William Labov

Language and social class - William Labov

• Known as a founder of sociolinguistics
• Interested in how social class affected language usage 
• Born December 4 1927, New Jersey U.S (age 88)
• Studied at Harvard (1948) and went to Columbia University
• Professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania since 1971, semi-retired in 2014
  

Martha's vineyard-

A map of Martha's Vineyard

- an island of the coast of America which is very popular with holiday makers; tourists

- Labov came up with three groups of people;

1. The 'summer people' - middle/upper middle class
2. The 'islanders' - working/middle class
3. The 'fishermen' - working class

Down Island was populated by mainly 'islanders' and the 'summer people'

Up Island was where the highly respected 'fishermen' were

The fisherman were viewed as a very desirable social group and the islanders looked up to them, they were respected by everyone. The fishermen also spoke with a very old, non standard punctuation. Labov found that the young 'islanders were making a deliberate shift to using the old-style pronunciation.

William Labov

I think that the 'islanders' wanted to have their own identity and separating themselves from the 'summer people'; the tourists. The 'islanders' exploited this non-standard dialect.

Diphthong: a sound made by combining two vowels, like (oy) in oil. Diphthong comes from the Greek word diphthongs which means "having two sounds."

Department story study (1966) - New York, Manhattan

Cover prestige: deliberate 'roughness'

Overt prestige: standard English

Link between prestige and language = performance

• Three completely different department stores were tested out in Labov' study:

Saks 5th avenue (highest)

Macy's (middle)

Klein's (lowest)

The social stratification of the post-vocalic r' - The final 'r' sound at the end of the word such as beer, guard, fourth.

Labov decided to test the word 'fourth' by asking a question to workers at three different department stores; Saks, Macy's and Klein's which was designed to elicit the answer 'fourth floor' or something very similar. He would then ask them politely to repeat the answer to see if it was spontaneous in the way in which they pronounced it.

The results were that the pronunciation of /r/ depended on the social class;

62% Saks, 51% Macy's and 20% Klein's