LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL CLASS | WILLIAM LABOV

William Labov is an American socio-linguist and professor of linguistics at the Pennsylvania University.

Socio-linguistics is the study of all the social variables affecting language (gender, ethnicity, social class...).

Labov was interested in finding the links between social classes and language.

His studies are settled in USA, so they focus on the American population. This is a weakness, because it can't be generalized, but Labov's findings are thought to be similar to the ones regarding the British population.

Martha's Vineyard Study

Martha's Vineyard is an isle on the East Cost, near New York. For an half of the year, the isle is occupied only by the local population; for the other half, summer, the isle is frequented by prestigious tourists.

Those tourists are called "summer people", and they represent effectively a social class on the island. All of them come from the New York upper middle class.

The second social class is the one for the islanders, the working middle class of Martha's Vineyard, that lives on the Eastern part of the isle.

The last social class is the working class of fishmen. The majority of the islanders really respected fishmen, who were seen as a desirable social group, with old fashioned values.

Fishmen spoke with an old, non standard pronounciation, especially for vowels and diphtongs.

Labov found that the young generations were deliberately tending to speak like fishmen, using the old fashioned pronunciation.

They used divergence to distinguish themselves from the summer people and to retain a sense of identity. Even the more educated islanders started speaking like fishmen.

The Department Store Study (1966)

The study is settled in New York, Manhattan. The stereotype around the people living there is that they are all upper middle class.

Labov considered 3 stores:

Saks 5th Avenue (highest classes customers)

Macy's (upper classes customers)

Klein's (lower classes customers)

Labov used the criteria of "the social stratification of the post-vocalic r": the final r at the end of words such as guard, beer...

He tested the word "fourth"in his study. Labov asked questions to the employees that implied "fourth" in the answer. Then he pretended to not understand and asked to repeat.

The results depended on the pronunciation or not of the post-vocalic r, considered as prestigious.

Labov found that the pronunciation depended on the social class membership of the employees.

Those with higher socio-economic status pronounced /r/ more frequently than those with a lower one (62% Saks, 51% Macy's, 20% Klein's).



Labov approached language through a rigorous, scientific, empirical method, and rejected contemplation and intuition.