CHAPTER 5 REGIONAL VARIATION, THE LINGUSITIC
D. Social Variation
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dimensional. As we have seen, at any particular moment, an individual locates himself or herself in social space according to the factors that are relevant to him or her at that moment. While he or she may indeed have certain feelings about being a member of the lower middle class, at any moment it might be more important to be female, or to be a member of a particular church or ethnic group, or to be an in-patient in a hospital, or to be a sister-in-law. That is, creating an identity, role-playing, networking, etc. may be far more important than a certain social-class membership. This is the reason why such concepts as ‘social network’ and ‘communities of practice’ are attractive to some investigators. Sometimes, too, experience tells the investigator that social class is not a factor in a particular situation and that something else is more important. For example, Rickford’s work (1986) on language variation in a non-American, East Indian sugar-estate community in Cane Walk, Guyana showed him that using a social-class based model of the community would be inappropriate. What was needed was a conflict model, one that recognized schisms, struggles, and clashes on certain issues. It was a somewhat similar perspective that Mendoza-Denton (2008) brought to her work among rival Latina groups in a California school where the main issue was Norteña-Sureña rivalry.
When attempting to place individuals within a social system, sociologists employ a variety of scales. People may be classified as major professionals and executives of large businesses, lesser professionals and executives of medium-sized businesses, semi-professionals, technicians and owners of small businesses, skilled workers, semi-skilled workers, and unskilled workers, according to an occupational scale. Graduate or professional education; college or university degree; attendance at college or university but no degree; high school graduation; some high school education;
and less than seven years of formal education are all examples of educational scale categories.
Investigators may use any or all the above criteria (and others) and assign different weights to them when classifying individuals. As a result, the resulting social-class designation assigned to any individual may differ from study to study. We can also see how social class is a sociological construct;
people are unlikely to classify themselves as members of groups defined by such criteria. According to Wolfram and Fasold (1974, p. 44), "there are other objective approaches [to establishing social groupings] that are not solely
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dependent on socio-economic ranking." An investigator may investigate church membership, leisure activities, or community organizations.' They admit that such alternative approaches are not easy to devise, but argue that the resulting classification is likely to be more directly related to social class than simple economic factor measurement. We should note that there is a current emphasis on "lifestyle" in classifying people, so patterns of consumption of goods and appearance are obviously important for several people in arriving at social classification.
Social variation in language might be considered from the perspective of differences between speakers in a variety of dimensions, including (1) age, (2) social class and network, and (3) race or ethnicity.
1. Age
Age grading refers to characteristics associated with specific age groups as a developmental or social stage, such as two-word utterances of children around 18 months of age ("Mommy sock," "Drink soup” - Moskowitz, 1985, p. 55), or in-group slang of teenagers (rad, "cool” gnarly, "gross” - T. Labov, 1992, p. 350). Speakers typically lose the characteristics associated with a specific stage as they mature, and they begin to speak more like members of the age group above them. In the case of progress, however, age differences reflect an actual shift in community norms.
The type of age-related language variation that teachers are most likely to notice in school is the use of slang, which, as previously stated, is a variety of age grading. Teachers interested in deciphering their adolescent or teenage students' slang may consult general dictionaries of slang such as Partridge (1984), but because slang is often so ephemeral — its value as an in-group marker depends on its inaccessibility to older people and outsiders — dictionaries of this type run the risk of being out of date even before they are printed.
2. Social class and network
Variation in language based on social class, like variation based on age or ethnicity, is a subcategory of variation based on user (differences between groups of speakers in various dimensions), as opposed to variation based on use in different styles or registers. The most attention has been paid to social
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class variation in language, which has produced some of the most striking regularities in quantitative sociolinguistics.
The most well-known work in this field is Labov's (1966) study of variation in New York City English. In this study, Labov introduced the concept of a sociolinguistic variable, a linguistic feature that varies in form and has social significance, and established the importance of following an accountability principle when studying such variables — reporting how frequently they occurred in recorded samples as a proportion of all cases in which they could have occurred. For this study, Labov drew on a random sample of New Yorkers from the Lower East Side, stratified based on occupation, education, and income into the four primary socioeconomic classes.
3. Race and ethnicity
Some of these racial and ethnic differences in language use reflect the effects of bilingualism in the children's homes and/or communities — the influence on the child's English of another language learned natively by them or their parents. For example, the fact that voiced [z] is replaced by voiceless [s] in some varieties of Mexican-American English (so that speakers say "soo"
for "zoo") may be attributed to transfer or interference from Spanish (Valdes, 1988, p.130), which does not have voiced [z] in word-initial or word-final position.
This type of foreign language influence is more likely the more recently one's family or ethnic group immigrated - for example, children of Vietnamese immigrants to the United States in the early 1980s are more likely to show such influences than grandchildren of German immigrants to the United States in the 1950s. However, ethnic varieties of English are not simply the result of passive inheritance from a parental or ancestral language. On the contrary, ethnic varieties are frequently actively maintained or developed to express the users' distinct ethnic identity (LePage &c Tabouret-Keller, 1985).