Relating Linguistic Variation to Social Variation

Once we have identified the linguistic variable as our basic working tool, our next task becomes one of employing that tool in an effort to see how linguistic variation relates to social variation. An early study of linguistic variation by Gumperz (1957), albeit one cast in a ‘modern’ mold, shows some of the intricacies involved in trying to relate linguistic variation to social variation; because the society he was studying is rigidly stratified on the basic of caste membership, the problems are considerably fewer than those encountered in such cities as New York, Detroit, or even Norwich, but they are still present. Gumperz shows how rather small differences in speech can effectively distinguish sub-groups in society from one another in a study of linguistic usage in the village of Khalapur, eighty miles north of Delhi in India. The social structure the village is determined by Hindu caste membership with Brahmans ta he top, that Rajputs (warriors) Vaishyas (merchants), nd several groups of artisans and laborers lower down. At the bottom are three untouchable castes: Chamars (landless laborers), Jatia Chamars (leather workers and shoe makers) and Bhangis (sweepers). The latter are restricted to living in certain neighborhoods and have less freedom to move in the village than do members of the upper castes. Ten percent of the population are not Hindus but Muslims.

So far as language is concerned, certain characteristics of the Khalapur village dialect are clear indicators of social groups membership. For example, Bhangis do not certain phonological contrasts that speakers of all the other castes make. Chamars and Jatia Chamars also lack certain phonological contrasts made by all others, and some, in attempting to make such a contrasts, actually hypercorrect; that is, they over-extend a particular usage in trying to emulate others. Jatia Chamars have a characteristic pronunciation of words that end in (æ) in all other village varieties. Each of the three untouchable castes therefore has speech characteristics that clearly set off both from the other two untouchable castes and from touchable castes in the village. Muslim speech resembles that of the touchable classes.

An anomaly is the variety of village speech spoken by the lowest caste, the Bhangis (sweepers), is closets to the dialect of the region in which Khalapur is situated. This fact constrains members of the upper castes in their use of the regional dialect since using it would make them sound like untouchables. In their linguistic usage therefore they are forced to innovate away from the regional variety. Since untouchables apparently try to emulate the touchables, the direction of innovation for all groups in Khalapur is away from the regional variety with the innovations prompted, of course, by different needs: the touchables’ need to signal their clear distinction from untouchables, and the untouchables’ attempt to reduce that distinction as much as possible.

This study quite clearly shows a direct relationship between linguistic variation and caste membership. If you know certain things about one, you can predict certain things about the other. It is just such connections or correlations that interest sociolinguistics working with the linguistic variable. What they seek are measure of social variation to which they can relate the kinds of linguistic variation they observe. However, caste, with its sharp social stratification, is useless as a measure of social variation outside a few non-western societies. Consequently, the problem becomes one of finding factors in society that show a relationship to such matters as whether or not an individual say singing or singin’, he go or he goes, or He doesn.t know anything or He don’t know nothing.

Once a linguistic variable has been identified, the next issue becomes that of collecting data concerning its variants in such a way that you can draw certain conclusions, you must be able to relate the variants in some way to quantifiable factors in society, e.g., social class membership, sex, age, ethnicity, and so on. As well shall see, there are numerous difficulties in attempting this task, but considerable progress has been made in overcoming these, particularly, as studies have built on those that have gone before in such a way as to strengthen the quality of the work done in this area of sociolinguistics.

While it is fairly easy to relate the occurrences of the variants of a linguistic variable to factors such as sex and age, relating them to factors such as race and ethnicity is somewhat more troublesome since these are much more subjective in nature and less easily quantifiable. But the most complicated factor of all is social class membership, if one considers ‘social class’ to be a useful concept to apply in stratifying society – and few indeed would deny its relevance! Sociolinguistics use a number of different scales for classifying people when they attempt to place individuals somewhere within a social system. An occupational scale may divide people into a number of categories as follows: major professionals and executives of large business; lesser professionals and executives of medium-sized business; semi-professionals; technician and owner of small business; skilled workers; semi-skilled workers’; and unskilled workers. An educational scale may employ the following categories: graduate or professionals education; college or university degree; attendance at college or university but no degree; high school graduation; some high school education; and less than seven years of formal education. Income level as well as source of income are important factors in any classification system that focuses on how much money people have. Likewise, in considering where people live, investigators must concern themselves with both the type of housing and its location.

In assigning individuals to social classes, investigators may use any or all of the above criteria (and others too) and assign different weights to them. Accordingly, the resulting social class designation given to any individual may differ from study to study. We can also see how ‘social class’ itself is a sociological construct; people probably do not classify themselves as members of group defined by such criteria. Wolfram and Fasold (1974, p. 44) point out that ‘there are other objective approaches [to establishing social groupings] not exclusively dependent on socioeconomic ranking. . . . An investigator may look at such thing as church membership, leisure-time activities, or community organizations. They admit that such alternative, or approaches are not at all simple to devise but argue that a classification so obtained is probably more directly related to social class than the simple measurement of economic factors. We should note that there is a current emphasis on ‘life style’ in classifying people, so obviously patterns of consumption of goods and appearance are important for a number of people in arriving at some kind of social classification.

Alternative approaches to using a somewhat simple social scale are, however, unusual. What we find is that people are assigned to social classes through the use to composite scores derived from various scales which ‘measure’ some of the factors mentioned above. It is also the case that the actual scales used must necessarily vary from community to community since exactly the same characteristics cannot serve to classify people in England and United States or in New England and New Mexico. However, as we have indicated, nearly all such scales take into account such matters as educational achievement, professional training, occupation (sometimes parental occupation too), ‘blue’ or ‘white’-collar work, salary or income level, source of that salary, income, or wage (this difference also being important), sex, age, residential area, race, and ethnicity. Weights are then assigned to each of these and some kind of unitary scale is devised so that individuals can be fitted into slots carrying such designations as ‘upper class’, ‘lower working class’, and so on. Sometimes the stratifications, or gradation, are few (‘upper’ vs ‘middle’ class), but at other times they are many  (‘upper middle’ vs ‘middle middle’ class). Most work in sociolinguistics has drawn on commonly used unitary scales of this kind to designate the social class membership of individuals in an attempt to describe the characteristic linguistic behavior of various social classes.

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?