Name : Zandra Yolanda D.

P
Nim : [Link].0.027

LANGUAGE VARIATION
One way of characterizing certain variations is to say that speakers of a particular language
sometimes speak different dialects of that language. In this way, it would be possible to talk about
both regional dialects and social dialects of a language.
 Regional dialect is marks off the residents of one region from those of other regions.
 Social dialect is marks the social class or group off from other classes or groups.

1. Regional Variation
 The mapping of dialects on a regional basis has a long history in linguistics.
o Dialect studies grew out of historical studies of languages.
o How languages change over time i.e., of diachronic or historical linguistics.
o “Dialect geography”.

 Languages differentiate internally.

o Speakers distance themselves from one another over time and over space.
o Dialects become new languages.
o Unintelligible to one another. E.g., Latin became French in Frances, Spanish in Spain,
and Italian in Italy.

 Linguists try to explain the differences with models (familiar to historical linguist).
o Family Tree.
e.g., Latin has branched into French, Spanish, and Italian.
o Phonemic “split”.
e.g., English /f/ and /v/ are distinctive sounds.
o The ‘comparative method’ of reconstruction.
e.g., English Knave and German Knabe come from the same source.
o Internal reconstruction.
e.g., mouse and mice have different vowel sounds.

Dialect geographers have traditionally attempted to reproduce their findings on maps in what
they call dialect atlases. They try to show the geographical boundaries of the distribution of a
particular linguistic feature by drawing a line on a map. Such a line is called an isogloss. On one
side of the line, people say one thing, on the other they say a different thing Isogloss. The isogloss
is geographical boundary or delineation of a certain linguistic feature. For example, the
pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. A line on a
map enclosing an area within which a particular linguistic feature is found. Various types of
isogloss are distinguished such as an isophone is a feature of pronunciation, an isolex an item of
vocabulary, an isomorph a feature of word formation, and an isoseme a particular word meaning.
The isoglosses show a considerable amount of crisscrossing caused a number of coincide. The
coincide called a bundle of isoglosses. A bundle is often said to marks a dialect boundary.
Isoglosses can also show that a particular set of linguistic features appears to be spreading from
one location:
  A focal area is an area whose dialect has exerted influence on the dialects of surrounding
areas, as reflected in a set of isoglosses more or less concentrically surrounding it. e.g.,
Beverly Hills affect LA called “coke” with “soda”.

 Relic area is an area isolated from the influences of any focal area and preserving older
linguistic forms that have been lost in other regions. e.g., Antelope Valley still calls bubbly
with “coke”, although other regions have changed the mention of “coke” with “soda”, then
the AV is called the relic area.

 A transition area is an area whose dialect has been influenced by the dialect of one or more
neighboring focal areas. e.g., the neighboring areas of Beverly Hills, such as Watts Influenced
LA called “coke” rather than “soda”. LA called a transition area.

2. The Linguistic Variable

A linguistic variable is a linguistic item which has identifiable variants. For example:
“singing” and “fishing” are sometimes pronounced by some speakers as “singin” and ‘fishin”
respectively. The final sound in these words is called the linguistic variable [ŋ] with its two variants
as [ŋ] in “singing” and “fishing” and [n] in “singin” and “fishin”. Another example of the linguistic
variable is found in the words like “car” and “card”. These words are sometimes assigned the (r)
less pronunciation by some speakers. Thus, in a way, we can see the linguistic variable (r) with its
two alternative forms or variants [r] and Ø (pronounced as “zero”). This brief sample indicates
some of the range of variables that have been investigated. The important fact to remember is that
a linguistic variable is an item in the structure of a language, an item that has alternate realizations,
as one speaker realizes it one way and another a different way or the same speaker realizes it
differently on different occasions. For example, one speaker may say “singing” most of the time
whereas another prefers “singin”, but the first is likely to say “singin” on occasion just as the
second may be found to use the occasional “singing”. What might be interesting is any relationship
we find between these habits and either (or both) the social class to which each speaker belongs or
the circumstances which bring about one pronunciation rather than the other. Labov (1972b) has
also distinguished among what he calls indicators, markers, and stereotypes.

 Indicator is a linguistic variable to which little or no social import is attached.

o E.g. some speakers in North America distinguish the vowels in cot and caught and others
do not.
o It doesn’t carry with it social significance.

 Marker does carries with it social significance.

o Related to social groupings and to styles of speaking.
o e.g. pronouncing car and cart in New York City in their r-less varieties marks you as
using a type of pronunciation associated with lower-class speech in that city.
o New Yorkers are conscious of this fact.

 stereotype is a popular and conscious characterization of the speech of a particular group

o E.g. the British use of chap, a Northumbrian Wot-cher (What cheer?).
o Often these are stigmatized.
o It offers people a rough and ready categorization.

3. Linguistic and Social Variation

This talk is about how linguistic variation relates to social variation. Almost all sociolinguistic
studies and investigations are concerned with the ways wherein language varies according to the
 social context in which it is used. Languages also change according to the social group to which
their speakers belong. As a matter of fact, no modern speech community offers to be a
homogeneous one. In every speech community, there is a social stratification or social
heterogeneity. This social heterogeneity is reflected in the language use of its speakers and gives
rise to speech variation among them. This is because of the fact that language and society are
closely related. Therefore, it can be said that linguistic variation is closely related to social
variation. This is also true to say that linguistic variation is due to the social variation. It is a well-
established fact that for the linguistic variation certain social factors or social variables such as
religion, region (place of living or socioeconomic status), education, age and occupation are quite
responsible. These social variables have been seen to modify the structure of language
considerably and give rise to linguistic variation.

4. Data Collection and Analysis

Once an investigator has made some decision concerning which social variable must be taken
into account and has formed a hypothesis about a possible relationship between social and
linguistic variation, the next task becomes one of collecting data that will either confirm or refute
that hypothesis. In sociolinguistics, this task has two basic dimensions, devising some kind of plan
for collecting relevant data and then collecting such data from a representative sample of speakers.
As we will see, neither task is an easy one. An immediate problem is one that I have previously
referred to (p. 19) as the “observer’s paradox”. Objective data without injecting your own self into
the data and the presence of an observer will have some effect on the variation. The usual kind of
data collection device is a questionnaire designed to elicit data illustrative of the use of the variable
or variables that are being investigated. Since experience has shown that the different variants of
a variable occur in different circumstances, the questionnaire must be designed to elicit data in a
variety of circumstances. Many studies have made a four-fold distinction in categorizing those
circumstances: (1) A casual situation, with sub-categories such as speech outside the formal
interview, or conversation with a third party (i.e., not the person doing the interviewing), or
responses to general questions, or recall of childhood rhymes, or the narration of a story about
feeling one’s life to be in peril. (2) An interview situation. (3) The reading aloud of a story and (4)
the reading aloud of lists of words and of pairs of words like den and then. A questionnaire which
elicits these various kinds of linguistic behaviors will cover very casual speech (the casual
situation), more formal speech (the interview situation), and the most formal speech of all (the
different reading tasks). 1966, the study of Labov in New York investigated both careful and casual
speech.

 His 4 types of careful speech.

o Reading lists of close pairs.
o Reading lists of words.
o Reading a prose passage.
o Participating in a formal interview.

 His 5 types of casual speech.

o Speech outside the formal interview.
o Conversation with a third party.
o Responses to questions.
o Telling childhood rhymes.
o Recounting an incident which might have proved fatal.

 9 contextual styles.
o Each style had to be accompanied by appropriate channel cues.
o These cues involved changes of speech pitch, volume, and rate of breathing.
 o Spontaneous and casual.
o E.g. the subject’s breaking away from the topic of the recorded interview to deal with
some situation in the immediate environment.

Labov also included what he called a subjective reaction test in his questionnaire, requiring
subjects to react to taped samples of speech containing the five variables he was concerned with
in his study. 1974, the study of Trudgill required his subjects to:
 To answer certain questions.
 To read word lists aloud “as naturally as you can”, and later “as rapidly as you can”.
 To read pairs of words, etc.

The other part of the linguist’s task is sampling. Sampling is

 Finding a representative group of speakers.
 To generalize concerning its characteristics requires considerable skill.
 Must be thoroughly representative and completely unbiased.
 All parts of the population must be adequately represented.
 kinds of samples:
o Random sample is everyone has an equal chance of being selected (the best sample).
o Judgment sample is the investigator chooses the subjects according to a set of criteria
(e.g. age, sex, education, etc.).
o Stratified sample is one chosen for specific characteristics, from that survey.

Studies employing the linguistic variable are

 Correlational in nature.
o They attempt to show how the variants of a linguistic variable are related to social
variation in much the same way that we can show ho children’s ages, heights are related
to one another.
o Dependent variables as independent variables.
o Linguistic variable as a dependent variable, the one we are interested in.
o Statistical in nature.
 Statistical treatments must follow certain basic principles.

Investigators must be prepared to employ proper statistical procedures not only in their
sampling but also in the treatment of the data they collect and in testing the various hypotheses
they formulate. They must be sure that what they are doing is both valid and reliable.
 Validity is whether or not the sociolinguist is really measuring what he or she is claiming to
be measuring.
 Reliability is how objective and consistent the measurements of the actual linguistic data are.

Serious experimental studies require experimental hypotheses to be stated before the data are
collected. Statistical tests to be chosen to decide whether these hypotheses are confirmed or not
and with what degree of confidence. The data collected be treated quantifiably. Standard deviation
is the actual distribution of the various measurements around those means.

The figures that sociolinguists use in their tables may be misleading.

 You may draw some other conclusion.
 But there are approved statistical procedures to help investigators to decide how far they can
be confident.
o Not only to calculate the means for each class, but also to assess the amount of variation
in the responses within each class.
o Then to test pairs of differences of means among the classes.
 A suitable test of a hypothesis as level of significance.
 Unless their statistical procedures indicate that the same results would occur by chance in less
than one case in a hundred, they will not say that two groups differ in some respect.
 They insist that their claims be significant at the 0.01 level of significance.