /r/.

 83% in the low ranking store used no /r/.

 Thus, Labov’s study showed how a relatively trivial

feature of accent can be important socially.

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Quantitative Sociolinguistic Research
Following the “classical Labovian” approach to quantitative studies,
sociolinguistic research differentiates five different stages.

 A. Selecting speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables.

 B. Collecting the sample.

 C. Identifying the linguistic variables and their variants in the

texts.

 D. Processing the figures.

 E. Interpreting the results.

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A. Selecting Speakers, Circumstances
and Linguistic Variables.
 The selection of speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables
involves some extremely important decisions, which are to a certain
extent dictated by hypotheses about the expected results.

 It is similarly important that all the speech should be collected under the
same circumstances, so far as this is possible.

 There is a major problem of definition here, both for social variables

relating to speaker and circumstances, and for the linguistic variables
themselves.

 How can we define 'manual worker'? How can we distinguish old from
young? Even worse is the problem of defining the community to be
studied, since 'speech communities' are not self-defining.

 The researcher has to provide solutions which are at least reasonably

satisfactory, to avoid the real danger that his results will be valueless
because of ambiguities in defining the variables.
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B. Collecting the Speech Sample

 The collection of the speech sample

necessitates finding appropriate speakers
who are willing to participate.

 This means finding people willing to be

interviewed and recorded.

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C. Identifying the Linguistic Variables and
their Variants in the Speech Sample.

 At this stage, one might expect the least difficulty, since we already
know what the variants to be distinguished are, and all we need to
do is listen for them.

 However, there is a considerable degree of subjectivity in

recognizing phonetic variants, and different researchers can
produce different analyses of the same sample.

 One may also need to record information about the social context in
which each linguistic variant is used since this often influences the
choice of one variant over another, specially if context is specified
by the hypothesis as to which social contexts are relevant.

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D. Processing the figures.

 The processing of the figures involves counting the number of

occurrences of each variant in each sample, and comparing the
figures for different samples.

 The obvious step is to reduce all the figures to percentages,

since this makes comparison much easier.

 The next step is to discover which differences between samples

are significant, i.e. which would form a reasonable basis for
generalizing to other samples of the same types.

 The investigator has to use statistical tests in order to decide

how significant the figures are.

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E. Interpreting the results.

 The interpretation of the results is in some ways the

most difficult stage, since this is where the findings
have to be fitted into a general theoretical framework
dealing with the structure of language and its
relations to society and individuals.

 Success at this stage depends not only on

appropriate methodology, but also on having an
adequate general theoretical framework.

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