In
this major study of linguistic variation in New York City, Labov (1966) used
the three criteria of education, occupation, and income to set up ten social
classes. His class O, his lower class, had grade school education or less, were
laborers, and found it difficult to make ends meet. His classes 1 to 5, his
working class, had had some high school education, were blue-collar workers,
but earned enough to own such things as cars. His classes 6 to 8, his lower
middle class, were high school graduates and semi-professional and white-collar
workers who could send their children to college. His highest class, his upper
middle class, were well educated and professional or business-oriented. In the
United States about 10 percent of the population can be said to be lower class,
about 40 percent working class, another 40 percent lower middle class, and the
remaining 10 percent fall into the upper middle class or an upper class, the
latter not included in Lobov’s study.
In
his study of linguistic variation in Norwich, England, Trudgill (1974) distinguishes five social classes:
middle middle class (MMC), lower middle class (LMC), upper working class (UWC),
middle working class (MWC), and lower working class (LWC). Trudgill interviewed
ten speakers from each of five electoral wards in Norwich plus ten school-age
children from two schools. These sixty informants were then classified in six
factors, each of which was scored on a six-point scale (0-5): occupation, education,
income, type of housing, locality, and father’s occupation. Trudgill himself
decided the cut-off points among his classes. In doing so, he showaa certain
circularity. His lower working class is defined as those who use certain
linguistic feature (e.g., he go) more
than 80 percent of the time. Out of the total possible score of 30 on his
combined scales, those scoring 6 or less fall into this category. Member of
Trudgill’s middle middle class always use he
goes, and that behavior is typical of those scoring 19 or more. His study
is an attempt to relate linguistic behavior to social class. What we can be
sure of this that there is a difference in linguistic behavior between those at
the top and bottom of Trudgill’s 30-point scale, but this difference is not one
that has been established quite independently because of the underlying
circularity.
Shuy’s
Detroit study (Shuy, Wolfram, and Riley, 1968) attempted to sample the speech
of that city using a simple of 702 informants. Eleven field workers collected the
data by means of a questionnaire over a period of ten weeks. They assigned each
of their informants to a social class using three sets of criteria: amount of
education, occupation, and place of residence. Each informant was ranked on a
six- or seven-point scale for each set, the rankings were weighted (multiplied
by 5 for education, 9 for occupation, and 6 for residence), and each informant
was given a social class placement. Four social class designation were used:
upper middle class, those with scores of 20-48; lower middle class, those with
scores of 49-77; upper working class, those with scores of 78-106; and lower
working class, those with scores of 107-134.
There
are some serious drawbacks to using social class designations of the kind.
Individuals are notoriously hard to classify using objective criteria designed
to quantify masses of people for statistical purposes. Is there really such an
entity as the ‘middle middle class’, and how representative really is John Doe
as a member of this class? Are the same criteria applicable to all individuals
in a society, e.g., to both the black and white inhabitants of northern cities
in the United States, and to both recent immigrants to London and nth-generation residents of Mayfair?
Another way of looking at John Doe is to try to specify what kinds of groups he
belongs to and then relate his various uses of language to membership in those
groups. The obvious disadvantage of such an approach is the lack of
generalizability of the result: we might be able to say a lot about the
linguistic behavior of John Doe vis-á-vishis
membership in those groups, but we would not be able to say anything at all
about anyone else’s linguistic behavior. We can contrast this result with the
statements we can make from using the aforementioned social class designations:
they say something about the linguistic usage of the middle middle class
without assuring us that we can ever find a typical member.
One
of the major problems in talking about social space is multi-dimensional whereas
systems of social classification are one-dimensional. At any particular moment,
an individual located himself or herself in social space according to the
factors that are relevant to him or her at the moment. While he or she may have
certain feelings about being a member of the lower middle class, at any moment
it might be more important to be female, or to be a member of particular church
or ethnic group, or to be an in-patient in a hospital, or to be a sister-in
law. That is, self-identification and role-playing may be far more important
than some kind of fixed social class labeling. There need not, of course, be
serious conflict between the two approaches. Certain kinds of
self-identification and role to be played may correlate quite closely with
certain social class labels, but also they may well be more accurately for
their behavior from moment of moment. Do you behave in a certain way (1)
because you are upper-class or lower working-class, or (2) because you are a
stockbroker among other stockbroker, or a worker on an assembly line being
interviewed about a possible strike, or an adolescent discussing a rock
concert? The second type of explanation seems somehow more likely than the
first.
The
work of Labov, Trudgill, and others tries to describe the speech
characteristics of member of social groups, that is, various sociolects. Traditionally, linguist have
been interested in idiolect, the
speech characteristics and linguistic behavior of individuals. They have also
maintained that, once ‘free variation’ is take into account, an idiolect is
highly representative of the linguistic behavior of all the speakers of that
language. In fact, that is usually the approach linguists adopt in studying an
‘exotic’ language: they find a speaker who is willing to serve as an informant, and they attempt to describe
that speaker’s language using appropriate field
methods. They usually show little hesitation in generalizing their
statements about that speaker’s linguistic behavior to all speakers of the
language. Sociolect, however, are statements about group norms arrived at
through counting and averaging. To the extent that the groups are ‘real’, that is,
that the members actually feel that they do belong to a group, a sociolect has
validity; to the extent that they are not, it is just an artifact. In the
extremely complex societies in which most of us live, there must always be some
question as to the ‘reality’ of any kind of social grouping: each of us
experiences society differently, multiple-group membership is normal, and
change rather than stability seems to be the natural condition of our
existence. We must therefore exercise a certain caution about interpreting any
claims made about lower working-class speech, upper middle-class speech, or the
speech of any other social group designated
with a ‘class’ label.
Distinguishing
among social classes in complex modern urban societies is probably becoming
more and more difficult, particularly with the growth of twentieth-century
‘egalitarianism’. We are far removed from the caste system described by Gumperz
(1958) in this village of Khalapur in India, or the clearly differentiated
societies so often described by anthropologists. We are also considerably
distanced from the rural societies favored by dialect geographers. Cities like
New York and London continue to change, and some would argue that the process
of change has. If such is the case, the very usefulness of ‘social class’ as a
concept that should be employed in trying to explain the distribution of
particular kinds of behavior, linguistic or otherwise, may need rethinking.
It
was for reasons not unlike these that Milroy (1980a) preferred to explore network
relationship and the possible connection of these to linguistic variation,
rather that to use the concept of ‘social class’. In her work, Milroy
hypothesized that it was the network of relationships that an individual
belonged to that exerted the most powerful, and interesting, influences on that
individual’s linguistic behavior. When
the group of speakers being investigated shows little variation in social
class, however that is defined, a study of network of social relationships
within the group may allow one to discover how particular linguistic usage can
be related to the frequency and density of certain kinds of contacts among
speakers. Network relationships, however, tend to be unique in a way that
social class categories are not. That is, no two networks are alike, and
network structure itself either may be more characteristic of certain societies
than others or may be of quite a different kind, e.g., in Belfast and Boston,
or among Jamaican immigrants to London and Old Etonians. But whom a person
associated with regularly may be more ‘real’ than any feeling he or she has of
belonging to this or that social class.
We will have more to say in the following chapter about this use of network
structure in a study of linguistic variation.
Discussion
1. How
would you try to place individuals according to their social position in the
community in which you live? What factors would you consider to be relevant,
and how would you weight each? What class designation would seem appropriate?
Where would you place yourself?
2. Sociolinguists
who have looked at variation in children’s speech often assign each child to a
social class. In doing so, they have almost always used measure pertaining to
the father rather that to the mother: his occupation, income, education, and so
on. Corresponding characteristics of the mother may be used for classification
only if they produce a demonstrably ‘higher’ rating for the child than those of
the father. Would you recommend any change? If so, what changes and for what
reasons?
3. For
his study of certain varieties of American English, Fries (1940) differentiated
his subject into social classes. Examine the criteria that Fries used and
discuss their adequacy for the purposes he had in mind. Was this study by Fries
also a study of linguistic variation?
4. Is
there an upper working class (or any other class) because a number of people
exhibit similar patterns of behavior, and this is a suitable designation for
them within society as a whole, or because a number of people have a particular
view of their place in that society and behave accordingly? That is, is social
structure continuously created and re-created out of the behavior of individuals,
or is individual behavior fashioned to meet the requirements of an ongoing
social structure? Or is this just a riddle best left to philosophers?
