-
Language and social class
If you are an English-speaker you will
be able to estimate the relative social status of
the
following speakers
solely on the basis of the linguistic evidence
given here:
Speaker A
Speaker B
I done it
yesterday
I
did it yesterday
He ain’t got it
He hasn’t got it
It was her what said it
It was her that
said it
If you heard these speakers say
these things you would guess that B was of higher
social
status than A, and you would
almost certainly be right. How is it that we are
able to do
this sort of thing?
The answer lies in the existence of
varieties of language which have come to be called
socialclass dialects
. There
are grammatical differences between the speech of
these two
speakers which
give us clues about their social
backgrounds. It is also probable, although
this is not indicated on the
printed page, that these differences
will be accompanied by
phonetic and
phonological differences
—
that is to say, there are also different
social-class
accents
. The internal
differentiation of human
societies is reflected in their
languages.
Different social groups use
different linguistic varieties, and as experienced
members of a
speech community we have
learnt to classify speakers
accordingly. Why does social
differentiation have this effect on
language?
We may
note parallels between the development of these
social varieties and the
development of
regional varieties: in both cases
barriers
and
distance
appear to be
relevant. Dialectologists have found
that regional-dialect boundaries often coincide
with
geographical
barriers,
such as mountains, swamps or rivers: for example,
all local-dialect
speakers in the areas
of Britain north of the river Humber (between
Lincolnshire and
Yorkshire) still have
a monophthong in words like
house
(‘
hoose
’ [hu:s],
whereas
speakers south of the river
have had some kind of [haus]-type diphthong for
several
hundred years. It also seems to
be the case that the greater the geographical
distance
between two dialects the more
dissimilar they are linguistically: for instance,
those
regional
varieties of British English which are
most unlike the speech of London are
undoubtedly those of the north-east of
Scotland
—
Buchan, for
example. The
development of social
varieties can perhaps be explained in the same
sort of way
—
in
terms of
social
barriers and
social
distance. The diffusion of a linguistic
feature through a
society may be halted
by barriers of social class, age, race, religion
or other factors. And
social distance
may have the same sort of effect as
geographical
distance: a
linguistic
innovation that begins
amongst, say, the highest social group will affect
the
lowest social group
last, if at all. (We must be careful, however, not
to explain all social
differences of
language in these entirely mechanical terms since,
as we saw in Chapter 1,
attitudes
to language clearly play an important
role in preserving or removing dialect
differences.)
Of the many
forms of social differentiation, for example, by
class, age, sex, race
or religion, we
shall concentrate in this chapter on the
particular type of social
differentiation
35
illustrated in the examples of speakers
A and B
—
social
stratification
.
Social stratification is a term used to
refer to any hierarchical ordering of groups
within a
society. In the industrialized
societies of the West this takes the form of
stratification into
social classes, and
gives rise linguistically to social-class
dialects. (The whole question of
social
class is in fact somewhat controversial,
especially since
sociologists are not agreed
as to the exact nature, definition or
existence of social classes […].)
Social-class stratification is not
universal, however. In India, for example, society
is stratified into different
castes
. As far as the
linguist is concerned,
caste dialects
are in
some ways easier to
study and describe than social-class dialects.
This is because castes
are stable,
clearly named groups, rigidly separated from each
other, with hereditary
membership and
with little possibility of movement
f
rom one caste to another.
[…].
In the class societies
of the English-speaking world the social situation
is much
more fluid, and the linguistic
situation is therefore rather more complex, at
least in certain
respects. Social
classes are not clearly defined or labelled
entities but simply aggregates
of
people with similar social and economic
characteristics; and social mobility
—
movement up or
down the social hierarchy
—
is
perfectly possible. This
makes things
much more difficult for
any linguist who wishes to describe a particular
variety
—
the
more heterogeneous a society is, the
more heterogeneous is its language.
For many years the linguist’s reaction
to this complexity was generally to ignore it
—
in two rather different
ways. Many linguists concentrated their studies on
the
idiolect
—
the speech of one person at one time in one style
—
which was thought (largely
erroneously […]) to be more
regular
than the speech of
the community as a whole.
Dialectologists, on the other hand,
concentrated on the speech of rural informants,
and in
particular on that of elderly
people of little education or travel experience,
in small
isolated villages, […mainly
because] there was a feeling that
hidden
somewhere in the
speech of older, uneducated people were
the ‘real’
or ‘pure’ dialects which
were
steadily being
corrupted by the standard variety […] (It turns
out that the ‘pure’
homogeneous
dialect is also largely a mythical
concept: all language is subject to stylistic
and social differentiation, because all
human communities are functionally differentiated
and heterogeneous to varying degrees.
All language varieties are subject to change.
There
is, therefore, an element of
differentiation even in the most isolated
conservative rural
dialect.) From: c. 2
in P. Trudgill,
Sociolinguistics. An
Introduction to Language and
Society
,
London,
Penguin, 1983 (rev. ed.), pp. 34-35.
SCUOLA SUPERIORE DELL’UNIVERSITA' DEGLI
STUDI DI UDINE
ESAME DI
AMMISSIONE PER LA CLASSE UMANISTICA
PROVA SCRITTA DI LINGUA INGLESE
A.A. 2004/2005
Nome e
cognome:
______________________________
________________________________
Read
the attached text (“Language and social class”)
and do the exercises below.
Part A: Approaching the text
Exercise 1:
In the attached
text there are 7 indented paragraphs. Match each
thematic
section
below (1.,
2., 3., 4.) with the paragraph(s) which is / are
conceptually related to it.
Ex. 1. Native speakers’
language awareness (par. __No. 6
-7___)
DO NOT INSERT THE SAME PARAGRAPH INTO
MORE THAN ONE
SUB-HEADING
1.
Native speakers
’ language awareness
(par. __________ )
2.
Effects of social differentiation on grammar and
phonology (par. __________ )
3.
Analogies between regional and social dialects
(par. __________ )
4. Social-class
dialects: relativity and complexity (par.
__________ )
Exercise 2:
Match each connective below with the
function it performs in the text by
filling the
corresponding
blank with either
a
(for
Additive)
b
(for Concessive)
c
(for Causal)
or
d
(for Contrastive).
(PAY ATTENTION TO THE REFERENCE LINE IN
BRACKETS AND WRITE ONLY
ONE LETTER
IN EACH BLANK)
1. although
(l. 11) _______
2. for example (l. 20)
_______
3. whereas (l. 22) _______
4. also (l. 23) _______
5.
however (l. 31) _______
6. since (l.
39) _______
7. on the other hand (l.
55) _______
8. therefore (l. 62)
_______
Part B: Intensive
reading
Exercise 3:
Read the text carefully and tick
(
??
)
the appropriate answer
:
1. What is the overall function of the
chapter from which this excerpt has been
taken?
??
to put
forward a new theory to explain the development of
linguistic varieties
??
to investigate the
influence of social stratification on
language use
??
to
explore the relationships between social accents
and
social dialects
2. This
text is an extract from a textbook called
Sociolinguistics. An Introduction to
Language and
Society
. Can you guess which
of the following topics is NOT likely to be dealt
with
systematically in the book?
??
How Languages Are Learned