The Social Stratification of English in New York City by William Labov

By William Labov

One of many first money owed of social version in language, this groundbreaking research based the self-discipline of sociolinguistics, offering the version on which hundreds of thousands of reviews were dependent. during this moment variation, Labov appears again on 40 years of sociolinguistic examine, bringing the reader modern on its equipment, findings and achievements. In over thirty pages of latest fabric, he explores the unexpected implications of his prior paintings, addresses the political concerns concerned, and evaluates the luck of more moderen ways to sociolinguistic research. In doing so, he unearths the exceptional accomplishments of sociolinguistics due to the fact that his unique learn, which laid the principles for learning language version, brought the an important notion of the linguistic variable, and confirmed how version throughout age teams is a trademark of language swap. Bringing Labov's pioneering examine into the twenty first century, this vintage quantity will stay the benchmark within the box for years yet to come.

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Sample text

In order to investigate the pronunciation of a great many lexical items by his informants, Hubbell found it necessary to rely primarily upon the reading of isolated sentences. He defends this policy on the grounds that stylistic variation is really not very important: . . objections have sometimes been raised to the use of written material. These objections, I feel, are not particularly convincing, for the distortions that appear in reading are pretty obvious and can be taken into account. The most important variation from ordinary conversational speech is in the frequently altered pattern of intonation and stress .

H/ distinct from / /? / h/ distinct from / h/? As a result of the exploratory interviews, we can revise Hubbell’s list of ingliding phonemes as a column of nine question marks. Resolution of the problem The complexities found in the exploratory interviews may appear to justify the view that New York City speech is chaotic, and that “free variation” is indeed an adequate description. But free variation on a scale such as this is hardly consonant with the concept of a coherent, interrelated system.

K. Thomas (1932, 1942, 1951) published several articles about New York City speech, based upon his observations of college students who attended Cornell University. His observations are primarily of two types: lists of specific words which occur with particular sounds, especially in the area of the low back vowels, and discussions of errors from the point of view of the speech teacher. In Thomas’ extensive records of the usage of college students, we have valuable information on the more formal styles of younger middle class speakers.

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