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Language and Social Class
Language and Social Class Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, Oxford, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract Social class has occupied a central place in the study of language variation since the rise of the discipline of sociolinguistics during the latter half of the twentieth century. Sociolinguists have correlated sociolinguistic variables such as postvocalic /r/ (e.g., car) with social factors such as class, sex, style, age, etc. A major finding of urban sociolinguistic work is that differences among social class dialects are quantitative and not qualitative. Generally speaking, the use of nonstandard forms increases the less formal the style and the lower one’s social status, with men’s scores higher than women’s.
Early Studies of Language and Social Class Since the rise of the discipline of sociolinguistics during the latter half of the twentieth century, social class has occupied a central place in the study of language variation as a key factor offering important insights into social structure. Until the 1960s, most studies of variability were concerned primarily with regional variation or dialectology, following a tradition established in the nineteenth century. These studies concentrated their efforts on documenting the rural dialects which were believed would soon disappear. Only during the latter half of the twentieth century would the concern for statusbased differences in language become a primary rather than a secondary focus, when sociolinguists turned their attention to the language of cities, where an increasing proportion of the world’s population lives in modern times. The rise of urbanization is connected with an increase in social stratification reflected in linguistic variation. Research focusing on social dialects is sometimes referred to as social dialectology and occupies a central place in quantitative sociolinguistic research on urban speech varieties, beginning with William Labov’s (1966) work in New York City. Although linguists were aware before of differences in language use tied to social class, Labov was the first to introduce a systematic methodology for investigating social dialects and produced the first large-scale sociolinguistic survey of an urban community. Earlier, for instance, Alan Ross (1954) suggested that certain vocabulary differences in English could be classified as U (upper class) or non-U (lower class), e.g., serviette (non-U) versus table-napkin (U), one of the best known of all linguistic class-indicators of England at the time. Labov, however, concentrating primarily on pronunciation differences, called phonological variables, showed how idiolects (or the speech of individuals) considered in isolation might seem random, but the speech community as a whole behaved regularly. Previous investigations had concluded that the speech of New Yorkers appeared to vary in a random and unpredictable manner. Sometimes they pronounced the names Ian and Ann alike and sometimes they pronounced postvocalic /r/ (i.e., r following a vowel) in words such as car, while at other times they did not. This fluctuation was termed ‘free variation’ because there did not seem to be any explanation for it. Labov’s study and subsequent ones modeled after it, however, showed that when such free variation in the speech of and between
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 13
individuals was viewed against the background of the community as a whole, it was not free, but rather conditioned by social factors such as social class, age, sex, and style in predictable ways. Unlike previous dialectological studies, which generally relied on one person (usually an older male) as representative of a particular area, most sociolinguists choose a sample of persons with different social characteristics. Labov’s survey was based on tape-recorded interviews with 103 people who had been chosen by random sample as being representative of the various social classes, ages, ethnic groups, etc. to be found in New York City. This approach solved the problem of how any one person’s speech could be thought of as representing a large urban area. Thus, while idiolects (or the speech of individuals) considered in isolation might seem random, the speech community as a whole behaved regularly. Using these methods, one could predict that a person of a particular social class, age, sex, etc. would pronounce postvocalic /r/ a certain percent of the time in certain situations. Through the introduction of these new methods for investigating social dialects by correlating sociolinguistic variables with social factors, sociolinguists have been able to build up a comprehensive picture of social dialect differentiation in the United States and Britain in particular, and other places, where these studies have since been replicated.
Methods In order to demonstrate a regular relationship between social and linguistic factors, we have to be able to measure them in a reliable way. Of the principal social dimensions sociolinguists have been concerned with (e.g., social class, age, sex, style, and network), social class has probably been the most researched. Patterns of social class differentiation are often assumed to be fundamental and other so-called sociolinguistic patterns of variation, e.g., stylistic and gender variation, are regarded as derivative of them. Many sociolinguistic studies have followed the generally accepted sociological practice of relying on indicators of social status such as education, occupation, housing, income, etc. to group individuals into social classes, and then looked to see how certain linguistic features were used by each group. The method used in New York City to study the linguistic features was to select easily quantifiable
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items, in particular, phonological variables such as postvocalic /r/, which was either present or absent. This was one of the first features to be studied in detail by sociolinguists.
Results Phonological Variables Varieties of English can be divided into two major groups with respect to their treatment of postvocalic /r/: those that are r-pronouncing (rhotic) and those that are not r-pronouncing (nonrhotic). Today in Britain accents that have lost postvocalic /r/ as a result of linguistic change generally have more prestige than those, like Scottish English, that preserve it. In many parts of the United States the reverse is true, although this has not always been the case. Table 1 compares the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ in New York City with that of Reading, England. The results show that in New York City the lower one’s social status, as measured in terms of factors such as occupation, education, and income, the fewer postvocalic /r/’s one uses, while in Reading the reverse is true. Like many features investigated by sociolinguists, the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ shows a geographically as well as socially significant distribution. There are also internal linguistic constraints affecting the realization of postvocalic /r/. New York City speakers pronounced /r/’s in word-final position (e.g., floor) more frequently than they did in word-internal position (e.g., fourth). Just as the diffusion of linguistic features may be halted by natural geographical barriers, it may also be impeded by social class stratification. However, the boundaries between social dialects tend for the most part not to be absolute. The pattern of variation for postvocalic /r/ shows ‘fine stratification’ or continuous variation along a linguistic dimension (in this case a phonetic one) as well as an extralinguistic one (in this case social class). The indices go up or down in relation to social class, and there are no sharp breaks between groups. A major finding of urban sociolinguistic work is that differences among social dialects are quantitative and not qualitative. Sociolinguists have studied many other variables in English and other languages that show similar sociolinguistically significant distributions. Peter Trudgill (1974a) found similar differences in Norwich in an urban dialect study modeled after the New York City research. Table 2 shows the results for three of his phonological variables: (ing), (t), and (h). The numbers show the percentage of nonstandard forms used by different class groups. The variable (ing) refers to alternation between alveolar /n/ and a velar nasal /s/ in words with -ing endings such as reading, singing, etc. The lower a person’s social status, the more likely he or she is to use a higher percentage of
Table 1
Percent of postvocalic /r/s pronounced
New York City
Reading
Social class
32 20 12 0
0 28 44 49
Upper-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Lower-working class
Adapted from Romaine, S., 2000. Language in Society. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 68.
Table 2
Percent of nonstandard forms in Norwich
(ing)
(h )
(t )
Social class
31 42 87 95 100
6 14 40 59 61
41 62 89 92 94
Middle-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Middle-working class Lower-working class
Adapted from Trudgill, P., 1974b. Sociolinguistics. An Introduction. Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 48.
alveolar rather than velar nasal endings. This is often referred to popularly as ‘dropping one’s g’s’, and is a well-known marker of social status over most of the English-speaking world, including New York City, where Labov also studied it. The variable (h) refers to alternation between /h/ and lack of it in words beginning with such as heart, hand, etc. Most urban accents in England do not have initial /h/ or are variable in their usage of it. For these speakers who ‘drop their h’s’, art and heart are pronounced the same. Again, the lower a person’s social status, the more likely he or she is to drop h’s. Speakers in the north of England, Scotland, and Ireland, however, retain /h/ , as do speakers of American English. The variable (t) refers to the use of glottal stops instead of /t/, as in words such as bottle, which is sometimes stereotypically spelled as bot’le to represent the glottalized pronunciation of the medial /t/. Most speakers of English glottalize final /t/ in words such as pat, and no social significance is attached to it. In many urban dialects of British English, however, glottal stops are more widely used, e.g., in London and Glasgow. By comparing the results for the use of glottal stops in Norwich with those for (ing) and (h), some interesting conclusions can be drawn about the way language and social class are related in this English city. Looking first at frequency, even the middle class in Norwich uses glottal stops very frequently, i.e., almost 50% of the time, but this isn’t true of (h). There is much more social stigma attached to h-dropping. Phonetician Alexander Ellis (1869) regarded h-dropping as tantamount to ‘social suicide,’ and more than a hundred years later J.C. Wells (1982: p. 254) described it as the ‘single most powerful pronunciation shibboleth in England.’ There is of course no reason to assume that every instance of variation in language will correlate with social structure in the same way or to the same extent. Most sociolinguistic variables have a complicated history, and the social significance of linguistic features may vary over time. Some variables will serve to stratify the population more finely than others, and some cases of variation do not seem to correlate with any external variables, e.g., the variation between /i/ and /3/ in the first vowel of economic is probably one such instance. Phonological variables tend to show fine stratification and there is more socially significant variation in the pronunciation of English vowels than in consonants. As in the case of postvocalic /r/, what is socially significant is how frequently a person uses glottal stops in particular linguistic and social contexts. The use of glottal stops is particularly socially stigmatized in medial position, e.g., bottle, butter. Glottal stops are more likely to occur according to the hierarchy of linguistic environments in Figure 1.
Language and Social Class
Most frequent
Word final + Consonant e.g. that cat
Table 4 Detroit
Before syllabic nasal e.g. button
Social class
Detroit
Norwich
Upper-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Middle-working class Lower-working class
1 10 57 – 71
0 2 70 87 97
Word final + Vowel Before syllabic /l/ Least frequent Figure 1
e.g. that apple e.g. bottle
Percent of verbs without -s in Norwich and
Adapted from Trudgill, P., 1974b. Sociolinguistics. An Introduction. Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 44.
e.g. butter
Word medially
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Linguistic environments for glottal stops.
Although all speakers are affected by the same internal constraints in the same way, they apply at different frequency levels, depending on social class membership and other external factors. Table 3 shows the incidence of glottal stops in relation to social class in Glasgow for all environments compared with that occurring only in medial position. Class I is the highest and contains professional people, while Class III is the lowest and contains unskilled workers. The results show that glottal stops are the norm for this community (74.3%) if we look at all the environments. Even the highest social class uses glottal stops nearly half the time and the lowest class, almost all the time. However, if we look at medial position, the highest social class uses no glottal stops in this environment, while the lowest class uses 68.8%. The use of glottal stops has been noted as a feature of Glasgow speech since at least the late nineteenth century, but more recent sociolinguistic research shows that this feature is spreading from working-class urban speech, particularly that of London, and making rapid inroads into the speech of middleclass speakers in many other areas of southeastern England and Wales, and even as far as New Zealand, where it had not been heard before (Docherty et al., 2006). Hence, a feature once regarded as a vulgarism associated with the working class is becoming respectable (Wells, 1994: p. 201). Given its frequency in many areas of Britain across the social class spectrum, it would no longer be correct, strictly speaking, to classify this feature as nonstandard.
Grammatical Variables
observed in the case of h-dropping. Table 4 compares the results of a study of a grammatical variable in Detroit and Norwich. The variable concerns the use of nonstandard thirdperson singular present tense verb forms without -s, e.g., he go. Only working-class speakers use these forms with any great frequency, and this is more often the case in Norwich than in Detroit. The gap between the middle- and working-class norms is also greater in Norwich than in Detroit, reflecting perhaps greater social mobility in the American social system. There are also other varieties of British English, e.g., in parts of the north, southwest, and south Wales, where the present tense paradigm is regularized in the opposite direction and all persons of the verb take -s, i.e., I goes, you goes, he goes, etc. Another common grammatical feature of nonstandard English is so-called double or multiple negation, which involves the use of two or more negative elements where standard English requires only one. Compare nonstandard he ain’t got no money with standard English he hasn’t got any money or he has no money. This variable also has a long history going back centuries, but during the eighteenth century grammarians condemned the construction as nonstandard. The use of ain’t has a similar history. This resulted in a decline in use of both ain’t and multiple negation among the educated. In spite of correction by generations of teachers, both features have persisted in many nonstandard varieties. Table 5 shows the percent of multiple negative forms among African-American and white speakers in Detroit. There is sharp class stratification, with middle-class speakers regardless of race rarely using this feature. Overall, however, speakers of African-American English use multiple negation more frequently than whites.
Lexical and Discourse Variables
Although grammatical variables have been less frequently studied than phonological ones, they have tended to show sharp stratification; that is, they often display a large social barrier between the middle class and the working class, as
Sociolinguists have also extended the search for correlations between language and social class to encompass lexical and
Table 5
Percent of multiple negation in Detroit
Table 3 Percent of glottal stops in Glasgow in all environments compared to word medial position Class
I
IIa
IIb
III
Total
All environments Medial position
48.4 0
72.9 7.2
84.3 42.5
91.7 68.8
74.3 29.6
Adapted from Macaulay, R.K.S., 1977. Language, Social Class, and Education. A Glasgow Study. University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh, p. 45, 48.
Upper-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Lower-working class
Black
White
0 25.0 41.1 73.6
6.3 6.3 31.8 56.3
Adapted from Shuy, R., Wolfram W.A., Riley, W.K., 1969. Field Techniques in an Urban Language Study. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC.
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discourse variables. Macaulay (2002), for instance, found that middle-class Scottish speakers in Ayr and Glasgow used adverbs ending in -ly (e.g., slowly) more than twice as frequently as working-class speakers. Other distinctions between the middle and working classes involved the use of very, which was almost exclusively a middle-class word, and quite, also used more predominantly by the middle class. There were also differences in the kinds of evaluative adjectives, with half of the adjectives used by the working class consisting of simple words of approval or disapproval such as good, bad, nice, etc. By contrast, the middle-class speakers used a wider variety of adjectives that were never used by working-class speakers, such as horrible, messy, impressive, interesting, unattractive, fantastic, tremendous, impeccable, and others. These differences are of a somewhat different nature than the ones previously discussed, where social class correlated closely with the boundary between standard and nonstandard usage. The higher incidence of adjectives and adverbs used by middle-class speakers served to emphasize the speaker’s stance or personal viewpoint, while the working-class speakers on the other hand tended to leave their hearers to infer their point of view. Studies such as these are also different in kind from Ross’s early study of social class differences in vocabulary, where the variables investigated consisted of different words used to refer to the same thing, e.g., lavatory versus toilet. While some of the differences between so-called U (upper class) and non-U seem outdated and old-fashioned (e.g., U looking glass vs non-U mirror or U wireless vs non-U radio), and it has become increasingly common to think that access to higher education has increased social mobility and brought about a classless society, there is still considerable anxiety about social class and language in Britain. The issue of U and non-U language erupted in 2007 when Prince William broke up with then girlfriend Kate Middleton. The press speculated that perhaps she and her family, especially Kate’s mother Carole, were just too middle class for the Royal family. Among Carole Middleton’s linguistic faux pas the press commented on were her use of non-U toilet and pardon instead of lavatory (or the abbreviation loo) or what? Journalists speculated that perhaps a toilet had come between William and Kate, and headlines referred to a toiletgate scandal. Another linguistic misstep Carole Middleton made was to say ‘Pleased to meet you’ when she met William’s grandmother, the Queen, instead of U ‘How do you do?’ This incident indicates the enduring nature of linguistic insecurity and the divide between the upper and middle classes, despite the fact that some of the forms marking the boundary have changed. Today’s non-U word or phrase may have been yesterday’s U. Toilet, for instance, was a very smart word for the Edwardians, because it came from French, which was regarded as a prestige language. It went out of fashion, however, when their servants adopted it (compare also serviette, another term of French origin). Electronic corpora of modern English containing information about social class such as the British National Corpus can provide a handy way of checking the persistence of some of the social markers Ross mentioned (Romaine, 2008). The corpus contains one hundred million words of spoken and written British English from the 1990s. The spoken texts, comprising ten million words, include informal, unscripted conversation by speakers of different ages, regions, and social class. The British National Corpus
categorized the speakers into four groups based on occupation: AB (top or middle management, administrative or professional), C1 (junior management, supervisory or clerical), C2 (skilled manual workers), and DE (semiskilled and unskilled manual workers). Although only 20% of the material in the spoken component of the corpus has been coded for speakers’ social class, the corpus can still provide some insight into modern usage. Table 6 shows the social distribution for settee/couch/sofa and lounge/living room/sitting room. The number of instances per million words is given for each term; boldface indicates the social group showing the highest usage for a particular term. The results show that social class differentiation in modern Britain is more nuanced than suggested by the simple division between U and non-U. While some words may distinguish the upper class from the rest, others may separate the working class from the lower-middle, or the middle-middle from the uppermiddle classes. Ross, for instance, regarded sofa and sitting room as U and settee or couch and lounge as non-U. Looking first at variation in terms for the item of furniture, all four social groups use both settee and sofa; interestingly, the term couch does not occur for the highest and lowest social group. The lowest social group strongly favors the non-U term settee; the highest social group uses that term least. The term sofa occurs most frequently among class C2 followed by DE, but is less often used by two highest classes AB and C1. As for the room where this item of furniture is found, all social groups use all three terms. The middle and lower-middle classes (C1 and C2), however, are the greatest users of the supposedly non-U term lounge. The highest group leads in the use of the term sitting room, and the lowest in the use of the term living room. Thus, the upper class displays a tendency to sit on a settee in the sitting room, while the working class is more likely to sit on a settee in the living room, and the middle class to sit either on a sofa or couch in the lounge. These results display a rather mixed picture. While they appear to offer some support for the continuing U status of sitting room versus lounge and the non-U status of settee and couch, sofa does not appear to be an indicator of U status. Often collocations, i.e., co-occurrences of words in context, are even more powerful indicators of social class than words in isolation. In 2012 the phrase kitchen supper triggered a national debate about class when Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet Office Minister remarked that the meals Cameron offered at his Downing Street flat to would-be Conservative
Table 6 Social distribution of settee/sofa/couch and lounge/living room/sitting room in the British National Corpus: hits/million words Social class
Settee Sofa
Couch
Lounge Living room
Sitting room
AB C1 C2 DE
12.32 18.02 13.98 31.21
0 5.5 8.39 0
11.09 32.18 48.93 8.92
13.55 9.01 5.59 8.92
2.7 2.57 8.39 4.46
12.32 9.01 13.98 22.9
p is less than or equal to .01; distribution is significant for settee/sofa/couch. p is less than or equal to .001; distribution is significant for lounge/living room/sitting room. Adapted from Romaine, S., 2008. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics. In: Lüdeling, A., Kytö, M. (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics. An International Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, p. 103.
Language and Social Class donors were just ‘kitchen suppers’. It meant relaxed, friendly meals in Mr Cameron’s home rather than official dinners in a formal setting such as a Downing Street dining room. Terms for meals display social differentiation, with the evening meal typically referred to as dinner or supper by the upper class, but as tea by the working class, who use the term dinner for a midday meal. For the upper class tea is a late afternoon meal with sandwiches and baked goods like scones, and the midday meal is lunch.
Social Class Differentiation in Relation to Other Sociolinguistic Patterns The intersection of social class and stylistic continua is one of the most important findings of quantitative sociolinguistics: namely, if a feature occurs more frequently in working-class speech, then it will occur more frequently in the informal speech of all speakers. There are also strong correlations between patterns of social stratification and gender, with a number of now classic findings emerging repeatedly. One of these sociolinguistic patterns is that women, regardless of other social characteristics such as class, age, etc., tend to use more standard forms than men. Table 7 shows the results for the variable (ing) in Norwich in relation to social class, style, and sex. The scores represent the percent of nonstandard forms used by men and women in each social group in four contextual styles, i.e., when reading a word list, reading a short text, formal speech, and casual speech. Generally speaking, the use of nonstandard forms increases the less formal the style and the lower one’s social status, with men’s scores higher than women’s. Although each class has different average scores in each style, all groups style-shift in the same direction in their formal speech style; that is, in the direction of the standard language. This similar behavior can be taken as an indication of membership in a speech community sharing norms for social evaluation of the relative prestige of variables. All groups recognize the overt greater prestige of standard speech and shift toward it in more formal styles. Summing up these sociolinguistic patterns involving social class, gender, and style, sociolinguists would reply to the
Table 7 Norwich
Social class, style, and sex differentiation in (ing) in
Class Middle-middle Lower-middle Upperworking Middleworking Lowerworking
M F M F M F M F M F
Style word list
Reading
Formal speech
Casual speech
0 0 0 0 0 11 24 20 66 17
0 0 20 0 18 13 43 46 100 54
4 0 27 3 81 68 91 81 100 97
31 0 17 67 95 77 97 88 100 100
Adapted from Trudgill, P., 1974b. Sociolinguistics. An Introduction. Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 112.
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question of who is likely to speak most nonstandardly in a community: working-class men speaking in casual conversation. Conversely, middle-class women speaking in more formal conversation are closest to the standard. In Table 7, for instance, we can see that middle-middle-class women in wordlist style never use the nonstandard form, while lowerworking-class men use it all of the time. Note, however, that the differences between men and women are not equal throughout the social hierarchy. For this variable they are greatest in the lower-middle and upper-working class. Such patterns reveal basic linguistic fault lines in a community, and are indicative of the uneven spread of the standard and its associated prescriptive ideology in a speech community. Similar results have been found in other places, such as Sweden and the Netherlands (Nordberg, 2005).
Social Class Differentiation and Language Change Because variability is a prerequisite for change, synchronic variation may represent a stage in long-term change. By examining the way in which variation is embedded into the social structure of a community, we can chart the spread of innovations just as dialect geographers mapped variation and change through geographical space. Sociolinguists have distinguished between ‘change from above’ and ‘change from below’ to refer to the differing points of departure for the diffusion of linguistic innovations through the social hierarchy. Change from above is conscious change originating in more formal styles and in the upper end of the social hierarchy, and change from below is below the level of conscious awareness originating in the lower end of the social hierarchy. Gender is a critical variable too. Women, particularly in the lower-middle class, often lead in the introduction of new standard forms of many of the phonological variables studied in the United States, the UK, and other industrialized societies such as Sweden, while men tend to lead in instances of change from below. Because language, like fashion, is always changing, keeping up linguistically or sartorially with the proverbial Joneses is a never-ending task. Indeed, the Joneses may themselves decide to adopt once highly stigmatized features like the glottal stop, a behavior that has been referred to as ‘linguistic slumming.’ By contrast, in their effort to be linguistically correct, the middle and lower classes may hypercorrect and overshoot the norm of the group whose language they are aiming at, or use a false analogy resulting in an incorrect form. In the case of postvocalic /r/ in New York City, the lower-middle class shows the most radical style shifting, exceeding even the highest status group in their use of the standard forms in the most formal style. Another type of hypercorrection actually results in the production of incorrect forms. In New York City highly stigmatized pronunciations such as ‘toity toid street’ (for 33rd Street) are popularly associated with the so-called Brooklyn accent (although in fact are more widespread throughout working class speech of the city). Speakers who wish to dissociate themselves from this way of speaking often ‘correct’ forms containing the sound, so that toilet becomes terlet and boil becomes berl. Speakers alter these sounds because they are aware of the ‘toity toid’ stereotype, which suggests to them that is an incorrect pronunciation of , so they correct all
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cases where occurs to . In cases like terlet, this produces a form that is not only hypercorrect, but also in fact nonexistent in the more prestigious form of speech that these speakers are trying to emulate. These hypercorrections often become so common that they too have now become stereotypes. People who drop h’s sometimes insert them in before words beginning with a vowel where they do not occur in the standard, resulting in hypercorrect forms such as hextra (extra), hever (ever), etc. Hypercorrection happens because the behavior of the lower-middle class is governed by their recognition of an exterior standard of correctness and their insecurity about their own speech. They see the use of postvocalic /r/ as a prestige marker of the highest social group. In their attempt to adopt the norm of this group, they manifest their aspirations of upward social mobility, but they overshoot the mark. The clearest cases of hypercorrection occur when a feature is undergoing change in response to social pressure from above, i.e., a prestige norm used by the upper class. In New York City the new /r/ pronouncing norm is being imported into previously nonrhotic areas of the eastern United States. Hypercorrection by the lower-middle class accelerates the introduction of this new norm. The variable (ing), on the other hand, has been a stable marker of social and stylistic variation for a very long time and does not appear to be involved in change and hence does not display hypercorrection.
Alternatives to Social Class Despite the successes of these investigations many sociolinguists have increasingly questioned the use of socioeconomic indices to determine speakers’ class backgrounds and have explored alternative approaches to grouping people into discrete social classes based on indicators such as income, occupation, education, etc. This method assumes a consensus view of social class membership and that those in the same group will behave similarly. Some have argued, however, that social class differentiation is grounded in conflict rather than consensus. The concept of social class also applies more readily to western industrialized societies than to traditional rural village-based societies. Starting with the individual rather than the group allows us to overcome some of these limitations and to see patterns of variation and linguistic choices as a way of actively constructing social meanings and identities rather than merely reflecting membership in predetermined social categories.
Social Networks One alternative to a class-based approach emphasizes the nature of contacts and networks in a society. Networks may cut across social class boundaries and reveal differences within social classes. Lesley Milroy’s (1980) work in Belfast revealed important linguistic differences among working-class networks. Networks in which individuals interact locally within a well-defined territory and whose members are linked to each other in several capacities, e.g., as kin, neighbor, workmate, etc., act as a powerful influence on the maintenance of local norms. Two women, Hannah and Paula, who live in the same type of
housing in the same area of Belfast and have similar employment, nevertheless, behaved quite differently from one another linguistically. Hannah is much more standard in her speech than Paula. The differences reflect their socialization patterns. Paula, whose speech is more nonstandard, is a member of a local bingo-playing group and has extensive kin ties in the area. Hannah has no kin in the area and does not associate with local people. In general, those with high network scores indicating the strength of association with the local community used more local, nonstandard forms of speech. Those whose networks were more open and less locally constrained used more standard speech. Although there is a tendency for middle-class speakers to have looser networks than the working class, dense networks may also be found at the upper levels of society. The British upper class, for example, has been educated at elite schools and at Oxford and Cambridge, which has given rise to an equally distinctive speech variety that does not indicate their regional origins. More men than women had dense networks in Belfast, which suggests an explanation for some of the patterns of sex differentiation described earlier. The network approach has also been applied in non-Western settings such as Africa and Brazil. In Brazil, for example, it was used to study the extent to which rural migrants to urban areas assimilated to urban standard speech norms. Change has been slower for migrant women, who have fewer social contacts than men. The notion of network is potentially more useful than social class because it applies equally well to multilingual and monolingual settings.
Communities of Practice, Habitus, and the Linguistic Marketplace Penelope Eckert’s (2000) study of Jocks and Burnouts, two selfdefined groups of high school students in Detroit, revealed that differing orientations to the school culture were correlated with opposing linguistic norms and styles of clothing. The Jocks aligned themselves with the middle-class values of the school and saw themselves as headed for college. The Burnouts oriented themselves to the local working-class world outside school, tended not to participate in school activities, and were not planning to attend college. Eckert situated her research within a theoretical framework drawing on notions such as community of practice and habitus. The concept of community of practice is closely related to that of social network. A community of practice shares ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, and values. A habitus is a set of dispositions developed over the course of life through being embedded in a particular social position that influences patterns of behavior, affect, and thought. The notion of habitus is associated with the related concept of linguistic marketplace, both of which were developed by French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1991). Linguistic practices function as commodities that are assigned value in a linguistic marketplace. Highly valued ways of speaking can be converted into actual economic capital by providing access to desirable career opportunities and employment. Conversely, nonstandard usage is an index of distance from or resistance to mainstream social and linguistic norms. The Burnouts, for instance, made significantly greater use of multiple negation than the Jocks, but a subgroup of
Language and Social Class Burnouts (referred to as ‘burned-out burnout girls’) led the entire school, including burnout boys, in their use of this nonstandard feature. These studies illustrate the importance of adopting a more dynamic view of language and of understanding how speakers use variable linguistic resources to construct identities in line with class-based language ideologies, i.e., beliefs and attitudes about language.
See also: Corpus Linguistics; Dialectology; Discourse and Indentity; Language and Society.
Bibliography Bourdieu, P., 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Polity Press, Cambridge. Docherty, G., Hay, J., Walker, A., 2006. Sociophonetic patterning of phrase-final /t/ in New Zealand English. In: Warren, P., Watson, C.I. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology. Australian Speech Science & Technology Association Inc, pp. 378–383. Ellis, A.J., 1869. On Early English Pronunciation, with Especial Reference to Shakespeare and Chaucer. N. Trübner & Co., London. Eckert, P., 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Blackwell, Oxford. Labov, W., 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. Labov, W., 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
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Macaulay, R.K.S., 1977. Language, Social Class, and Education. A Glasgow Study. University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh. Macaulay, R.K.S., 2002. Extremely interesting, very interesting, or only quite interesting? Adverbs and social class. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (3), 398–417. Milroy, L., 1980. Language and Social Networks. Blackwell, Oxford. Milroy, L., Gordon, M., 2003. Sociolinguistics. Method and Interpretation. Blackwell, Oxford. Nordberg, B., 2005. Social stratification in the present-day Nordic languages I: Swedish. In: Bandle, O., Braunmuller, K., Jahr, E.-H., Karker, A., Naumann, H.-P. (Eds.), The Nordic Languages 2: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 1759–1772. Romaine, S., 2000. Language in Society. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Romaine, S., 2008. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics. In: Lüdeling, A., Kytö, M. (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics. An International Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 96–111. Ross, A.S.C., 1954. Linguistic class indicators in present-day English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 16, 171–185. Shuy, R., Wolfram, W.A., Riley, W.K., 1969. Field Techniques in an Urban Language Study. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. Trudgill, P., 1974a. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trudgill, P., 1974b. Sociolinguistics. An Introduction. Penguin, Harmondsworth. Wells, J.C., 1982. Accents of English, 3 vols. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wells, J.C., 1994. The cockneyfication of RP? In: Melchers, G., Johannesson, N.-L. (Eds.), Nonstandard Varieties of Language. Almqvist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, pp. 198–205. Wolfram, W.A., 1969. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC.
Abstract Social class has occupied a central place in the study of language variation since the rise of the discipline of sociolinguistics during the latter half of the twentieth century. Sociolinguists have correlated sociolinguistic variables such as postvocalic /r/ (e.g., car) with social factors such as class, sex, style, age, etc. A major finding of urban sociolinguistic work is that differences among social class dialects are quantitative and not qualitative. Generally speaking, the use of nonstandard forms increases the less formal the style and the lower one’s social status, with men’s scores higher than women’s.
Early Studies of Language and Social Class Since the rise of the discipline of sociolinguistics during the latter half of the twentieth century, social class has occupied a central place in the study of language variation as a key factor offering important insights into social structure. Until the 1960s, most studies of variability were concerned primarily with regional variation or dialectology, following a tradition established in the nineteenth century. These studies concentrated their efforts on documenting the rural dialects which were believed would soon disappear. Only during the latter half of the twentieth century would the concern for statusbased differences in language become a primary rather than a secondary focus, when sociolinguists turned their attention to the language of cities, where an increasing proportion of the world’s population lives in modern times. The rise of urbanization is connected with an increase in social stratification reflected in linguistic variation. Research focusing on social dialects is sometimes referred to as social dialectology and occupies a central place in quantitative sociolinguistic research on urban speech varieties, beginning with William Labov’s (1966) work in New York City. Although linguists were aware before of differences in language use tied to social class, Labov was the first to introduce a systematic methodology for investigating social dialects and produced the first large-scale sociolinguistic survey of an urban community. Earlier, for instance, Alan Ross (1954) suggested that certain vocabulary differences in English could be classified as U (upper class) or non-U (lower class), e.g., serviette (non-U) versus table-napkin (U), one of the best known of all linguistic class-indicators of England at the time. Labov, however, concentrating primarily on pronunciation differences, called phonological variables, showed how idiolects (or the speech of individuals) considered in isolation might seem random, but the speech community as a whole behaved regularly. Previous investigations had concluded that the speech of New Yorkers appeared to vary in a random and unpredictable manner. Sometimes they pronounced the names Ian and Ann alike and sometimes they pronounced postvocalic /r/ (i.e., r following a vowel) in words such as car, while at other times they did not. This fluctuation was termed ‘free variation’ because there did not seem to be any explanation for it. Labov’s study and subsequent ones modeled after it, however, showed that when such free variation in the speech of and between
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 13
individuals was viewed against the background of the community as a whole, it was not free, but rather conditioned by social factors such as social class, age, sex, and style in predictable ways. Unlike previous dialectological studies, which generally relied on one person (usually an older male) as representative of a particular area, most sociolinguists choose a sample of persons with different social characteristics. Labov’s survey was based on tape-recorded interviews with 103 people who had been chosen by random sample as being representative of the various social classes, ages, ethnic groups, etc. to be found in New York City. This approach solved the problem of how any one person’s speech could be thought of as representing a large urban area. Thus, while idiolects (or the speech of individuals) considered in isolation might seem random, the speech community as a whole behaved regularly. Using these methods, one could predict that a person of a particular social class, age, sex, etc. would pronounce postvocalic /r/ a certain percent of the time in certain situations. Through the introduction of these new methods for investigating social dialects by correlating sociolinguistic variables with social factors, sociolinguists have been able to build up a comprehensive picture of social dialect differentiation in the United States and Britain in particular, and other places, where these studies have since been replicated.
Methods In order to demonstrate a regular relationship between social and linguistic factors, we have to be able to measure them in a reliable way. Of the principal social dimensions sociolinguists have been concerned with (e.g., social class, age, sex, style, and network), social class has probably been the most researched. Patterns of social class differentiation are often assumed to be fundamental and other so-called sociolinguistic patterns of variation, e.g., stylistic and gender variation, are regarded as derivative of them. Many sociolinguistic studies have followed the generally accepted sociological practice of relying on indicators of social status such as education, occupation, housing, income, etc. to group individuals into social classes, and then looked to see how certain linguistic features were used by each group. The method used in New York City to study the linguistic features was to select easily quantifiable
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items, in particular, phonological variables such as postvocalic /r/, which was either present or absent. This was one of the first features to be studied in detail by sociolinguists.
Results Phonological Variables Varieties of English can be divided into two major groups with respect to their treatment of postvocalic /r/: those that are r-pronouncing (rhotic) and those that are not r-pronouncing (nonrhotic). Today in Britain accents that have lost postvocalic /r/ as a result of linguistic change generally have more prestige than those, like Scottish English, that preserve it. In many parts of the United States the reverse is true, although this has not always been the case. Table 1 compares the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ in New York City with that of Reading, England. The results show that in New York City the lower one’s social status, as measured in terms of factors such as occupation, education, and income, the fewer postvocalic /r/’s one uses, while in Reading the reverse is true. Like many features investigated by sociolinguists, the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ shows a geographically as well as socially significant distribution. There are also internal linguistic constraints affecting the realization of postvocalic /r/. New York City speakers pronounced /r/’s in word-final position (e.g., floor) more frequently than they did in word-internal position (e.g., fourth). Just as the diffusion of linguistic features may be halted by natural geographical barriers, it may also be impeded by social class stratification. However, the boundaries between social dialects tend for the most part not to be absolute. The pattern of variation for postvocalic /r/ shows ‘fine stratification’ or continuous variation along a linguistic dimension (in this case a phonetic one) as well as an extralinguistic one (in this case social class). The indices go up or down in relation to social class, and there are no sharp breaks between groups. A major finding of urban sociolinguistic work is that differences among social dialects are quantitative and not qualitative. Sociolinguists have studied many other variables in English and other languages that show similar sociolinguistically significant distributions. Peter Trudgill (1974a) found similar differences in Norwich in an urban dialect study modeled after the New York City research. Table 2 shows the results for three of his phonological variables: (ing), (t), and (h). The numbers show the percentage of nonstandard forms used by different class groups. The variable (ing) refers to alternation between alveolar /n/ and a velar nasal /s/ in words with -ing endings such as reading, singing, etc. The lower a person’s social status, the more likely he or she is to use a higher percentage of
Table 1
Percent of postvocalic /r/s pronounced
New York City
Reading
Social class
32 20 12 0
0 28 44 49
Upper-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Lower-working class
Adapted from Romaine, S., 2000. Language in Society. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 68.
Table 2
Percent of nonstandard forms in Norwich
(ing)
(h )
(t )
Social class
31 42 87 95 100
6 14 40 59 61
41 62 89 92 94
Middle-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Middle-working class Lower-working class
Adapted from Trudgill, P., 1974b. Sociolinguistics. An Introduction. Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 48.
alveolar rather than velar nasal endings. This is often referred to popularly as ‘dropping one’s g’s’, and is a well-known marker of social status over most of the English-speaking world, including New York City, where Labov also studied it. The variable (h) refers to alternation between /h/ and lack of it in words beginning with
Language and Social Class
Most frequent
Word final + Consonant e.g. that cat
Table 4 Detroit
Before syllabic nasal e.g. button
Social class
Detroit
Norwich
Upper-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Middle-working class Lower-working class
1 10 57 – 71
0 2 70 87 97
Word final + Vowel Before syllabic /l/ Least frequent Figure 1
e.g. that apple e.g. bottle
Percent of verbs without -s in Norwich and
Adapted from Trudgill, P., 1974b. Sociolinguistics. An Introduction. Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 44.
e.g. butter
Word medially
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Linguistic environments for glottal stops.
Although all speakers are affected by the same internal constraints in the same way, they apply at different frequency levels, depending on social class membership and other external factors. Table 3 shows the incidence of glottal stops in relation to social class in Glasgow for all environments compared with that occurring only in medial position. Class I is the highest and contains professional people, while Class III is the lowest and contains unskilled workers. The results show that glottal stops are the norm for this community (74.3%) if we look at all the environments. Even the highest social class uses glottal stops nearly half the time and the lowest class, almost all the time. However, if we look at medial position, the highest social class uses no glottal stops in this environment, while the lowest class uses 68.8%. The use of glottal stops has been noted as a feature of Glasgow speech since at least the late nineteenth century, but more recent sociolinguistic research shows that this feature is spreading from working-class urban speech, particularly that of London, and making rapid inroads into the speech of middleclass speakers in many other areas of southeastern England and Wales, and even as far as New Zealand, where it had not been heard before (Docherty et al., 2006). Hence, a feature once regarded as a vulgarism associated with the working class is becoming respectable (Wells, 1994: p. 201). Given its frequency in many areas of Britain across the social class spectrum, it would no longer be correct, strictly speaking, to classify this feature as nonstandard.
Grammatical Variables
observed in the case of h-dropping. Table 4 compares the results of a study of a grammatical variable in Detroit and Norwich. The variable concerns the use of nonstandard thirdperson singular present tense verb forms without -s, e.g., he go. Only working-class speakers use these forms with any great frequency, and this is more often the case in Norwich than in Detroit. The gap between the middle- and working-class norms is also greater in Norwich than in Detroit, reflecting perhaps greater social mobility in the American social system. There are also other varieties of British English, e.g., in parts of the north, southwest, and south Wales, where the present tense paradigm is regularized in the opposite direction and all persons of the verb take -s, i.e., I goes, you goes, he goes, etc. Another common grammatical feature of nonstandard English is so-called double or multiple negation, which involves the use of two or more negative elements where standard English requires only one. Compare nonstandard he ain’t got no money with standard English he hasn’t got any money or he has no money. This variable also has a long history going back centuries, but during the eighteenth century grammarians condemned the construction as nonstandard. The use of ain’t has a similar history. This resulted in a decline in use of both ain’t and multiple negation among the educated. In spite of correction by generations of teachers, both features have persisted in many nonstandard varieties. Table 5 shows the percent of multiple negative forms among African-American and white speakers in Detroit. There is sharp class stratification, with middle-class speakers regardless of race rarely using this feature. Overall, however, speakers of African-American English use multiple negation more frequently than whites.
Lexical and Discourse Variables
Although grammatical variables have been less frequently studied than phonological ones, they have tended to show sharp stratification; that is, they often display a large social barrier between the middle class and the working class, as
Sociolinguists have also extended the search for correlations between language and social class to encompass lexical and
Table 5
Percent of multiple negation in Detroit
Table 3 Percent of glottal stops in Glasgow in all environments compared to word medial position Class
I
IIa
IIb
III
Total
All environments Medial position
48.4 0
72.9 7.2
84.3 42.5
91.7 68.8
74.3 29.6
Adapted from Macaulay, R.K.S., 1977. Language, Social Class, and Education. A Glasgow Study. University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh, p. 45, 48.
Upper-middle class Lower-middle class Upper-working class Lower-working class
Black
White
0 25.0 41.1 73.6
6.3 6.3 31.8 56.3
Adapted from Shuy, R., Wolfram W.A., Riley, W.K., 1969. Field Techniques in an Urban Language Study. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC.
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discourse variables. Macaulay (2002), for instance, found that middle-class Scottish speakers in Ayr and Glasgow used adverbs ending in -ly (e.g., slowly) more than twice as frequently as working-class speakers. Other distinctions between the middle and working classes involved the use of very, which was almost exclusively a middle-class word, and quite, also used more predominantly by the middle class. There were also differences in the kinds of evaluative adjectives, with half of the adjectives used by the working class consisting of simple words of approval or disapproval such as good, bad, nice, etc. By contrast, the middle-class speakers used a wider variety of adjectives that were never used by working-class speakers, such as horrible, messy, impressive, interesting, unattractive, fantastic, tremendous, impeccable, and others. These differences are of a somewhat different nature than the ones previously discussed, where social class correlated closely with the boundary between standard and nonstandard usage. The higher incidence of adjectives and adverbs used by middle-class speakers served to emphasize the speaker’s stance or personal viewpoint, while the working-class speakers on the other hand tended to leave their hearers to infer their point of view. Studies such as these are also different in kind from Ross’s early study of social class differences in vocabulary, where the variables investigated consisted of different words used to refer to the same thing, e.g., lavatory versus toilet. While some of the differences between so-called U (upper class) and non-U seem outdated and old-fashioned (e.g., U looking glass vs non-U mirror or U wireless vs non-U radio), and it has become increasingly common to think that access to higher education has increased social mobility and brought about a classless society, there is still considerable anxiety about social class and language in Britain. The issue of U and non-U language erupted in 2007 when Prince William broke up with then girlfriend Kate Middleton. The press speculated that perhaps she and her family, especially Kate’s mother Carole, were just too middle class for the Royal family. Among Carole Middleton’s linguistic faux pas the press commented on were her use of non-U toilet and pardon instead of lavatory (or the abbreviation loo) or what? Journalists speculated that perhaps a toilet had come between William and Kate, and headlines referred to a toiletgate scandal. Another linguistic misstep Carole Middleton made was to say ‘Pleased to meet you’ when she met William’s grandmother, the Queen, instead of U ‘How do you do?’ This incident indicates the enduring nature of linguistic insecurity and the divide between the upper and middle classes, despite the fact that some of the forms marking the boundary have changed. Today’s non-U word or phrase may have been yesterday’s U. Toilet, for instance, was a very smart word for the Edwardians, because it came from French, which was regarded as a prestige language. It went out of fashion, however, when their servants adopted it (compare also serviette, another term of French origin). Electronic corpora of modern English containing information about social class such as the British National Corpus can provide a handy way of checking the persistence of some of the social markers Ross mentioned (Romaine, 2008). The corpus contains one hundred million words of spoken and written British English from the 1990s. The spoken texts, comprising ten million words, include informal, unscripted conversation by speakers of different ages, regions, and social class. The British National Corpus
categorized the speakers into four groups based on occupation: AB (top or middle management, administrative or professional), C1 (junior management, supervisory or clerical), C2 (skilled manual workers), and DE (semiskilled and unskilled manual workers). Although only 20% of the material in the spoken component of the corpus has been coded for speakers’ social class, the corpus can still provide some insight into modern usage. Table 6 shows the social distribution for settee/couch/sofa and lounge/living room/sitting room. The number of instances per million words is given for each term; boldface indicates the social group showing the highest usage for a particular term. The results show that social class differentiation in modern Britain is more nuanced than suggested by the simple division between U and non-U. While some words may distinguish the upper class from the rest, others may separate the working class from the lower-middle, or the middle-middle from the uppermiddle classes. Ross, for instance, regarded sofa and sitting room as U and settee or couch and lounge as non-U. Looking first at variation in terms for the item of furniture, all four social groups use both settee and sofa; interestingly, the term couch does not occur for the highest and lowest social group. The lowest social group strongly favors the non-U term settee; the highest social group uses that term least. The term sofa occurs most frequently among class C2 followed by DE, but is less often used by two highest classes AB and C1. As for the room where this item of furniture is found, all social groups use all three terms. The middle and lower-middle classes (C1 and C2), however, are the greatest users of the supposedly non-U term lounge. The highest group leads in the use of the term sitting room, and the lowest in the use of the term living room. Thus, the upper class displays a tendency to sit on a settee in the sitting room, while the working class is more likely to sit on a settee in the living room, and the middle class to sit either on a sofa or couch in the lounge. These results display a rather mixed picture. While they appear to offer some support for the continuing U status of sitting room versus lounge and the non-U status of settee and couch, sofa does not appear to be an indicator of U status. Often collocations, i.e., co-occurrences of words in context, are even more powerful indicators of social class than words in isolation. In 2012 the phrase kitchen supper triggered a national debate about class when Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet Office Minister remarked that the meals Cameron offered at his Downing Street flat to would-be Conservative
Table 6 Social distribution of settee/sofa/couch and lounge/living room/sitting room in the British National Corpus: hits/million words Social class
Settee Sofa
Couch
Lounge Living room
Sitting room
AB C1 C2 DE
12.32 18.02 13.98 31.21
0 5.5 8.39 0
11.09 32.18 48.93 8.92
13.55 9.01 5.59 8.92
2.7 2.57 8.39 4.46
12.32 9.01 13.98 22.9
p is less than or equal to .01; distribution is significant for settee/sofa/couch. p is less than or equal to .001; distribution is significant for lounge/living room/sitting room. Adapted from Romaine, S., 2008. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics. In: Lüdeling, A., Kytö, M. (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics. An International Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, p. 103.
Language and Social Class donors were just ‘kitchen suppers’. It meant relaxed, friendly meals in Mr Cameron’s home rather than official dinners in a formal setting such as a Downing Street dining room. Terms for meals display social differentiation, with the evening meal typically referred to as dinner or supper by the upper class, but as tea by the working class, who use the term dinner for a midday meal. For the upper class tea is a late afternoon meal with sandwiches and baked goods like scones, and the midday meal is lunch.
Social Class Differentiation in Relation to Other Sociolinguistic Patterns The intersection of social class and stylistic continua is one of the most important findings of quantitative sociolinguistics: namely, if a feature occurs more frequently in working-class speech, then it will occur more frequently in the informal speech of all speakers. There are also strong correlations between patterns of social stratification and gender, with a number of now classic findings emerging repeatedly. One of these sociolinguistic patterns is that women, regardless of other social characteristics such as class, age, etc., tend to use more standard forms than men. Table 7 shows the results for the variable (ing) in Norwich in relation to social class, style, and sex. The scores represent the percent of nonstandard forms used by men and women in each social group in four contextual styles, i.e., when reading a word list, reading a short text, formal speech, and casual speech. Generally speaking, the use of nonstandard forms increases the less formal the style and the lower one’s social status, with men’s scores higher than women’s. Although each class has different average scores in each style, all groups style-shift in the same direction in their formal speech style; that is, in the direction of the standard language. This similar behavior can be taken as an indication of membership in a speech community sharing norms for social evaluation of the relative prestige of variables. All groups recognize the overt greater prestige of standard speech and shift toward it in more formal styles. Summing up these sociolinguistic patterns involving social class, gender, and style, sociolinguists would reply to the
Table 7 Norwich
Social class, style, and sex differentiation in (ing) in
Class Middle-middle Lower-middle Upperworking Middleworking Lowerworking
M F M F M F M F M F
Style word list
Reading
Formal speech
Casual speech
0 0 0 0 0 11 24 20 66 17
0 0 20 0 18 13 43 46 100 54
4 0 27 3 81 68 91 81 100 97
31 0 17 67 95 77 97 88 100 100
Adapted from Trudgill, P., 1974b. Sociolinguistics. An Introduction. Penguin, Harmondsworth, p. 112.
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question of who is likely to speak most nonstandardly in a community: working-class men speaking in casual conversation. Conversely, middle-class women speaking in more formal conversation are closest to the standard. In Table 7, for instance, we can see that middle-middle-class women in wordlist style never use the nonstandard form, while lowerworking-class men use it all of the time. Note, however, that the differences between men and women are not equal throughout the social hierarchy. For this variable they are greatest in the lower-middle and upper-working class. Such patterns reveal basic linguistic fault lines in a community, and are indicative of the uneven spread of the standard and its associated prescriptive ideology in a speech community. Similar results have been found in other places, such as Sweden and the Netherlands (Nordberg, 2005).
Social Class Differentiation and Language Change Because variability is a prerequisite for change, synchronic variation may represent a stage in long-term change. By examining the way in which variation is embedded into the social structure of a community, we can chart the spread of innovations just as dialect geographers mapped variation and change through geographical space. Sociolinguists have distinguished between ‘change from above’ and ‘change from below’ to refer to the differing points of departure for the diffusion of linguistic innovations through the social hierarchy. Change from above is conscious change originating in more formal styles and in the upper end of the social hierarchy, and change from below is below the level of conscious awareness originating in the lower end of the social hierarchy. Gender is a critical variable too. Women, particularly in the lower-middle class, often lead in the introduction of new standard forms of many of the phonological variables studied in the United States, the UK, and other industrialized societies such as Sweden, while men tend to lead in instances of change from below. Because language, like fashion, is always changing, keeping up linguistically or sartorially with the proverbial Joneses is a never-ending task. Indeed, the Joneses may themselves decide to adopt once highly stigmatized features like the glottal stop, a behavior that has been referred to as ‘linguistic slumming.’ By contrast, in their effort to be linguistically correct, the middle and lower classes may hypercorrect and overshoot the norm of the group whose language they are aiming at, or use a false analogy resulting in an incorrect form. In the case of postvocalic /r/ in New York City, the lower-middle class shows the most radical style shifting, exceeding even the highest status group in their use of the standard forms in the most formal style. Another type of hypercorrection actually results in the production of incorrect forms. In New York City highly stigmatized pronunciations such as ‘toity toid street’ (for 33rd Street) are popularly associated with the so-called Brooklyn accent (although in fact are more widespread throughout working class speech of the city). Speakers who wish to dissociate themselves from this way of speaking often ‘correct’ forms containing the sound
286
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cases where
Alternatives to Social Class Despite the successes of these investigations many sociolinguists have increasingly questioned the use of socioeconomic indices to determine speakers’ class backgrounds and have explored alternative approaches to grouping people into discrete social classes based on indicators such as income, occupation, education, etc. This method assumes a consensus view of social class membership and that those in the same group will behave similarly. Some have argued, however, that social class differentiation is grounded in conflict rather than consensus. The concept of social class also applies more readily to western industrialized societies than to traditional rural village-based societies. Starting with the individual rather than the group allows us to overcome some of these limitations and to see patterns of variation and linguistic choices as a way of actively constructing social meanings and identities rather than merely reflecting membership in predetermined social categories.
Social Networks One alternative to a class-based approach emphasizes the nature of contacts and networks in a society. Networks may cut across social class boundaries and reveal differences within social classes. Lesley Milroy’s (1980) work in Belfast revealed important linguistic differences among working-class networks. Networks in which individuals interact locally within a well-defined territory and whose members are linked to each other in several capacities, e.g., as kin, neighbor, workmate, etc., act as a powerful influence on the maintenance of local norms. Two women, Hannah and Paula, who live in the same type of
housing in the same area of Belfast and have similar employment, nevertheless, behaved quite differently from one another linguistically. Hannah is much more standard in her speech than Paula. The differences reflect their socialization patterns. Paula, whose speech is more nonstandard, is a member of a local bingo-playing group and has extensive kin ties in the area. Hannah has no kin in the area and does not associate with local people. In general, those with high network scores indicating the strength of association with the local community used more local, nonstandard forms of speech. Those whose networks were more open and less locally constrained used more standard speech. Although there is a tendency for middle-class speakers to have looser networks than the working class, dense networks may also be found at the upper levels of society. The British upper class, for example, has been educated at elite schools and at Oxford and Cambridge, which has given rise to an equally distinctive speech variety that does not indicate their regional origins. More men than women had dense networks in Belfast, which suggests an explanation for some of the patterns of sex differentiation described earlier. The network approach has also been applied in non-Western settings such as Africa and Brazil. In Brazil, for example, it was used to study the extent to which rural migrants to urban areas assimilated to urban standard speech norms. Change has been slower for migrant women, who have fewer social contacts than men. The notion of network is potentially more useful than social class because it applies equally well to multilingual and monolingual settings.
Communities of Practice, Habitus, and the Linguistic Marketplace Penelope Eckert’s (2000) study of Jocks and Burnouts, two selfdefined groups of high school students in Detroit, revealed that differing orientations to the school culture were correlated with opposing linguistic norms and styles of clothing. The Jocks aligned themselves with the middle-class values of the school and saw themselves as headed for college. The Burnouts oriented themselves to the local working-class world outside school, tended not to participate in school activities, and were not planning to attend college. Eckert situated her research within a theoretical framework drawing on notions such as community of practice and habitus. The concept of community of practice is closely related to that of social network. A community of practice shares ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, and values. A habitus is a set of dispositions developed over the course of life through being embedded in a particular social position that influences patterns of behavior, affect, and thought. The notion of habitus is associated with the related concept of linguistic marketplace, both of which were developed by French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1991). Linguistic practices function as commodities that are assigned value in a linguistic marketplace. Highly valued ways of speaking can be converted into actual economic capital by providing access to desirable career opportunities and employment. Conversely, nonstandard usage is an index of distance from or resistance to mainstream social and linguistic norms. The Burnouts, for instance, made significantly greater use of multiple negation than the Jocks, but a subgroup of
Language and Social Class Burnouts (referred to as ‘burned-out burnout girls’) led the entire school, including burnout boys, in their use of this nonstandard feature. These studies illustrate the importance of adopting a more dynamic view of language and of understanding how speakers use variable linguistic resources to construct identities in line with class-based language ideologies, i.e., beliefs and attitudes about language.
See also: Corpus Linguistics; Dialectology; Discourse and Indentity; Language and Society.
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