William Labov
William Labov
was known as one of the creators of sociolinguistics. He was born in 1927 and
was the professor of linguistics at Pennsylvania Uni. Labov was interested in
how social class affected the use of language.
Martha’s
Vineyard
Labov had two
theories. Martha’s Vineyard was one of his studies. Martha’s Vineyard was an Island
located off the east coast of the USA. It was a popular tourist attraction for
in the summer. There are people that live in the Island all year round called
‘the Islanders’, most of which lived on the eastern part of the Island. ‘Down-
Island’ is the populated part of the island and ‘up-island’ is the less
populated however it is where the fishermen live. There are three social groups
within the Island. ‘The Islanders’ who were a mixture of working and middle
class, ‘The Summer People’ who were middle and upper middle class and ‘The
Fishermen’ who were working class.
The Fishermen
were seen as a desirable social group for the rest of the
Islanders; they
had old fashioned values and were also very hard working. They spoke with
non-standard, old fashioned pronunciation. Their vowel sounds were especially
different from standard punctuality, especially the diphthongs. A diphthong is
a sound made by joining two vowels, specifically when it starts as one vowel
sound and goes to another, like the (oy) sound in oil.
Results
Findings- Labov
found that the young Islanders were making a deliberate shift to using the
old-style pronunciation. He found that they wanted to be like the fisherman
because they respect them. They don’t want to be like the summer people so they
diverge from them. Even the islanders who were well educated were using the
non-standard dialect.
The social
stratification of the post-vocalic R
Also known as
the Department Store Study, this is one of Labov’s other theories. It is based
in Manhattan in New York. He was looking at the link between social class,
department stores and language. Labov was testing the patterns of language
usage and their link to prestige and social class. He looked at three different
department stores of varying degrees of prestige. Saks 5th Avenue was
the highest, Macy’s was the middle and Kleins was the lowest. The social stratification
of the post-vocalic r looks at the final ‘r’sound at the end of words such as guard,
beer and fourth. Labov rested the word ‘fourth’in his
study. He asked a question designed to elicit the answer ‘fourth floor’ or
similar, he then pretended not to hear the response and asked the sales
assistant to repeat the answer.
Results
The results
illustrated that (r) in New York City was stratified by class. The pronunciation
of (r) depended on the social class membership of the employees.
Those with
higher socioeconomic status pronounced (r) more frequently than those with
lower socioeconomic.
