William Labov

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 5^th 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.