A note about methodology
Map 6.1 Map of England showing distance between London and other cities
relatively short time, and can provide interesting clues about what is worth studying in more detail. But it has obvious limitations. Though patterns of gender and age and sometimes ethnic variation can be detected using this approach, since we can usually guess these features when we meet someone, it is harder to be sure about the social background of speakers when no social information is collected from them. And, of course, the data is limited in quantity and style. A sociolinguistic interview which attempts to elicit a range of styles as well as collect background information from the interviewee is thus much more useful. This is by far the most widespread method of collecting social dialect data. But of course it is much more time- consuming and thus expensive.
Conclusion
The way you speak is usually a good indicator of your social background. And there are many speech features which can be used as clues. Sociolinguists have found that almost any linguistic feature in a community which shows variation will differ in frequency from one social group to another in a patterned and predictable way. Some features are stable and their patterns of use seem to have correlated with membership of particular social groups in a predictable way for many years. Variation in pronunciation of the suffi x -ing and [h]-dropping are examples of features which are usually stable. Grammatical features, such as multiple negation and tense markers, are often stable too. This means they are good ones to include in any study of an English-speaking community. They are reliable indicators of sociolinguistic patterning in a community.
Social dialect surveys have demonstrated that stable variables tend to divide English-speaking communities sharply between the middle class and lower or working classes. So patterns of [h]-dropping and [ih] vs [in] pronunciation clearly divide the middle-class groups from the lower-class groups in Norwich. Grammatical variables do the same, as fi gure 6.5 on p. 148 illustrated. There is a sharp rise in the number of vernacular forms between the middle-class groups and the lower-class groups both in Detroit and in Norwich, and the same pattern has been observed in many other communities. As mentioned above, this pattern has been labelled sharp stratifi cation.
Not all variation is stable over time, however. In fact, variation is often used as an indicator of language change in progress. New linguistic forms don’t sweep through a community over- night. They spread gradually from person to person and from group to group and they often stratify the population very delicately or fi nely. Unstable variation is thus associated with fi ne stratifi cation and is a clue to linguistic changes in progress in the community, as we will see in chapter 9 . I have focused largely on pronunciation and grammar in this chapter, but social dialectologists are increasingly paying attention to pragmatic features too. The way people use tag questions ( isn’t she , didn’t they ), for example, or pragmatic particles such as you know , may also index their social group.
In exploring the relationship between language and society, this chapter has been con- cerned almost exclusively with the dimension of social status or class. The evidence discussed indicates that the social class someone belongs to is generally signalled by their speech patterns.
Many people, however, are not very conscious of belonging to a particular social class. They are much more aware of other factors about the people they meet regularly than their social class membership. A person’s gender and age are probably the fi rst things we notice about them.
The next chapter explores ways in which women and men speak differently, and describes speech differences associated with age.
Answers to exercises in chapter 6
Answer to exercise 2
Using the system for representing sounds in Appendix 1, your answer for batter might include:
■ [bata] the pronunciation considered standard in Britain ■ [batar] a pronunciation considered standard in North America ■ [baca] a Cockney pronunciation
■ [bacar] and [badar] pronunciations heard in the West Country of England
There are many other possible pronunciations, including one common in Liverpool which sounds a little like [batsa] with affrication after the [t], and another which occurs in New Zealand English which sounds like [beta] to British ears.
Answers to exercise 3
(a) ‘snowfl ake’ (Somerset)
(b) ‘time for a snack’ (Norfolk and elsewhere too)
(c) ‘infuse or brew the tea’ (Cumberland, Durham, Northumberland, Yorkshire, Scotland)
(d) ‘the place was all untidy, disordered’ (Lincolnshire)
(e) ‘icicles’ (Somerset)
(f ) ‘a great rough awkward girl’ (Essex, East Anglia and elsewhere)
(g) ‘I’m really fed up, weary’ (Yorkshire)
(h) ‘child’ (Scottish)
(i) ‘newt’ (south-east)
(j) a piggy is a ‘hot water bottle’ (Scotland, Northumberland) Answers to exercise 5
(a) Accents are distinguished from each other by pronunciation alone. Different dialects are generally distinguishable by their pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.
(b) Regional dialects involve features of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar which differ according to the geographical area the speakers come from. Social dialects are dis- tinguished by features of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar according to the social group of the speakers. Social group is usually evaluated on the basis of a range of features, such as education, occupation, residential area and income level. So people who come from different social groups speak different social dialects if they use different words, pro- nuncia tions, and grammatical features. Examples of these are discussed in the next section.
Answers to exercise 8
(a) Example of points you might have made:
■ the pattern of vernacular usage is consistent for both variables in all 3 places
■ negative concord is slightly more frequent than non-standard was in 2 of the 3 places ■ vernacular was is particularly distinctive of Hull speech, where it reaches almost
100 per cent or categorical status
■ the further north you go the higher the percentage of vernacular forms
■ this table suggests that regional variation intersects with class variation since, as the section preceding this exercise indicates, these vernacular forms typically stratify urban populations socially.
(b) Hull would be the equivalent of the lowest social class because the percentages of vernacular forms are highest in Hull and lower social groups tend to use more vernacular forms.
■ Concepts introduced Accent
Regional dialect Isogloss
Dialect chain Social dialect Vernacular
Sociolinguistic patterns Methodology
Sharp and fi ne stratifi cation
■ References
The following sources provided material for this chapter:
Bayard (1987), Bayard et al. (2001) for New Zealand data Becker (2009) on New York City and non-rhoticity Bright (1966) on Indian languages
Bright and Ramanujan (1964) on Indian languages Chambers and Trudgill (2004)
Cheshire, Kerswill and Williams (2005) is the source of fi gure 6.7 Eisikovits (1989a) on have deletion
Feagin (1979) for data on Anniston and West Virginia Finegan and Besnier (1989: 383) for defi nition of a language Gordon and Deverson (1985, 1989)
Guy (1988: 37) on ‘social class’
Kerswill (2001) on dialect levelling and Estuary English Labov (1966, 1972a, 1972b), especially data on New York City Lee (1989) on Brisbane adolescents’ speech
McCallum (1978) on New Zealand past tense usage Mitford and Ross (1980) and Wales (1994) on ‘U’ speech
Orton, Sanderson and Widdowson (1998) on British English dialects Petyt (1985) for West Yorkshire dialect data
Pragji (1980) on [h] dropping
Romaine (1978, 1984) on Edinburgh speech Sankoff and Cedergren (1971) on Montreal French Shuy, Wolfram and Riley (1967) for Detroit data
Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie (2007) on Glasgow speech Trudgill (1974, 1983), especially data on Norwich
Wolfram and Fasold (1974) for Detroit data
■ Quotations
Example 10 is from Mitford (1949: 29)
Example 15 is from Gordon and Deverson (1989: 35)
■ Useful additional reading
Chambers and Trudgill (2004)
Coupland and Jaworski (2009) Part 1: Language Variation Hughes and Trudgill (2005)
Mesthrie et al. (2009) Chs 3 and 4 Milroy and Gordon (2003) Tagliamonte (2006) Trudgill (2000), Ch. 2
Wardhaugh (2010), Chs 2 and 7 Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2006)
■ Notes
1. Here and elsewhere I have combined data from groups 3 (upper working class) and 4 (middle working class) in Norwich and West Yorkshire for ease of comparison with communities which were analysed into only four social groups.
2. ‘Post-vocalic’ is the term widely used for the [r] in words like car and card which is not pronounced in many varieties of English, and I use this term throughout the book. Note, however, that strictly speaking one should refer to non-pre-vocalic (r) in such contexts, since [r] is always pronounced between vowels in words such as wary and carry .
D
o women and men speak differently? Do children speak differently from adults? The answer to both these questions is almost certainly ‘yes’ for all speech communities, and the reasons in both cases are mainly social and cultural.The linguistic forms used by women and men contrast – to different degrees – in all speech communities. There are other ways too in which the linguistic behaviour of women and men differs. It is claimed women are more linguistically polite than men, for instance, and that women and men emphasise different speech functions. These claims will be explored in later chapters. In the fi rst section of this chapter, the focus will be on evidence that women and men from the same speech community may use different linguistic forms.
First a brief comment on the meaning of the terms sex and gender in sociolinguistics. I have used the term gender rather than sex because sex has come to refer to categories distinguished by biological characteristics, while gender is more appropriate for distinguishing people on the basis of their socio-cultural behaviour, including speech. The discussion of gender in this chapter focuses largely on contrasts between empirically observed features of women’s and men’s speech. The concept of gender allows, however, for describing masculine and feminine behaviours in terms of scales or continua rather than absolute categories. So we can also think of the features associated with women and men’s speech as linguistic resources for constructing ourselves as relatively feminine or relatively masculine. This is something which is discussed further in chapter 12 .
Gender-exclusive speech differences: highly structured communities
Gender and age
7 7
Example 1
Tayana is a young Amazonian Indian woman from the north-west Amazon Basin. She lives with her husband and children and a number of other families in a longhouse beside the river. The language of her longhouse is Tuyuka, which is the language of all the men in this tribe, and the language she uses to talk to her children. She comes from a different tribe and her fi rst language is Desano. She uses Desano to her husband, and he replies in Tuyuka.
Women and men do not speak in exactly the same way as each other in any community. The Amazon Indians provide an extreme example. As described in chapter 4 , in any longhouse the language used by a child’s mother is different from her father’s language, because men must marry outside their own tribe, and each tribe is distinguished by a different language. In this community, women and men speak different languages.
Less dramatically, there are communities where the language is shared by women and men, but particular linguistic features occur only in the women’s speech or only in the men’s speech.
These features are usually small differences in pronunciation or word-shape (morphology). In Montana, for instance, there are pronunciation differences in the Gros Ventre American Indian tribe. Where the women say [kjajtsa] for ‘bread’ the men say [dfajtsa]. In this community, if a person uses the ‘wrong’ form for their gender, the older members of the community may consider them bisexual. In Bengali, a language of India, the women use an initial [l] where the men use an initial [n] in some words.
Word-shapes in other languages contrast because women and men use different affi xes. In Yana, a (now extinct) North American Indian language, and Chiquitano, a South American Indian language, some of the words used between men are longer than the equivalent words used by women and to women, because the men’s forms sometimes add a suffi x, as illustrated in example 2 .