Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

9.

Transcribe the text below into IPA following your native accent as

closely as you can, indicating lexical stress on polysyllabic items.

Note that in some cases there might be several alternative ways of

pronouncing a given sound or sound sequence.

For some, Britain and the United States are two countries divided

by a common language, and the same could be said of other places

where English is spoken, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand or

South Africa. Nonetheless, on the whole English speakers tend to

communicate with each other somehow. Nor should we jump to the

conclusion that it’s just across national boundaries that accent and

dialect differences occur. The differences in the speech of Americans

from New England and those from the Deep South can be at least as

great as the differences between New Englanders and British speakers,

or between Australians and New Zealanders.

3

Sound variation

In our main introduction, we observed that language varies across both time

and space. If we compare the English spoken in the cities of Perth, Pittsburgh, Port Elizabeth and Plymouth, we can point not only to differences between these four cities, but also to historical differences which distinguish these varieties today from those spoken in these locations 150 years ago. This important study of historical and geographical variation has been a preoccupation of linguists for well over a century now, and continues to be a strong focus of research in

dialectology and historical linguistics. It is only in recent times, however, that linguists have begun to investigate linguistic variation within communities. The French spoken in Marseilles may be different from that spoken in Montreal, but what about the use of language within these cities? Does everyone in Montreal speak an identical variety of French? Clearly not, we might suppose, but it was not until the 1960s that linguists began to take this view seriously and study variation within villages, towns and cities.

In this section we will examine phonological variation – the variability in

language that affects those features which have been introduced in the previous

section: sounds, syllables, stress and intonation. Because of the nature of existing research, our discussion will be concerned exclusively with sounds.

Linguistic variables and sociological variables

So what is phonological variation? A reasonable definition might be

that it is the existence within the speech of a single community of more than one possible realisation (or variant) of a particular sound. A simple introductory example is the variable loss of the glottal fricative [h] in the northern English city of Bradford, with words like hammer being pronounced [hamə] or [amə].

Table 3 shows how often different social class groups in Bradford use the two different possibilities [h] or Ø (i.e. nothing):

We can see clearly in this table that there are class differences in the use of

[h] – the higher someone’s social class, the more likely they are to use [h]. This class difference is interesting, but more important is the fact that everybody in this Bradford research used both forms at least some of the time. Even the lower-working-class speakers occasionally used [h] and the middle middle-class speakers sometimes omitted it. The variation within this community, then, is relative.

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48

sounds

Table 3 The omission of [h] in Bradford

Percentage of the number of occurrences

Social class

of [h] that were omitted, i.e. Ø

lower working class

93

middle working class

89

upper working class

67

lower middle class

28

middle middle class

12

Different groups use different proportions of the two variants, and this is typical of variation. Absolute differences, situations where one group within the community uses a particular form all of the time in contrast with other groups which never use that form, occur less frequently (exercise 1).

In order to describe this quantitative variation, linguists have devised the notion of the linguistic variable, an analytical construct which enables them to contrast people’s use of different variants. A variable is a linguistic unit which has two or more variants that are used in different proportions either by different sections of the community or in different linguistic or contextual circumstances. Variables can be concerned with phonological factors, the topic of this section, and also with word structure, word meaning and syntax. For the example above, we say that the variable (h) – variables are normally put in round brackets – has two variants [h]

and Ø, the use of which relates to a person’s social class.

The procedure for analysing the use of a variable in a particular community is as follows:

1.

Recordings are made of conversational speech from people belonging

to different groups in the community.

2.

Researchers listen to these recordings, noting down the pronunciation

of a representative number of instances of each variable. Normally,

they analyse at least thirty examples of each variable for each person

they record.

3.

Each person’s relative use of the different variants is calculated. The

results of this are often presented as percentages, showing that a

particular speaker used x% of one variant and y% of the other.

4.

It is then possible to amalgamate these results to produce group scores.

So, for example, the researcher may calculate an average of the scores

of all the working-class speakers and compare this figure with the

averaged scores of middle-class speakers, or an average for middle-aged

men to compare with the average for middle-aged women.

We have seen for the example of (h) in Bradford that there appears to be a

relationship between social class and language use. Such a relationship has been found in many westernised speech communities around the world – from Chicago to Copenhagen, from Brisbane to Berlin. Outside western societies, however, the notion

Sound variation

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90

80

70

ilated 60

50

40

30

% of vowels assim 20

10

0

Univ ersity

Secondary

Primary

None

Educational achievement

Figure 17 Sound variation and speaker educational achievement: vowel

assimilation in Tehran Farsi (from Hudson 1996)

of social class is less easy to apply. Most research of this type in non-western societies has used education level as a means to measure socioeconomic divisions when

correlating language use to social structure. An example is provided by the occurrence of vowel assimilation by Farsi (Persian) speakers in Tehran. Assimilation was briefly mentioned in the introduction (pp. 4–5), and we can illustrate its role in Tehran Farsi using the Farsi verb meaning ‘do’. The standard pronunciation of this verb is

[bekon], but the vowel in the first syllable may assimilate to the second vowel, giving the variant [bokon]. Figure 17 shows that the higher the educational achievement of speakers, the less likely they are to assimilate vowels.

Whether we rely on social class or education, what appears common to all

societies is that social structure is reflected in linguistic structure in some way.

We should expect, therefore, that, besides the socioeconomic characteristics of speakers, other social factors will also affect and structure linguistic variability.

This certainly appears to be the case if we consider the gender of the speaker. The relationship between language variation and speaker gender is probably the most extensively studied in sociolinguistic research. One of the consistent findings is that, all other things being equal, women use proportionately more standard