Sociolinguistics 7

Acts of identity

The story so far

• We classify people in terms of general ‘person-types’– E.g. Man, Brit, Londoner, Educated

• We apply the same classification to ourselves as we search for a social identity.

• Our identity varies according to:– Who we are interacting with– The situation (e.g. formal/casual)

Who am I?

P e r s o n

F e m al e M al e Se ni o r J uni o r B r i t L o ndo ne r E duc ate d

M e

1 0 0 % 1 0 0 %6 0 % 4 0 % 7 0 % ? %

Variable isa

• Membership of a category is usually a matter of degree,– E.g. a chair is a ‘better’ item of furniture than

an ash-tray.

• Similarly for our social self-classification,– E.g. my daughters are ‘better’ Londoners than

I am.

• Degrees of membership can be shown as percentages.

Language

• We signal our social identity in various ways, e.g. clothing, behaviour.

• Perhaps the most important signal is language because:– It’s learned socially.– It allows many distinctions (e.g. one per

phoneme).– Each token (instance) can be chosen

independently, which allows fine-tuning.

Acts of identity

• Every word is an “act of identity in a multi-dimensional social space” (Le Page).

• This is different from (simple) accommodation because we’re following– Abstract social prototypes (‘person-types’)– Not the people in front of us.

• Acts of identity fine-tune our face (= ‘public self-image’)

Liverpool

How do they talk in Liverpool?

• LUCK = LOOK = [lk], LOVES = [lvz]

• POT ≠ PART, LOST = [lst]

• But:

Who are they?

L i ve r pudl i an Am e r i c an

B e at l e

5 0 % 5 0 %

New York

• How do you study “the language” of a complex city such as New York?

• William Labov’s answer (PhD, 1962-66): study sociolinguistic variables.

• E.g. (r): [r] ~ Ø (e.g. car = [kɑ:r] ~ [kɑ:])• He tested this idea with a brilliant

pilot study.

Background

• Labov (a New Yorker) observed that (r) was variable.

• The old standard in NYC was (r):Ø.

• The new educated standard seemed to be (r):[r]

• For example,

Hypotheses

• Use of (r) varies with social class and age.

• Maybe sex matters too.

• And ‘style’ (attention to language).

• And phonological context (before C or word-final).

Method: speaker selection

• Select an easy measure of “education”:– wealth.

• Select places which cater for people of differing wealth:– department stores.

• Three stores qualified:– Saks: for the very rich– Macy’s: for the comfortably off– Klein: for the poor

Klein

• By 1986, when a student replicated the experiment, Klein had gone out of business.

Method: choice of words

• Select some words containing (r), e.g. fourth, floor.

• Get assistants in those places to say those words:– Ask where to find some item known to be on

the fourth floor.– Then pretend not to have heard the answer.

• Record their answers out of sight.

Results

• In this way he collected data from 264 subjects in just over six hours.

• He counted (r):[r] as % of all (r).

• He distinguished:– Saks, Macy’s, Klein– First and second utterance– Fourth and floor

(r) by store, word and utterance

So …

Use of (r) does indeed vary with:

• Education/wealth/social class – Evidence: differences among stores

• Style/attention to language– Evidence: first versus second utterance– But less so in Saks

• Phonological context– Evidence: fourth versus floor

Other data-collection methods

• Interview (e.g. Trudgill in Norwich)– Speakers selected for class, age, etc.– Interviews arranged in advance.– Structured interviews (including reading and

‘danger-of-death’ or ‘funny-incident’ question)

• Spontaneous casual speech

• Many projects in many countries.

Analysis method

• Decide:– Which sociolinguistic variables to study– What kinds of speaker to study

• Find relevant speakers

• Record them speaking

• Listen for all tokens of each variable– Use a coding sheet.– Listen for one variable at a time.

A coding sheet for (t)

Analysis (2)

• For each variable:– Count all the variants for each speaker.– Record them in a table.– Show each variant as a percentage of the total for

each speaker.

• If possible, calculate statistical significance for any differences between speakers.– See the course web site, lecture 6, on how to write

the quantitative analysis for your final assessment.

For example

[t] [ ] Ø

F re d 15 27 5

Bill 33 31 7

[t] [ ] Ø

F re d 32% 57 11

Bill 46% 44 10

p = 0 .2 7 5 - NO T S I G NI FI C A NT

Main findings

• Different sociolinguistic variables are sensitive to different social variables.

• Variable scores show variable allegiance to alternative person-types.

• Education is always important:– education/social class is always relevant (in America

as much as in UK).– Women are always more ‘standard’ than men

(provided they have access to education).– Formal speech (e.g. reading lists) is always more

‘standard’ (as defined by education) than casual.

Coming shortly

• 8. Inequality – and why education is important.