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Quiz 1 ..[align=left]
Sociolinguistics: The interrelationship between language and society.
Language is variable, is not used in the same manner by all people in all situations.
Variety: a neutral term to refer to any form of language (languages & dialects)
Speech community: controversial concept: a community of people who share a linguistic variety as their own and share social norms.
shared linguistic norms , shared communicative competence and shared social norms. (can be a city, neighborhood, region, nation)
Communicative (Sociolinguistic) competence (imp.): speaker’s underlying knowledge of rules of grammar and rules for their use in socially appropriate circumstances.
Variation and Language(essay)
The variable: an abstract representation of the source of variation, realised by two or more variants, e.g ‘think’ /q/ : [q], [f].
the variants are the actual realization of a variable > (variable) – [actual use]
Variation Studies
1. Fischer’s 1958 study of the use of (ng)-standard in New England:
12 boys, 12 girls aged 3-10.
Interview
Conclusions:
Boys used more [in] than girls.
The use of [in] increases with the formality of situations. The use of [in] increased when relaxed.
[in] is used more with verbs that describe everyday activities ,e.g ‘hit’ ; [ing] is used with formal verbs, e.g ‘criticize’.

2. Labov (1966) study of (r) in New York:(essay)
To investigate the incidence of final and post-vocalic /r/
While most American accents are rhotic, New York (and Boston) have distinctive non-rhotic accent
Labov showed that rhotic use of /r/ reflected social class and aspiration, and was more widespread in younger speakers
Method
He needed to quickly elicit possible /r/ pronunciations in both spontaneous and careful speech
Walked around 3 NYC department stores, asking the location of departments he knew were on the fourth floor
By pretending not to hear, he got each informant to pronounce the two words twice, once spontaneously, and once carefully
3 stores catering for distinct social groups: Saks (upper), Macy’s (middle), S. Klein (lower)
Informants were shop workers at different grades, giving a further possible stratification
Results
Social class (results): Use of [r] corresponded to higher class of store
His conclusion: /r/ is used more by the upper class, less use by the lower class (working class).
Style: 1st & 2nd utterance; it was used more with careful speech in all department stores. And the use of [r] increases in careful speech
Pronunciation and style: Adoption of prestige form increases with formality of style, in each case with a higher usage by higher classes EXCEPT in one case
middle class outperform upper middle class on word lists and minimal pairs this cross-over due to hypercorrection (according to Labov) not sure whether results are statistically significant
(Labov) people thought positively with the use of /r/ in New York, though they did not use it all the time.
Labov wanted to investigate the use of /r/ in different styles.
The lower middle class do well than the upper middle class.
Hyper correction: is over-generalization (you over generalize the rule, sometime you mistake, e.g. ذمان instead of زمان .

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