Selected Topics in Linguistics

Fourth Year

Compiled and Edited

By

Prof. Dr. Marghany Mahmoud

1
Preface
This course is intended to teach Sociolinguistics to fourth
year students, Department of English, Higher Institute
for Specific Studies, Giza. The course focuses on
identifying sociolinguistics according to different
sociolinguists like William Labov, Peter Trudgill,
Dell Hymes, Downes, Holmes, Wardhaugh, etc. It
also introduces various sociolinguistic
terminologies to students such as dialect, accent,
pidgin, slang, vernacular, Creole, ethnography of
communication, etc. it explains the concept of
speech community and the development of the
communicative competence notion. It shows how
language is related to social prestige. It describes
the interrelationship between language and other
social factors like social classes, gender, age, etc.
It handles the social phenomenon of language
variation as it reviews William Labov' social
stratification of the New York City and
pronunciation of /r/ sound varies according to some
demographic variables.

Course Objectives:
A. Knowledge and Understanding
1-To understand various definitions of
sociolinguistics.
2-To gain knowledge about different sociolinguistic
concepts like speech community, slang, jargon,
etc.

2
B-Intellectual Skills:
1- To learn the differences between various
sociolinguistic terminologies like dialect, accent,
Creole, pidgin, ethnography of communication, etc.
2. To be able to define interrelationship between
language and society and how language varies
according to its cultural context and various social
identities.
3- To become aware of how language varieties differ
between groups separated by certain social variables
(e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age,
etc.).

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 Course Plan and Distribution
Description Week
Definition of sociolinguistics 1st week 2nd weeks
Sociolinguistic views of 2nd weeks
different sociolinguists
Applications of 3rd week
sociolinguistics
Fundamental concepts in 4th and 5th week
sociolinguistics
What is dialect? 6th week
Mi-Term exam 7th week
Sociolinguistic concept of 8th and 9th weeks
language prestige
Dialect differentiation and 10th week
social stratification in a
North Indian village
Social stratification of New 11th week
York City
The Basic Variation 12th week
Theorists – Labov, Trudgill,
Cheshire, Millroy
& Bernstein
Terminology 13th week
Revision 14th week

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 Contents
Topic Page
Definitions of sociolinguistics 6
8
Some Definitions and
Divisions of Sociolinguistics
Applications of 15
sociolinguistics
Fundamental concepts in 18
sociolinguistics
What is dialect? 31
Sociolinguistic concept of 40
language prestige
Dialect differentiation and 46
social stratification in a
North Indian village
Social stratification of New 47
York City
The Basic Variation 49
Theorists – Labov, Trudgill,
Cheshire, Millroy
& Bernstein
Terminology 64
References 71

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1. Definition of Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is concerned with language in social and
cultural context, especially how people with different social
identities (e.g. gender, age, race, ethnicity, class) speak and how
their speech changes in different situations. Some of the issues
addressed are how features of dialects (ways of pronouncing
words, choice of words, patterns of words) cluster together to
form personal styles of speech; why people from different
communities or cultures can misunderstand what is meant, said
and done based on the different ways they use language.
Sociolinguistics encompasses a range of methodologies, both
quantitative and qualitative.

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and

all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations,
and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of
language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology
of language in that the focus of sociology of language is the
effect of language on the society, while sociolinguistics focuses
on the society's effect on language. Sociolinguistics overlaps to
a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically closely
related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between
the two fields has even been questioned recently.
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It also studies how language varieties differ between groups
separated by certain social variables
(e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age,
etc.) and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to
categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic classes. As the
usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage
also varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that
sociolinguistics studies.

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first

studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also
by Louis Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none
received much attention in the West until much later. The study
of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand,
has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century.
The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas
Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article "Sociolinguistics in
India" published in Man in India. Sociolinguistics in the West
first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such
as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK. In
the 1960s, William Stewart and Heinz Kloss introduced the
basic concepts for the sociolinguistic theory of pluricentric
languages, which describes how standard language varieties
differ between nations
(e.g. American/British/Canadian/Australian English;Austrian/Ge
rman/Swiss German; Bosnian/Croatian).

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Some Definitions and Divisions of Sociolinguistics

W. Labov (1966:136-7), Social Stratification of English in

NYC:

"We can take 2 different routes to the description of social

variation in language. ...We can consider various sections of the
population, and determine the values of the linguistic variables
for each group... college-trained professionals... [or]
longshoremen. The alternate approach is to chart the overall
distribution of the variables themselves and then ask, for certain
values of each variable, What are the characteristics of the
people who talk this way? ..[This] will tell us what group
membership we can expect from a person who talks in a certain
manner.

"The first approach, through social groups, seems more

fundamental and more closely tied to the genesis of linguistic
differentiation.. When we have finished this type of analysis, we
may turn to the second approach.. [Thus] we will be able to
avoid any error which would arise in assuming that a group of
people who speak alike is a fundamental unit of
social behavior."

P. Trudgill (1974: 32), Sociolinguistics:

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 "Sociolinguistics.. is that part of linguistics which is
concerned with language as a social and cultural phenomenon. It
investigates the field of language and society & has close
connections with the social sciences, especially social
psychology, anthropology, human geography and sociology."

Peter Trudgill (1983: 2-5), On Dialect:

[Trudgill uses 'language and society' as the broadest

term, and distinguishes 3 types of study:]

1. "First, those where the objectives are purely

linguistic;
2. Second, those where they are partly linguistic and
partly sociological; and
3. Third, those where the objectives are wholly
sociological.

"Studies of [the first] type are based on empirical work on

language as it is spoken in its social context, and are intended to
answer questions and deal with topics of central interest to
linguistics... the term ‘sociolinguistics’ [here]... is being used
principally to refer to a methodology: sociolinguistics as a way
of doing linguistics.

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 "The 2nd category... includes [areas] such as: sociology of
language; the social psychology of language; anthropological
linguistics; the ethnography of speaking; & [interactional]
discourse analysis.

"The third category consists of studies... [like] ethno-

methodological studies of conversational interaction... where
language data is being employed to tell us, not about language
but only about society... [This] is fairly obviously not
linguistics, and therefore not sociolinguistics.

Dell Hymes, Foreword to Gillian Sankoff (1980: x-xi), The

Social Life of Language:

"An integration of linguistics and anthropology, of urban

ethnography and cross-cultural ethnology, is taken for granted...
The congeries of interests that coalesced in the 1960s around the
goal of a sustained social study of language have tended to
separate out again. In arguing for the social study of language,
each had its specific opponent, its specific disciplinary world to
conquer. For some, it was conventional sociology, for some
conventional linguistics, for others philosophy, for still others
anthropology... the impulse to band together depended on a
sense of marginality in a home discipline. Achieved legitimacy
has weakened the impulse. Old methodological fault lines tend

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to prevail – logic, intuition, transcripts, cultural ethnography,
survey and questionnaire, and the like...

"[Sankoff's work] is micro-evolutionary in both its model

of the human actor & its contextualization of language... People
are not tacitly reduced to what phenomenological sociologist
Harold Garfinkel has called ‘cultural dopes’, actors who can do
only what cultural roles provide. Yet the existence of
indeterminacy, the fact that behavior and meaning can be newly
interpreted and constituted with each situation, does not lead to
a view of actors whose action is an unchartable miasma... What
people do is variable according to situation, interest, need, yet
intelligible to themselves and others in terms of recurrent
patterns... The ingredients required for an adequate analysis of
the social life of language in the modern world are[:] technical
linguistics, quantitative and mathematical technique,
ethnographic inquiry, ethnohistorical perspective."

W.M. Downes (1984: 15), Language and Society:

"Sociolinguistics is that branch of linguistics which

studies just those properties of language and languages which
REQUIRE reference to social, including contextual, factors in
their explanation."

Janet Holmes (1992, 16), An Introduction to Sociolinguistics:

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 "The sociolinguist’s aim is to move towards a theory
which provides a motivated account of the way language is used
in a community, and of the choices people make when they use
language."

Suzanne Romaine (1994, vii-ix), Language in Society:

"Some distinguish between theoretical and applied

sociolinguistics. The former is concerned with formal models
and methods for analysing the structure of speech communities
and speech varieties, and providing a general acount of
communicative competence. Applied sociolinguistics deals with
the social and political implications of fundamental inequalities
in language use in various areas of public life, e.g. school,
courts, etc. ... [In another subdivision:] Macro-sociolinguistics
takes society as its starting-point and deals with language as a
pivotal factor in the organization of communities. Micro-
sociolinguistics begins with language and treats social forces as
essential factors influencing the structure of languages. [SR
refers this division to Fasold'sSociolinguistics of Society vs.
Sociolinguistics of Language]… This [is] an artificial and
arbitrary division of labor, which leads to a fruitless
reductionism... The large-scale socio-political issues typically
addressed by the sociology of language... and the forms and uses
of language on a small scale dealt with by sociolinguistics... are

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manifestations of similar principles, albeit operating on different
levels. Variability is inherent in human behavior."

J. K. Chambers (1995, 203), Sociolinguistic Theory:

"Upon observing variability, we seek its social correlates.

What is the purpose of this variation? What do its variants
symbolize? … [These] are the central questions of
sociolinguistics."

Ronald Wardhaugh (1998, 10-11), Sociolinguistics: An

Introduction:

"[1] Social structure may either influence or determine

linguistic structure and/or behavior… [2] Linguistic structure
and/or behavior may either influence or determine social
structure [Whorf, Bernstein]… [3] The influence is bi-
directional: language and society may influence each other… [4]
There is no relationship at all between linguistic structure and
social structure… each is independent of the other…
[4a] Although there might be some such relationship, present
attempts to characterize it are essentially premature… this view
appears to be the one that Chomsky holds."

Florian Coulmas (1997), Handbook of

Sociolinguistics "Introduction" (1-11)

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The primary concern of sociolinguistic scholarship is to study
correlations between language use and social structure… It
attempts to establish causal links between language and society,
[asking] what language contributes to making community
possible & how communities shape their languages by using
them… [It seeks] a better understanding of language as a
necessary condition and product of social life… Linguistic
theory is… a theory about language without human beings.

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2. Applications of sociolinguistics

For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of

social attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be
considered appropriate language use in a business or
professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study
the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this
sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for
a regional dialect.

The study of language variation is concerned with

social constraints determining language in its
contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the
use of different varieties of language in different social
situations.

William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of

sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for introducing the
quantitative study of language variation and change, making the
sociology of language into a scientific discipline.

Also, the sociolinguistics can study a gradual transition of

individual values of a word in the context its semantics which
occur in some ethnic, cultural or social groups. For example,
Russian linguist A.V. Altyntsev studied the semantics of word
"love" (the Udmurt Idiom (Udmurtish) of Yiddish ‫ ) ליב‬among
the Ashkenazi Jews from Udmurtia andTatarstan. He was able
to make up a gradation of meanings of this word (scale of

15
gradients) and established that the concept of love is a gradual
transition of individual values, where reference point raises the
profile vector "State – Ethnic commonality – Family".

Traditional sociolinguistic interview

Sociolinguistic interviews are an integral part of collecting data

for sociolinguistic studies. There is an interviewer, who is
conducting the study, and a subject, or informant, who is the
interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a specific linguistic form
and how it is used in the dialect of the subject, a variety of
methods are used to elicit certain registers of speech. There are
five different styles, ranging from formal to casual. The most
formal style would be elicited by having the subject read a list of
minimal pairs (MP). Minimal pairs are pairs of words that differ
in only one phoneme, such as cat and bat. Having the subject
read a word list (WL) will elicit a formal register, but generally
not as formal as MP. The reading passage (RP) style is next
down on the formal register, and the interview style (IS) is when
an interviewer can finally get into eliciting a more casual speech
from the subject. During the IS the interviewer can converse
with the subject and try to draw out of them an even more casual
sort of speech by asking him to recall childhood memories or
maybe a near death experience, in which case the subject will
get deeply involved with the story since strong emotions are
often attached to these memories. Of course, the most sought

16
after type of speech is the casual style (CS). This type of speech
is difficult if not impossible to elicit because of the Observer's
Paradox. The closest one might come to CS in an interview is
when the subject is interrupted by a close friend or family
member, or perhaps must answer the phone. CS is used in a
completely unmonitored environment where the subject feels
most comfortable and will use their natural vernacular without
overtly thinking about it.

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3. Fundamental concepts in
sociolinguistics
While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few
fundamental concepts on which many sociolinguistic inquiries
depend.

Speech community

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes

a distinct group of people who use language in a unique and
mutually accepted way among themselves.

A speech community is a group of people who share a set of

norms and expectations regarding the use of language.

Exactly how to define speech community is debated in the

literature. Definitions of speech community tend to involve
varying degrees of emphasis on the following:

 Shared community membership

 Shared linguistic communication

Early definitions have tended to see speech communities as

bounded and localized groups of people who live together and
come to share the same linguistic norms because they belong to
the same local community. It has also been assumed that within
a community a homogeneous set of norms should exist. These
assumptions have been challenged by later scholarship that has
demonstrated that individuals generally participate in various

18
speech communities simultaneously and at different times in
their lives. Each speech community has different norms that
they tend to share only partially. Communities may be de-
localized and unbounded rather than local, and they often
comprise different sub-communities with differing speech
norms. With the recognition of the fact that speakers actively
use language to construct and manipulate social identities by
signalling membership in particular speech communities, the
idea of the bounded speech community with homogeneous
speech norms has become largely abandoned for a model based
on the speech community as a fluid community of practice.

A speech community comes to share a specific set of norms for

language use through living and interacting together, and speech
communities may therefore emerge among all groups that
interact frequently and share certain norms and ideologies. Such
groups can be villages, countries, political or professional
communities, communities with shared interests, hobbies, or
lifestyles, or even just groups of friends. Speech communities
may share both particular sets of vocabulary and grammatical
conventions, as well as speech styles and genres, and also norms
for how and when to speak in particular ways.

To be considered part of a speech community, one must have

a communicative competence. That is, the speaker has the
ability to use language in a way that is appropriate in the given
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situation. It is possible for a speaker to be communicatively
competent in more than one language.

Communicative competence is a term in linguistics which

refers to a language user's grammatical knowledge
of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social
knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately.

The term was coined by Dell Hymes in 1966, reacting against

the perceived inadequacy of Noam Chomsky's (1965)
distinction between competence and performance. To address
Chomsky's abstract notion of competence, Hymes
undertook ethnographic exploration of communicative
competence that included "communicative form and function in
integral relation to each other". The approach pioneered by
Hymes is now known as the ethnography of communication.

Debate has occurred regarding linguistic competence and

communicative competence in the second and foreign language
teaching literature, and scholars have found communicative
competence as a superior model of language following Hymes'
opposition to Chomsky's linguistic competence. This opposition
has been adopted by those who seek new directions toward a
communicative era by taking for granted the basic motives and
the appropriateness of this opposition behind the development of
communicative competence.

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The notion of communicative competence is one of the theories
that underlies the communicative approach to foreign language
teaching.

Canale and Swain (1980) defined communicative competence in

terms of three components:

1. grammatical competence: words and rules

2. sociolinguistic competence: appropriateness
3. strategic competence: appropriate use of communication
strategies

Canale (1983) refined the above model, adding discourse

competence: cohesion and coherence

A more recent survey of communicative competence by

Bachman (1990) divides it into the broad headings of
"organizational competence", which includes both grammatical
and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic
competence", which includes both sociolinguistic and
"illocutionary" competence. Strategic competence is associated
with the interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies
(Faerch & Kasper, 1983; Lin, 2009).

Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it

has become widely accepted that communicative competence
should be the goal of language education, central to good
classroom practice. This is in contrast to previous views in
which grammatical competence was commonly given top
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priority. The understanding of communicative competence has
been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of
language concerning speech acts as described in large part
by John Searle and J.L. Austin.

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a

specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school
students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit groups like
families and friends. Members of speech communities will often
develop slang or jargon to serve the group's special purposes and
priorities. Jargon is a type of language that is used in a
particular context and may not be well understood outside of it.
The context is usually a particular occupation (that is, a certain
trade, profession, or academic field), but any ingroup can have
jargon. The main trait that distinguishes jargon from the rest of a
language is special vocabulary—including some words specific
to it and, often, narrower senses of words that outgroups would
tend to take in a broader sense. Jargon is thus "the technical
terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or
group". Most jargon is technical terminology, involving terms
of art or industry terms, with particular meaning within a
specific industry. A main driving force in the creation of
technical jargon is precision and efficiency of

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communication when a discussion must easily range from
general themes to specific, finely differentiated details
without circumlocution. A side effect of this is a higher
threshold for comprehensibility, which is usually accepted as
a trade-off but is sometimes even used as a means of social
exclusion (reinforcing ingroup-outgroup barriers) or social
aspiration (when intended as a way of showing off).

Social group: in the social sciences a social group has been

defined as two or more people who interact with one another,
share similar characteristics, and collectively have a sense of
unity. Other theorists disagree however, and are wary of
definitions which stress the importance of interdependence or
objective similarity. Instead, researchers within the social
identity tradition generally define it as "a group is defined in
terms of those who identify themselves as members of the
group". Regardless, social groups come in a myriad of sizes and
varieties. For example, a society can be viewed as a large social
group.

Slang consists of a lexicon of non-standard words and phrases

in a given language. Use of these words and phrases is typically
associated with the subversion of a standard variety (such
as Standard English) and is likely to be interpreted by listeners
as implying particular attitudes on the part of the speaker. In

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some contexts a speaker's selection of slang words or phrases
may convey prestige, indicating group membership or
distinguishing group members from those who are not a part of
the group.

Few linguists have endeavoured to clearly define what

constitutes slang. Attempting to remedy this, Bethany K. Dumas
and Jonathan Lighter argue that an expression should be
considered "true slang" if it meets at least two of the following
criteria:

 It lowers, if temporarily, "the dignity of formal or

serious speech or writing"; in other words, it is likely to
be considered in those contexts a "glaring misuse
of register."
 Its use implies that the user is familiar with whatever is
referred to, or with a group of people who are familiar
with it and use the term.
 "It's a taboo term in ordinary discourse with people of a
higher social status or greater responsibility."
 It replaces "a well-known conventional synonym". This
is done primarily to avoid discomfort caused by the
conventional synonym or discomfort or annoyance
caused by having to elaborate further.

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Social media and Internet slang

Slang is often taken from social media as a sign of social

awareness and shared knowledge of popular culture. This
particular branch of slang has become more prevalent since the
early 2000s as a result of the rise in popularity of social
networking services, including Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram. This has created new vocabularies associated
with each new social media venue, such as the use of the term
“friending” on Facebook, which is a verbification of “friend”
used to describe the process of adding a new person to one's list
of friends on the website. This term is much older than
Facebook, but has only recently entered the popular
lexicon. Unlike most slang, social media slang is often not
spoken aloud in conversation, but rather written, though it is still
not viewed as acceptable in a formal setting. Other examples of
the slang found in social media include a general trend toward
shortened words or acronyms. These are especially associated
with services such as Twitter, which has a 140 character limit
for each message and therefore requires a briefer, more
condensed manner of communication. This includes the use
of hashtags which explicitly state the main content of a message
or image, such as #food or #photography

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Community of Practice allows for sociolinguistics to examine
the relationship between socialization, competence, and identity.
Since identity is a very complex structure, studying language
socialization is a means to examine the micro interactional level
of practical activity (everyday activities). The learning of a
language is greatly influenced by family but it is supported by
the larger local surroundings, such as school, sports teams, or
religion. Speech communities may exist within a larger
community of practice.

History of definitions

The adoption of the concept of the "speech community" as a unit

of linguistic analysis emerged in the 1960s.

John Gumperz

John Gumperz described how dialectologists had taken issue

with the dominant approach in historical linguistics that saw
linguistic communities as homogeneous and localized entities in
a way that allowed for drawing neat tree diagrams based on the
principle of 'descent with modification' and shared innovations.
Dialectologists rather realized that dialect traits spread through
diffusion and that social factors were decisive in how this
happened. They also realized that traits spread as waves from
centers and that often several competing varieties would exist in
some communities. This insight prompted Gumperz to
26
problematize the notion of the linguistic community as the
community that carries a single speech variant, and instead to
seek a definition that could encompass heterogeneity. This could
be done by focusing on the interactive aspect of language,
because interaction in speech is the path along which diffused
linguistic traits travel. Gumperz defined the community of
speech:

Any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent

interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set
off from similar aggregates by significant differences in
language usage.

— Gumperz (1968)

This definition gives equal importance to the structural and

interactional layers, and does not aim to delineate either the
community or the language system as discrete entities. The
community is a group of people that frequently interact with
each other. This is not a definition of a discrete group because
frequency of interaction is relative and graduated, and never
stable. The definition of the language system is also not
exclusive because it is defined as being set off from other
systems by significant differences in usage.Furthermore
Gumperz refines the definition of the linguistic system shared
by a speech community:

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Regardless of the linguistic differences among them, the speech
varieties employed within a speech community form a system
because they are related to a shared set of social norms.

— Gumperz (1964)

Here Gumperz again identifies two important components of the

speech community: its members share both a set of linguistics
forms and a set of social norms that govern the use of those
forms. Gumperz also sought to set up a typological framework
for describing how linguistic systems can be in use within a
single speech community. He introduced the concept of
linguistic range, the degree to which the linguistic systems of
the community differ so that speech communities can be
multilingual, diglossic, multidialectal
(including sociolectal stratification), or homogeneous -
depending on the degree of difference among the different
language systems used in the community. Secondly the notion
of compartmentalization described the degree to which the use
of different varieties were either set off from each other as
discrete systems in interaction (e.g. diglossia where varieties
correspond to specific social contexts, or multilingualism where
varieties correspond to discrete social groups within the
community) or whether they are habitually mixed in interaction
(e.g. code-switching, bilingualism, syncretic language).

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Noam Chomsky

Gumperz's formulation was however effectively overshadowed

by Noam Chomsky's redefinition of the scope of linguistics as
being :

concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a

completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its
language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically
irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts
of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic)
in applying his knowledge of the language in actual
performance.

— Chomsky (1965:3)

Where Gumperz formulation was designed to incorporate

heterogeneity, by focusing on shared norms of language use
rather than a shared linguistic system, Chomsky's definition
explicitly rejected it. Chomsky argued that linguistic
competence was logically prior to linguistic performance, and
that competence was necessarily homogeneously distributed
among all speakers of a linguistic community, or language
acquisition wouldn't have been possible.

William Labov

Another influential conceptualization of the linguistic

community was that of William Labov, which can be seen as a

29
hybrid of the Chomskyan structural homogeneity and Gumperz'
focus on shared norms informing variable practices. Labov
wrote:

The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement

in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in
a set of shared norms: these norms may be observed in overt
types of evaluative behavior, and by the uniformity of abstract
patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular
levels of usage.

— Labov (1972:120–1)

Like that of Gumperz, Labov's formulation stressed that a

speech community was defined more by shared norms than by
shared linguistic forms. But like Chomsky, Labov also saw each
of the formally distinguished linguistic varieties within a speech
community as homogeneous, invariant and uniform. Labov's
model was designed to see speech varieties as associated with
social strata within a single speech community, and it assumed
each stratum to use a single variety with a well-defined, uniform
structure. This model worked well for Labov's purpose which
was to show that African American Vernacular English could
not be seen as structurally degenerate form of English, but rather
as a well defined linguistic code with its own particular
structure. Labov's model was designed to explain variation
between social groups within a single speech community, and

30
for this reason it assumed a structural integrity of the linguistic
system of each social group, and it also assumed each social
group within the speech community to form a neatly bounded
unit definable in terms of discrete and correlatable variables,
such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, age, ideology, and specific
formal variables of linguistic usage.

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4. What is dialect?

Sociolinguists also study dialect — any regional, social or ethnic

variety of a language. By that definition, the English taught in
school as correct and used in non-personal writing is only one
dialect of contemporary American English. Usually called
Standard American English or Edited American English, it is the
dialect used in this essay.

Scholars are currently using a sociolinguistic perspective to

answer some intriguing questions about language in the United
States, including these:

Which speakers in urban areas of the North are changing the

pronunciation of vowels in a systematic way? For instance,
some speakers in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago
pronounce bat so that it sounds like bet and betso that it sounds
like but. Linguists call these patterned alterations the Northern
Cities Vowel Shift.

Which features of African American Vernacular English

(AAVE) grammar are used by middle-class white teen-agers
who admire contemporary African-American music,
entertainment and clothing? For instance, white adolescents
might speak approvingly of the style of a peer by saying she

32
money or he be jammin’ — sentence structures associated with
African Americans.

Which stereotypical local pronunciations are exaggerated to

show local allegiance? Such language behavior has been pointed
out recently for Pittsburgh, New Orleans and the barrier islands
off North Carolina known as the Outer Banks. At the end of the
20th century, connections between the isolated Outer Banks and
the greater world increased. This changed the local seafood
industry and made the Outer Banks a destination for a growing
number of tourists. Using the typical way that the natives
pronounce the vowel in the words high and tide, these North
Carolinians are called Hoi Toiders. They continue to use this
distinctive vowel even though in other ways their dialect is
becoming more like other American dialects.

What will be the linguistic impact of the impending loss of

monolingual French speakers in the Acadian, or Cajun, region
of southern Louisiana? What are the traces of French in Cajun
Vernacular English, the dialect of monolingual speakers of
English who consider themselves Cajun? Will these French
features be sustained?

What slang terms do students use to show affiliation with

subgroups of their peers and to distinguish themselves from
their parents’ generation? In 2002, for example, university
students in North Carolina described things that were great,

33
pleasing or favorable as cool, hype, money, phat,
tight or sweet — but definitely not swell.

Variation in language is not helter-skelter. It is systematic. For

instance, a speaker may sometimes pronounce the word mind to
sound just like mine through a process called consonant cluster
reduction. Pronunciation of the final–nd consonant cluster as –
n tends to occur before consonants; i.e., the speaker’s choice of
saying mine instead of mind is conditioned by a feature of the
language itself (whether or not a consonant sound follows the
word).For instance, a speaker is likely to say “I wouldn’t mind
owning a BMW” (with both n and d pronounced before o), but
“I wouldn’t mine borrowing your BMW” (with nd reduced to n
before b).

Variation also correlates with social factors outside of language.

For example, Appalachian working-class speakers reduce
consonant clusters more often than northern Anglo-American
working class speakers and working-class African Americans,
regardless of their region, reduce consonant clusters more
frequently than do other working-class speakers. Thus, the
occurrence of final consonant cluster reduction is conditioned
internally by its position in the speech stream and externally by
the social factors of socioeconomic class and ethnicity.

Another example of an internal linguistic variable is the

pronunciation of the words spelled pen, ten and Ben so that they

34
sound as if they were spelled pin, tin and bin. This variable
correlates with being Southern, regardless of age, gender, socio-
economic class or ethnicity. However, among Southerners, the
pronunciation of ask as if it were spelled ax correlates with
ethnicity, because the pronunciation is used most often (but not
exclusively) by African Americans.

Another pronunciation variant that correlates with a social

category is heard in New Orleans. In working-class
neighborhoods, words spelled with oi are often pronounced as if
spelled er. For these speakers, then, the word point rhymes
with weren’t. Age is another social variable. In North Carolina,
elderly speakers often pronounce duke,
stupid and newspaper with a y-sound before the vowel.Instead
of the common pronunciations dook, stoopid, and nooz for these
words, they say dyuke, styupid, and nyuz. (This is basically the
difference all English speakers make between the words food
and feud; feud has a y-sound before the vowel.) Speakers born
after World War II seldom use this pronunciation.

The examples above have all concerned pronunciation, but

language also varies in vocabulary, grammar and use.

Vocabulary sometimes varies by region

Vocabulary sometimes varies by region. The expression lost

bread to refer to French toast is a translation of French pain
perdu, part of the vocabulary of southern Louisiana. Other
35
vocabulary is not regional but rather is old-fashioned, such
asfrock for ‘a woman’s dress’ or tarry for ‘wait.’ Some
vocabulary may vary by degree of formality, as in the choice
among the words barf, upchuck, vomit and regurgitate.

Grammatical constructions also vary. In the Midland region of

the United States, speakers use a construction called positive
anymore, as in “Anymore you see round bales of hay in the
fields.” In other regions, speakers would say, “Nowadays you
see round bales of hay in the field.” A grammatical variation
associated with AAVE omits the verb be, as in “The teacher in
the classroom.” Another variation that is widespread in spoken
American English is the double negative, as in “We don’t want
no more construction on this road.” Such sentences are not
Standard American English.

Putting It in Context

Considerations other than grammatical correctness often govern

speaker choices. For example, Sign this paper is a
grammatically correct imperative sentence. However, a student
approaching a teacher to obtain permission to drop a course, for
reasons having nothing to do with grammar,will probably avoid
the imperative — expressing the request instead as a statement
or a question, such as I need to get your signature on this
paper or Will you please sign this drop form?

36
Some social factors are attributes of the speaker — for example,
age, gender, socio-economic class, ethnicity and educational
level. Many studies have shown that these factors commonly
correlate both with variation within the language itself (such as
the pronunciation of final consonant clusters) and with variation
in the use of language (such as the use of more or less formal
vocabulary, depending on the audience). These findings match
our everyday experience; most people are well aware that men
and women use the language differently, that poor people often
speak differently from rich people, and that educated people use
language differently from uneducated people.

People adjust the way they talk to their social situation

It is common knowledge that people also adjust the way they

talk to their social situation. Socio-situational variation,
sometimes called register, depends on the subject matter, the
occasion and the relationship between participants — in addition
to the previously mentioned attributes of region, ethnicity,
socioeconomic status, age and gender. Here are some examples.

Constraints on subject matter vary from culture to culture. In

American English, it is fine to ask a child or a medical patient,
“Have you had a bowel movement today?” However, the same
question to an acquaintance might be coarse. Even a good friend
would find it at the least peculiar. American English speakers
must approach other subjects with care. They wouldn’t dare ask,

37
for example, “Are you too fat for one plane seat?” “What’s your
take-home pay?” “Are you sure you’re only 50?” “Do you have
a personal relationship with Christ?”

Any of these questions posed at a cocktail party might draw a

prompt “None of your business” — or something less polite.
However, in other situations, between other participants, those
same questions might be appropriate. A public-health official
encouraging Americans to lose weight might well ask a general
audience, “Are you too fat to fit in one plane seat?” A financial
planner speaking to a client certainly should ask, “What is your
take-home pay?”

Contact

Contact is an important concept in sociolinguistics — social

contact and language contact. Language change spreads through
networks of people who talk with one another. Tight-knit
groups that keep to themselves tend not to promote change.
Networks whose members also belong to other networks tend to
promote change. People can live next door to one another and
not participate in the same network. In the segregated South,
blacks and whites often lived on the same piece of land; blacks
worked in the homes of whites. The physical distance was
minimal, but the great social distance led to different varieties of
American English.

38
Contact between languages brings about variation and change.
Situations of language contact are usually socially complex,
making them of interest to sociolinguists. When speakers of
different languages come together, the results are determined in
large part by the economic and political power of the speakers
of each language. In the United States, English became the
popular language from coast to coast, largely replacing colonial
French and Spanish and the languages of Native Americans. In
the Caribbean and perhaps in British North America where
slavery was practiced, Africans learned the English of their
masters as best they could, creating a language for immediate
and limited communication called a pidgin.When Africans
forgot or were forbidden to use their African languages to
communicate with one another, they developed their English
pidgin into their native tongue. A language that develops from a
pidgin into a native language is called a creole. African
American Vernacular English may have developed this way.

Bilingualism is another response to language contact. In the

United States, large numbers of non-English speaking
immigrants arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Typically, their children were bilingual and their grandchildren
were monolingual speakers of English. When the two languages
are not kept separate in function, speakers can intersperse
phrases from one into the other, which is called code switching.
Speakers may also develop a dialect of one language that is

39
heavily influenced by features of the other language, such as the
contemporary American dialect Chicano English.

5. Prestige (sociolinguistics)
Standard and Prestige

The standard variety or simply the standard of a language is the

variety which enjoys the highest status and the highest prestige
in a speech community. ‘Prestige’ is the social value which is
ascribed to a linguistic variety. A prestigious variety is one that
is socially widely accepted and most highly valued.

The standard variety of a language is generally codified, i.e.

written down. Codification includes the description of a number
of linguistic norms in dictionaries and grammar books which
officially define the correct usage of the standard variety, both
written and spoken. This prestigious, codified variety becomes
the legitimized standard. Moreover, the language as a whole is
thus regularized and standardized, whereas varieties with less
prestige become marginalized.

The standard is usually the institutionalized variety of a

language. That is, it is used for official purposes (law,
politics…) and in the media.

Although other varieties of a language may be regarded as less

prestigious than the standard, they are not inferior to the
standard, neither are they of less quality. Usually, one variety

40
has become the standard because of various external, non-
linguistic reasons (e.g. political, social or historical
circumstances).

The term ‘Standard English’ resists easy definition. English is

spoken in many countries all over the world. In all English-
speaking countries, different local standards have emerged and
can be distinguished. They exist alongside British Standard
English and American Standard English.

Other than the standard variety of a language, dialects are often

stigmatized. They are regarded in a rather negative way as
deviant cases of speech and are accredited with low prestige.
Labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ English reflect the general attitude
towards standard and non-standard varieties of the English
language.

‘Prestige’, however, is not entirely equal to ‘Standard’. In fact,

any language variety, be it standard or non-standard, can have
prestige among its speakers. Sociolinguists make a distinction
between ‘overt prestige’ and ‘covert prestige’ to denote the
degree of overall social acceptance of a speech variety:

Overt prestige: the standard usually has overt prestige; it is

generally socially acknowledged as ‘correct’ and therefore
valued highly among all speakers of the language.

41
Covert prestige: Non-standard varieties are often said to have
covert prestige ascribed to them by their speakers. A specific,
small group of speakers shows positive evaluation of and
orientation towards a certain linguistic variety, usually without
the speakers' awareness. The variety is usually not accepted in
all social groups (e.g. youth language).

In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of respect normally

accorded to a specific language or dialect within a
particular speech community, relative to other languages or
dialects. Sociolinguistic prestige is therefore one manifestation
of, or analogous to, the more general phenomenon of social
stratification – especially class. In general, a language or dialect
associated with an upper class has positive prestige, while a
language or dialect associated with a lower class has "negative
prestige". Historical examples of prestige languages include
the court languages used by royal elites. At the opposite
extreme, members of underclasses have often communicated in
particular forms of cant.

Prestige languages/dialects are often tied closely to

a standardized language/dialect, in that the latter is usually
considered more prestigious within a speech community, than a
language/dialect that diverges significantly from
linguistic norms. However, there are many exceptions to this

42
rule, such as Arabic, in which Egyptian Arabic is widely used
in mass media aimed at international audiences, while Literary
Arabic (also known as Standard Arabic) is a more prestigious
form.

Sociolinguistic prestige is especially visible in situations where

two or more distinct languages are in use, and in diverse,
socially stratified urban areas, in which there are likely to be
speakers of different languages and/or dialects interacting
frequently.

Despite any perceptions that a particular dialect or language is

"good/better" or "worse/bad" than its counterparts, when dialects
and languages are assessed "on purely linguistic grounds, all
languages — and all dialects — have equal merit"

Causes:

Different languages and dialects are accorded prestige based

upon factors which include "rich literary heritage, high degree of
language modernization, considerable international standing, or
the prestige of its speakers". Having many of these attributes
will likely mean the language is viewed as being of high
prestige; likewise, a language or dialect with few or none of
these attributes will be considered to be of low prestige. The
phenomenon is not limited to English-speaking populations.
In Western Europe, multiple languages were considered to be of
high prestige at some time or another, including "Italian as

43
the Mediterranean lingua franca and as the language of
the Renaissance; and the 17th-18th century French of the court
culture".

There is a strong correlation between the prestige of a group of

people and the prestige accorded to the language they speak, as
"language is intertwined with culture". Linguist Laurie Bauer's
description of Latin's prestige exemplifies this phenomenon:

“ The prestige accorded to the churchmen, lawyers and

scholars who used Latin was transferred to the language
itself. Latin was held to be noble and beautiful, not just the
thoughts expressed in it or the people who used it. What is
called 'beauty' in a language is more accurately seen as a
reflection of the prestige of its speakers". ”

Walt Wolfram, a professor of linguistics at North Carolina State

University, notes that he "can't think of any situations in the
United States where low-prestige groups have high-prestige
language systems"

Effects on attitudes towards language

Language or dialect?

Prestige influences whether a language variety is considered

a language or a dialect. In discussing definitions of
language, Dell Hymes wrote that "sometimes two communities

44
are said to have the same, or different, languages on the grounds
of mutual intelligibility, or lack thereof", but alone, this
definition is often insufficient. Different language varieties in an
area exist along a dialect continuum, and
moving geographically often means a change in the local
variety. This continuum means that despite the fact thatstandard
German and standard Dutch are not mutually intelligible, the
speech of people living near the border between Germany and
the Netherlands will more closely resemble that of their
neighbors across the border than the standard languages of their
respective home countries. Even so, speakers near the border
would describe themselves as speaking a variety of their
respective standard languages, and the evolution of these
dialects tends to mirror that of the standard languages as
well. That they are classified as such reflects the fact that
"language differences are not only marks of differential group
membership, but also powerful triggers of group attitudes". Such
fuzziness has resulted in the aphorism "A language is a dialect
with an army and a navy." That is, speakers of some language
variety with political and social power are viewed as having a
distinct language, while "'dialect' is [...] a term that suggests
lower-class or rural speech". A canonical example of this is
the Scandinavian languages, including Danish,Swedish,
and Norwegian, where language differences "constitute barriers
to but do not wholly block communication", but are considered

45
distinct languages because they are spoken in
different countries.

Class and prestige

While some differences between dialects are regional in nature,
there are also social causes for differences in dialects. Very
often, the "public prestige dialect of the elite in a stratified
community differs from the dialect(s) of the non-elite strata
(working class and other)". In fact, in an article which in part
tried to motivate the study of sociolinguistics, Raven
McDavid wrote that "the importance of language as a mirror of
culture can be demonstrated by dialect differences in American
English". Thus the relation between the way speakers use a
language and their social status is a long recognized tool in
sociolinguistics.

Dialect differentiation and social stratification in a North

Indian village:

One of the earliest studies of the relationship between social

differences and dialect differences was done by John Gumperz,
who studied the speech patterns in Khalapur, a small, highly
stratified village in India. In all, the village has 31 castes,
ranging from Brahmins and Rajputs at the top,
to Chamars and Bhangis at the bottom, and 90% of the overall
population was Hindu, with the remaining

46
10% Muslim. Gumperz observed that the different castes were
distinguished both phonologically and lexically, with each caste
having a vocabulary specific to their subculture.[20] Remarkably,
the speech differences between Hindus and Muslims "are of the
same order as those between individual touchable castes and
certainly much less important than the variation between
touchables and untouchables". Gumperz also observed that the
lower prestige groups sought to imitate the higher prestige
speech patterns and that over time, it had caused the evolution of
the prestige away from the regional standard, as higher prestige
groups sought to differentiate themselves from lower prestige
groups. Gumperz concluded that in determining speech patterns
in this community, "the determining factor seems to be informal
friendship contacts" rather than work contacts.

Social stratification of New York City

One notable example of the relationship between dialect and

social stratification in English is William Labov's 1966 study of
the variable pronunciation of r in New York City. Labov went
to three New York City department stores that catered to three
clearly delineated socioeconomic groups—
Saks (high), Macy's (middle), and S. Klein (low)—and studied
how their employees pronounced the phrase "fourth floor". His
results demonstrated that the employees at Saks
pronounced r most often, Macy's employees pronounced r less
often, and at S. Klein, seventy-nine percent of the respondents
47
said no r at all. Another trend Labov noticed was that at all three
of the stores, but Macy's in particular, when prompted to say
"fourth floor" a second time, employees were much more likely
to pronounce the r.

Labov attributed his findings to the perceived prestige of each

dialect. He noted that New York City's "dropped 'r' has its
origins in posh British speech", but after World War II, "with
the loss of Britain's imperial status 'r'-less British speech ceased
to be regarded as 'prestige speech'". In 1966, when Labov
performed his study, pronouncing words like
car and guard with r was then considered an element of prestige
speech. This resulted in middle-class employees, once made
conscious of having to pronounce "fourth floor", altering their
pronunciation in order to match that of the high prestige dialect.
The prestige given to r was also evident in
the hypercorrection observed in lower-class speech. Knowing
that r-pronunciation was a prestigious trait, many of the lower-
class speakers in another Labov study—in which speakers were
asked to read from word lists—added –r to words that did not
have an r at all. The difference between this study and the
"fourth floor" study was the fact that speakers were closely
monitoring their speech, not speaking spontaneously, and were
thus careful to add r in an attempt to mimic a higher social class.

48
6. The Basic Variation Theorists – Labov, Trudgill,
Cheshire, Millroy & Bernstein

1. William Labov – 1966 New York Study – individual

speech patterns are “part of a highly systematic structure of
social and stylistic stratification”

– Labov studied how often the final or preconsonantal (r)

was sounded in words like guard, bare and beer. Use of this
variable has considerable prestige in New York City.

– The speech of sales assistants in three Manhattan stores,

drawn from the top (Saks), middle (Macy’s) and bottom
(Klein’s) of the price and fashion scale. Each unwitting
informant was approached with a factual enquiry designed to
elicit the answer – “Fourth floor” – which may or may not
contain the variable final or preconsonantal (r). A pretence not
to have heard it obtained a repeat performance in careful,
emphatic style.

– Frequency of use of the prestige variable final or

preconsonantal “r” varied with level of formality and social
class – the sales assistants from Saks used it most, those from
Klein’s used it least and those from Macy’s showed the greatest
upward shift when they were asked to repeat.

– Of the four classes tested – Lower Class, Working Class,

Lower Middle Class & Upper Middle Class – it was the lower
middle class that were most susceptible to the overt prestige of

49
the preconsonantal “r” – as they differed the most between the
incidence in casual speech style (4%) to most careful speech
style (77%).

– That the Upper Middle Class cohort differed least between

the casual and careful speech styles – (19% in casual and 60% in
careful), showed that they were least susceptible to the prestige
form, changing the way they spoke less than any other social
class when thinking carefully about how they spoke.

– All of the 3 lower classes: Lower Class, Working Class &

Lower Middle Class are more aware of the prestige of the
preconsonantal “r” , and when they think about it are more
likely to change the way they speak to reflect “how they should
sound” or how “post people sound”

2. William Labov –Martha’s Vineyard Study – individual

speech patterns are “part of a highly systematic structure of
social and stylistic stratification”
– Martha’s Vineyard is an island lying about 3 miles off
New England on the East Coast of the United States of America,
with a permanent population of about 6000. However over
40,000 visitors, known somewhat disparagingly as the ‘summer
people’, flood in every summer.

– In his study, Labov focused on realisations of the

diphthongs [aw] and [ay] (as in mouse and mice). He
interviewed a number of speakers drawn from different ages and

50
ethnic groups on the island, and noted that among the younger
(31-45 years) speakers a movement seemed to be taking place
away from the pronunciations associated with the standard New
England norms, and towards a pronunciation associated with
conservative and characteristically Vineyard speakers – the
Chilmark fishermen.

– The heaviest users of this type of pronunciation were

young men who actively sought to identify themselves as
Vineyarders, rejected the values of the mainland, and resented
the encroachment of wealthy summer visitors on the traditional
island way of life. Thus, these speakers seem to be exploiting
the resources of the non-standard accent. The pattern emerged
despite extensive exposure of speakers to the educational
system; some college educated boys from Martha’s Vineyard
were extremely heavy users of the vernacular vowels.

– A small group of fishermen began to exaggerate a

tendency already existing in their speech. They did this
seemingly subconsciously, in order to establish themselves as an
independent social group with superior status to the despised
summer visitors. A number of other islanders regarded this
group as one which epitomised old virtues and desirable values,
and subconsciously imitated the way its members talked. For
these people, the new pronunciation was an innovation. As more
and more people came to speak in the same way, the innovation
gradually became the norm for those living on the island.

51
– Rather than the increased exposure to the standard New-
England accent leading to dialect / accent levelling, the
islanders exaggerated the pronunciation of vernacular vowels
leading to a more pronounced difference and thus a greater level
of variation
– This tendency noted by Labov – how covert
prestige pronunciations can take hold and further entrench
themselves – can be noted with many current variants in
England. For example, the scouse accent is becoming more
entrenched. Also, as young people are seeking to define
themselves more and more as a group, outside of their gender or
class types, the use of MLE can be seen to be getting more
exaggerated, which happens either consciously or
subconsciously.
3. Peter Trudgill – 1974 Norwich Study – how gender affects
dialect in each social class

– Looking at “walking”& “talking” as the standard form and

“walkin’,” “talkin’” as the non-standard form peculiar to the
local accent. Also considering at the presence or absence of the
third person –s ending, as in “he go to the shop” or “he goes to
the shop”.

– differentiated between relaxed and careful speech in order

to assess participants awareness of their own accents as well as

52
how they wished to sound – which saw the non-standard
pronunciation quickly decline

– Found that class is more of a determiner of non-standard

usage than gender, though women in all social classes are more
likely to use the overt prestige or RP form

– Men over-reported their non-standard usage – implying

that men wished to sound more non-standard, assuming that
they used more of the covert prestige forms

– Women over-reported their standard usage – implying that

women wished to sound more standard, assuming that they used
more of the overt prestige forms

– Concluded that women are more susceptible to overt

prestige than men (and men more susceptible to covert prestige)

– In the “lower middle class” and the “upper working class”

the differences between men’s and women’s usage of the
standard forms were greatest in formal speech, thereby
identifying these classes as most susceptible to the prestige of
the RP form, with women leading the way on this front.
(-ng) in Norwich by social class and sex for Formal Style (Trudgill. 1974a)
Male Female
middle middle
96 100
class
lower middle
73 97
class
upper working
19 32
class
middle working
9 19
class
lower working 0 3

53
class
4. Jenny Cheshire – 1982 Reading Study – relationship
between use of non-standard variables and adherence to peer
group norms
– Identified 11 non-standard features and measured their
frequency of use in boys and girls in a Reading playground,
differentiating between those who approved or disapproved of
minor criminal activities

“They calls me names.”

“You just has to do what the teacher says.”
“You was with me, wasn’t you?”
“It ain’t got no pedigree or nothing.”
“I never went to school today.”
“Are you the ones what hit him?”
“I come down here yesterday.”
“You ain’t no boss.”
– All children who approved of peer group criminal
activities were more likely to use non-standard forms, but boys
more so

– All children who disapproved of such activities use non-

standard forms less frequently, but the difference between the
groupings of girls was more stark

– Suggests that variation in dialect is a conscious choice,

influenced by (declared) social attitude

54
– Males are more susceptible to covert prestige, but social
attitude is more of a determining factor than gender

– A more negative attitude to the peer group’s criminal

activities can be seen as aspirational, and therefore those
children would be less susceptible to the covert prestige forms
(and more susceptible to the overt prestige of standard forms)

5. Milroy’s Belfast Study -Members of a speech community

are connected to each other in social networks which may be
relatively ‘closed’ or ‘open’.
– A person whose personal contacts all know each other
belong to a closed network. An individual whose contacts tend
not to know each other belong to an open network. Closed
networks are said to be of high density: open networks are said
to be of low density. Moreover, the links between people may
be of different kinds: people can relate to each other as relatives,
as neighbours, as workmates, as friends. Where individuals are
linked in several ways, e.g. by job, family and leisure activities,
then the network ties are said to be multiplex.
– Relatively dense networks, it is claimed, function as norm-
enforcement mechanisms. In the case of language, this means
that a closely-knit group will have the capacity to enforce
linguistic norms.

– She investigated the correlation between the integration of

individuals in the community and the way those individuals
speak. To do this she gave each individual she studied a
55
Network Strength Score based on the person’s knowledge of
other people in the community, the workplace and at leisure
activities to give a score of 1 to 5, where 5 is the highest
Network Strength Score. Then she measured each person’s use
of several linguistic variables, including, for example, (th) as in
mother and (a) as in hat, which had both standard and non-
standard forms. What she found was that a high Network
Strength Score was correlated with the use of vernacular or non-
standard forms.

– In most cases this meant that men whose speech revealed

high usage of vernacular or non-standard forms were also found
to belong to tight-knit social networks. Conversely, vernacular
or non-standard forms are less evident in women’s speech
because the women belong to less dense social networks.

– However, for some variables, the pattern of men using

non-standard and women using standard forms was reversed. In
the Hammer and the Clonard, for example, more women than
expected tended to use the non-standard form of (a) as in hat.
Milroy’s explanation for this finding is based on the social
pressures operating in the communities. The Hammer and the
Clonard both had unemployment rates of around 35 per cent,
which clearly affected social relationships. Men from these areas
were forced to look for work outside the community, and also
shared more in domestic tasks (with consequent blurring of sex
roles). The women in these areas went out to work and, in the

56
case of the young Clonard women, all worked together. This
meant that the young Clonard women belonged to a dense and
multiplex network; they lived, worked and amused themselves
together.

– The tight-knit network to which the young Clonard women

belong clearly exerts pressure on its members, who
are linguistically homogeneous.
– Over and above gender differences, or class differences,
Milroy discovered that it was how closely or loosely knit a
social group a person belonged to that determined their use of
the local dialect forms. The covert prestige of such forms works
in a more complicated way that previously thought.
– The idea of closed and open networks can be usefully
applied to any case of language variation – e.g. the spread of
MLE. Whereas in the past working class London children might
have belonged to very closed networks, because of changes to
society such as high levels of immigration, exposure to the
media and greater sense of identity as teenagers as opposed to
class.
6. Bernstein: Language and Social Class – Restricted code
and Elaborated code – 1971

– Rather than distinguishing between Standard English and

Regional Dialect, a distinction which carries an inherent bias

57
towards the former, Bernstein wanted to look at language
variation in a different way

– Bernstein came up with the terms Restricted code and

Elaborated code in order to distinguish between what he saw as
two distinct ways of using language as opposed to the two
distinct dialects of Standard English and the Regional Dialect

– The Elaborated code has a more formally correct syntax,

having more subordinate clauses and fewer unfinished
sentences. There are also more logical connectives like “if” and
“unless”, as well as more originality and more explicit reference

– The restricted code has a looser syntax, uses more words

of simple coordination like “and” and “but”, there are more
clichés, and more implicit reference so there are a greater
number of pronouns than the elaborated code

– The codes should not be confused with social dialects

because there is nothing in a dialect to inhibit explicit statements
of individual feeling or opinion. While dialects are identified by
their formal features, and by who their speakers are, codes are
identified by the kinds of meaning they transmit and by what the
words are used to do.

– An elaborated code arises where there is a gap or

boundary between speaker and listener which can only be
crossed by explicit speech.

58
– A restricted code arises when speech is exchanged
against a background of shared experience and shared
definitions of that experience; it realises meanings that are
already shared rather than newly created, communal rather than
individual. The speech is “context dependent” because
participants rely on their background knowledge to supply
information not carried by the actual words they use.

– Whilst the elaborated code is used to convey facts and

abstract ideas, the restricted code is used to convey attitude and
feeling.

– The elaborated code is the one which, in the adult

language, would be generally associated with formal situations,
the restricted code that associated with informal situations.

– E.g. Two five-year-old children, one working-class and

one middle-class, were shown a series of three pictures, which
involved boys playing football and breaking a window. They
described the events involved as follows:

(1) Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball
and it goes through the window and the bail breaks the window
and the boys are looking at it and a man comes out and shouts at
them because they’ve broken the window so they run away and
then that lady looks out of her window and she tells the boys off.
(2) They’re playing football and he kicks it and it goes through
there it breaks the window and they’re looking at it and he

59
comes out and shouts at them because they’ve broken it so they
run away and then she looks out and she tells them off.
– In the earlier articles it was implied that middle-class
children generally use the elaborated code (although they might
sometimes use the restricted code), whereas working-class
children have only the restricted code. But Bernstein later
modified this viewpoint to say that even working-class children
might sometimes use the elaborated code; the difference
between the classes is said to lie rather in the occasions on
which they can use the codes (e.g. working-class children
certainly have difficulty in using the elaborated code in school).
Moreover, all children can understand both codes when
spoken to them.
– As well as avoiding the negative and positive stereotypes
associated with regional Dialect and Standard English, Bernstein
wanted to understand when either code would be used as well as
the advantages conferred on the speakers through using one or
other of the codes.

– In situations where you don’t know the person you are

speaking to and there is little shared knowledge, most speakers,
regardless of class or level of education, will default to a variety
of the elaborated code, as it is necessary to getting the message
across. However, where there is a lot of shared knowledge
between interlocutors who are known to each other,
the restricted code is far more efficient, eliding unnecessary

60
grammatical constructions and logical connectives as well as the
tiresome formulations of “polite conversation”.
– The question is then: when to use the elaborated code? Is
it that middle class children are better judges of when to use
which code, or that they are trained to automatically default to
the elaborated code? Or is it the case that Working Class
children aren’t fully comfortable with or knowledgeable of the
elaborated code?

– This way of looking at the matter can make us look at

the John Honey Standard English Debate in a new light. If its
not a question of teaching one dialect over any other (Standard
English over the local dialect), then who could disagree with the
need to teach all children the code they need for
professional/working life?
– Might there be another issue with the elaborated code in
the minds of the lower class children? Might this way of
speaking, be seen as somehow “other” and not of their place or
lives? Just as Standard English and Received Pronunciation
might have negative connotations, and the local dialect have
covert prestige, might not the restricted code be seen as
distinctive of their group identity?

– However, if both codes have a neutral value but are used

without prejudice in different contexts by all levels of society
and all ages, how can we account for society’s use of how
people speak to label them and subjugate them?

61
– Is there some kind of ‘cognitive deficit’ in an inability to
use the elaborated code, and thereby to think logically? Labov
(1969) has argued that young blacks in the United States,
although using language which certainly seems an example of
the restricted code, nevertheless display a clear ability to argue
logically. One example quoted by Labov is a boy talking about
what happens after death:
You know, like some people say if you’re good an’ shit, your
spirit goin’ t’heaven…’n’ if you bad, your spirit goin’ to hell.
Well, bullshit! Your spirit goin’ to hell anyway, good or bad.
(Why?) Why! I’ll tell you why. ‘Cause, you see, doesn’t
nobody really know that it’s a God, y’know, ’cause I mean I
have seen black gods, pink gods, white gods, all color gods,
and don’t nobody know it’s really a God. An’ when they be
sayin’ if you good, you goin’ t’heaven, tha’s bullshit, ’cause
you ain’t goin’ to no heaven, ’cause it ain’t no heaven for you
to go to.
The speaker is here setting out ‘a complex set of interdependent
propositions’; ‘he can sum up a complex argument in a few
words, and the full force of his opinions comes through without
qualification or reservation’.

– In addition Labov notes the common faults of so-called

middle-class speech: ‘Our work in the speech community makes
it painfully obvious that in many ways working-class speakers
are more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many

62
middle-class speakers who temporize, qualify, and lose their
argument in a mass of irrelevant detail.’ There is no clear
relationship between language and logical thought.

– Cazden (1970) showed that lower class 10 year olds

needed much more prompting to give sufficient information for
the interviewer to identify a picture from among a selection. The
lack of explicit speech, giving clear information, seemed to
support Bernstein’s theory.

– Bernstein says that lower working class children do not

use elaborated speech at all, whereas others prefer to say that
differences lie in the degree to which elaborated language is
used. Also it is unclear that the ability to use elaborated speech
in one type of situation guarantees its successful usage in other
types.

63
7. Terminology:
 An accent is the way that particular person or group of
people sound. It’s the way somebody pronounces words, the
musicality of their speech, etc.
accent 1) Strictly speaking this refers to the pronunciation of
a dialect, i.e. it is a reference to the collection of phonetic
features which allow a speaker to be identified regionally or
socially. It is frequently used to indicate that a given speaker
does not speak the standard form of a language. The term is
used in German to refer to grammatical features as well. 2)
The stress placed on a syllable of a word or the type of stress
used by a language (pressure or pitch).

 code switching Moving from one language to another

within a single sentence or phrase. This is a phenomenon
found among bilinguals who feel it is appropriate to
change languages (or dialects in some cases) — perhaps to
say something which can only be said in the language
switched to. Code-switching is governed by fairly strict
rules concerning the points in a sentence at which one can
change over.
 creole A term used to describe a pidgin after it has become
the mother tongue of a certain population. This
development usually implies that the pidgin has become
more complex grammatically and has increased its

64
 vocabulary in order to deal with the entire set of situations
in which a native language is used. A well-known example
is Tok Pisin, a creole spoken in Papua New Guinea and
which has official status there.
 A dialect describes both a person’s accent and the
grammatical features of the way that person talks. A
traditional term referring to a variety of a language spoken in
a certain place. There are urban and rural dialects. The
boundaries between dialects are always gradual. The
term dialect is used to denote a geographically distinct
variety of a language. Two major points in this connection
should be noted: 1) 'dialect' does not refer to the social or
temporal aspect of language and 2) the term 'dialect' makes
no reference to the standard variety of a language. In
connection with the latter point it is important to stress that
the standard of a language is nothing more than a dialect
which achieved special political and social status at some
stage in the past and which has been extensively codified
orthographically.
 Diglossia Classically defined as a situation where two
closely related languages are used in a speech community.
One for High (H) functions (e.g., church, newspapers) and
one for Low (L) functions (e.g., in the home, or market). The
situation is supposed to be relatively stable and the
languages/varieties remain distinct (cf. creole outcomes of

65
 language contact). Now often extended to refer to any two
languages (even typologically unrelated ones) that have this
kind of social and functional distribution.
 ethnography of communication The study of cultural
differences in acts of communication. This is a
comprehensive term which goes beyond simple differences in
language to cover additional aspects such as formulaic use of
language (e.g. in greeting or parting rituals), the use of
distance between partners in a conversation) and kinesics (the
study of body movements used in communication).

 honorific A specific use of language to express deference

in a social context. This can encompass special pronominal
forms (T- and V-forms in continental European languages)
and fixed titular phrases (Mr., Mrs., Ms., etc. in English)
or special adjectives (honourable, reverend, esquire).

 hypercorrection A kind of linguistic situation in which a

speaker overgeneralises a phenomenon which he/she
does not have in his/her native variety. For example if a
speaker from northern England pronounces butcher /butʃə/
with the vowel in but, i.e. as /bʌtʃə/, then this is almost
certainly hypercorrection as he/she does not have the but-
sound in his/her own dialect and, in an effort to speak
'correct' English, overdoes it. The same applies to native
speakers of Rhenish German when they

66
 pronounce Kirschen like Kirchen when they are talking to
speakers of High German.

 idiolect The language of an individual as opposed to that

of a group.

 interference The transfer of certain phenomena from one

language to another where they are not considered
grammatical. This may happen on an individual level
(during second language learning, for example) or
collectively in which case it often leads to language
change.

 langue A term used by Saussure to refer to the collective

knowledge of a community of the language spoken by its
members.

 linguistic stigma The condemnation of certain forms in a

language by the majority of a social group.

 linguistic taboo Forbidding the use of certain forms.

Taboo words change from generation to generation, e.g.
the means of referring to sex and sexual practices, as older
taboo words lose their strength and become part of general
vocabulary.

67
 parole A term deriving from Ferdinand de Saussure and
which refers to language as it is spoken, contrast this
with langue.

 pidgin A language which arises from the need to

communicate between two communities. Historically, and
indeed in almost all cases, one of the communities is
socially superior to the other. The language of the former
provides the base on which the latter then creates the
pidgin. A pidgin which has become the mother language
of a later generation is termed a creole. Pidgins are of
special interest to the linguist as they are languages which
have been created from scratch and because they are not
subject to the normalising influence of a standard.
Classically pidgins arose during trade between European
countries and those outside of Europe. The lexicon of a
pidgin is usually taken from the lexifier language (the
European one in question) and its grammar may derive
from native input (such as the languages of West Africa
during the slave trade with the Caribbean and America) or
may take elements from the lexifier language or may
'invent' its own structures going on an innate blueprint
which many linguists assume speakers have from birth.
The further development of a pidgin is a creole, although
this stage does not have to be reached if there is no
necessity to develop a native language.
68
 register A style level in a language. When we speak we
automatically locate ourselves on a specific stylistic level.
This can vary depending on the situation in which we find
ourselves. For example when talking to the postman one
would most likely use a different register than when one is
holding a public address.

 sociolect A variety of a language which is typical of a

certain class. Sociolects are most common in urban areas.
In history, sociolects may play a role, e.g. in the formation
of the English standard, Received Pronunciation, which
derives from a city dialect (that of London in the late
Middle Ages) but which has long since become a sociolect
(Cockney being the dialect of London nowadays).

 sociolinguistics The study of the use of language in

society. Although some writers on language had
recognised the importance of social factors in linguistic
behaviour it was not until the 1960's with the seminal work
of Labov that the attention of large numbers of linguists
was focused on language use in a social context. In
particular the successful explanation of many instances of
language change helped to establish sociolinguistics as an
independent sub-discipline in linguistics and led to a great
impetus for research in this area.

69
 speech community Any identifiable and delimitable
group of speakers who use a more or less unified type of
language.

 standard A variety of a language which by virtue of

historical accident has become the leading form of the
language in a certain country. As a result of this, the
standard may be expanded due to the increase in function
which it experiences due to its position in society. There is
nothing inherently superior about a standard although
nearly all speakers of a community accept that it has
highest prestige.

 variety A term used to refer to any variant of a language

which can be sufficiently delimited from another variant.
The grounds for such differentiation may be social,
historical, spatial or a combination of these. The necessity
for a neutral term such as variety arose from the loaded use
of the term dialect: this was not only used in the sense
defined above, but also with the implication that the
linguistically most interesting varieties of a language are
those spoken by the older rural population. This view is
understandable given the origin of dialectology in the 19th
century, that is in the heydey of historical linguistics.
Nowadays, sociolinguistic attitudes are prevalent and the
need for a term which can include the linguistic

70
 investigation of urban populations from a social point of
view became evident.

 vernacular The indigenous language or dialect of a

community. This is an English term which refers to purely
spoken forms of a language.

References
Coulmas, F. (ed.) (1997). The Handbook of Sociolinguistics,
Oxford: Blackwell.
Coupland, N. and Jaworski, A. (eds) (1997). Sociolinguistics: A
Reader and Coursebook, Houndmills: Macmillan Press.
Coupland, N. and Jaworski, A. (eds) (2008). Sociolinguistics:
Volumes I–VI, Abingdon: Routledge.
Coupland, N. and Jaworski, A. (eds) (2009). The New
Sociolinguistics Reader, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and
Identity in the High School, New York: Teachers’ College Press.
Eckert, P. (1997) [1989] ‘The whole woman: sex and gender
differences in variation’, in N. Coupland and A. Jaworski (eds)
Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook, Houndmills:
Macmillan Press.
Eckert, P. and Rickford, J.R. (eds) (2001) Style and

71
Sociolinguistic Variation, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Fasold, R. (1984) The Sociolinguistics of Society, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Ferguson, C.A. (1972) [1959] ‘Diglossia’, in P.P. Giglioli (ed.)
Language and Social Context, London: Penguin Books.
Hudson, R.A. (2000) Sociolinguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Social
Factors, Basil Blackwell: Oxford.
Labov, W. (2010). Principles of Linguistic Change: Cognitive
and Cultural Factors, Basil Blackwell: Oxford.
Saville-Troike, M. (1982). The Ethnography of
Communication: An Introduction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Exercises
Choose the correct answer a, b, or c:
1.sociolinguistics focuses on the society's …….. on language.
a. defect b. affect c. effect
2.How people with different social ………speak.
a. Identity b. identification c. identities
3.How their speech changes in ……….situations.
a. Different b. differ c. indifferent
4. Sociolinguistics studies social………. of language.
a. Proper b. properties c. properly
5. Sociolinguistics …….. to a considerable degree with pragmatics.
b. Differs b. overlaps c. contrasts
6. The usage of a language …… from place to place.
a. Varies b. vary c. variation
7. Language usage also varies among social ……...
a. Class c. classy c. classes
8. It is these …….. that sociolinguistics studies.
a. sociolects b. socio c. social
9. A/An ……… is the way that particular person or group of
people sound.
a. Accent b. dialect c. code switching
10.Why people from different communities or cultures can ……… what
is meant, said and done based on the different ways they use language.
b. Understand b. misunderstand c. stand
11.Different languages and dialects are accorded……..
a. Prestigious b. prestige c. rest
12. Language ……. correlates with social factors.

73
a. vary b. very c. Variation
13. The notion of communicative competence was introduced
by ……
a. Chomsky b. Dell Hymes c. Trudgill
14. …….. languages describe how standard language varieties
differ between nations.
a. pluricentric b. centric c. plural
15. For ……, language as a social and cultural phenomenon.
a. Holmes b. Downes c. Trudgill
16. Communicative competence refers to a language user's
……….knowledge.
a. lexical b. grammatical c. ungrammatical
17. Minimal pairs are two words differ in one ……
a. phoneme b. morpheme c. morph
18. Mr., Mrs., Ms are ……
a. corrections b. hypercorrections c. honorifics
19. Hymes ……. to Chomsky's linguistic competence.
a. agreed b. opposed c. shared
20. The terms Restricted code and Elaborated are introduced by
……
a. Trudgill b. Chomsky c. Bernstein
21. Langue is a term used by ……
a. Chomsky b. de Saussure c. Holmes

22. The language of an individual as opposed to that of a group

is termed as ……

a. slang b. interference c. idiolect

23. The transfer of certain phenomena from one language to

another is termed as ………

a. slang b. interference c. idiolect

24. ……. refers to language as it is spoken.

a. parole b. langue c. slang

25. ……. is a style level in a language.

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a. parole b. langue c. register

26. …….is the inability to use the elaborated code, and thereby
to think logically.

a. interference b. cognitive deficit c. register

27. Language ……. includes the description of a number of

linguistic norms in dictionaries and grammar books.

a. Codification b. simplification c. non-standardization

28. ……. consists of a lexicon of non-standard words and

phrases in a given language.

a. parole b. langue c. slang

29. Variation in dialect is a …….choice.

a. subconscious b. conscious c. non-conscious

30. The "dropped-'r'” has its origins in ……. speech.

a. American b. Scottish c. British

State the true and false statements among the following:

1.Sociolinguistics studies the connection between language and society. T
2.Sociolinguistics is historically irrelevant to linguistic anthropology. F
3.The musicality of speech is termed as dialect. F (accent)
4.Sociolinguistics pays no attention to language varieties. F
5.Language varieties only differ according to ethnicity. F
6.Sociolinguistics first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered
by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil
Bernstein in the UK. T
7.Sociolinguistics and sociology of language are fully compatible with
each other. F
8.For Chomsky, the notions of competence and performance are similar.
F
9.The pronunciation of the words spelled pen, ten and Ben is
referred to as internal linguistic variable. T

75
10.A speech community is a group of people who share a set of
norms and expectations regarding the use of language. T
11.Labov studied the pronunciation of final or pre-consonantal
(r). T
12.Labov uses 'language and society' in the broadest term. F
Trudgill
13.Applied sociolinguistics analyzes the structure of speech
communities and speech varieties. F theoretical
14.Theoretical sociolinguistics deals with the social implications
of fundamental inequalities in language use. F Applied
15.Trudgill studied the Social Stratification of English in NYC.
F Labov
16.Sub-communities refer to the notion of bounded speech
community. F
17.Chomsky undertook ethnographic exploration of
communicative competence. F Hymes.
18.Chomsky is often regarded as the founder of the study of
sociolinguistics. F Labov
19.An example of double negation is “You ain’t no boss.” T
20.The restricted code has a looser syntax, uses more words of
simple coordination like “and” and “but”. T
21.The speech is classified as “context dependent”. T
22. Milroy studied the standard and non-standard forms of the
velar nasal /ŋ/ as in ‘walking’ and ‘talking’. F Trudgill

23. Linguistic taboo means the condemnation of certain forms

in a language by the majority of a social group. F stigma

24. Linguistic stigma means forbidding the use of certain

forms. F taboo

25. Gumperz introduced the notion of language system. T

26. Trudgill focused on realizations of the diphthongs [aw] and

[ay] (as in mouse and mice). F Labov

27. The standard variety of a language is generally codified, i.e.

written down. T

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28. Prestige influences whether a language variety is considered
a language or a dialect. T

29. Sociolinguistic prestige is especially visible in situations

where two or more distinct languages are in use. T

30. Prestige languages/dialects are often tied closely to

a standardized language/dialect. T

Write short notes on:

Code switching

Dialect

Accent

Creole

Diglossia
Pidgin

Variety

Vernacular
Standard language
Sociolect
Ethnography of communication

77