English native speakers

In the class society of the English-speaking world the social situation is much more fluid, and the linguistic situation is therefore rather complex, at least in certain respects. Social classes are not clearly defined or labelled entities but simply aggregates of people with similar social and economic characteristics; and social mobility - movement up or down the social hierarchy [haie’ra:ki] - is perfectly possible. This makes things much more difficult for any linguist who wishes to describe a particular variety because the more heterogeneous the society is, the more heterogeneous is its language.

For many years the linguist's reaction to this complexity was generally to ignore it in two rather different ways. Many linguists concentrated their studies on the idiolect [ai'dielekt] - the speech of one person at one time in one style - which was thought to be more regular than the speech of the community as a whole.

Dialectologists, on the other hand, concentrated on the speech of rural informants, and in particular on the elderly people of little education or travel experience in small isolated villages. Even small villages are socially heterogeneous, of course, but it is easier to ignore this fact in villages than in large towns. It is only fair to say, however, that there are two additional explanations why dialectologists concentrated on rural areas in this way. First, they were concerned with records of many dialect features, which were dying out and doomed to be lost for ever. Secondly, there was a feeling that hidden somewhere in the speech of older, uneducated people were the 'real' or ‘ pure' dialects which were steadily corrupted by the standard variety, but which the dialectologists could discover and describe.

It turns out that a ‘ pure' homogeneous dialect is also largely a mythical concept: the whole language is subject to stylistic and social differentiations, because all human communities are functionally differentiated and heterogeneous to varying degrees. All the language varieties are also subject to change. There is, therefore, an element of differentiation even in a most isolated conservative rural dialect. Gradually, however, dialectologists realized that by investigating only the speech of older, uneducated speakers they were obtaining an imperfect and inaccurate picture of speech in different areas. For example, the records of The Survey of English Dialects show that the county of Surrey, immediately to the south of London, is an area where non-prevocalic [r] is pronounced in words like yard and farm, whereas anybody who has been to Surrey will say that this is simply not the case for a large proportion of the population.

The dialectologists all over the world then began to incorporate social as well as geographical information into their rural dialect surveys. For example, workers on the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, which was begun in the 1930s, divided their informants into three categories largely according to the education they had received, and thereby added a social dimension to their linguistic information. They also began to investigate the speech of urban area speakers.

But it was not really until after the Second World War, however, that linguists also began to realize that in confining dialect studies to mainly rural areas they were remaining singularly ignorant about the speech of the vast majority of the population, i.e. those who lived in towns. It was clear that a large amount of linguistic data that was both interesting and potentially valuable to any linguistic theory had been ignored or lost.

For this reason, works with titles like The Speech of New York City and The Pronunciation of English in San Francisco began to appear. Urban studies presented a further problem, however: how on earth could a linguist describe 'the speech of New York City', a city of eight million or more heterogeneous inhabitants?! How accurate was it to refer to the 'English language in San Francisco' when a scholar’s work was based on the speech analysis of a few speakers out of thousands and millions whom he could not have investigated? Was it, in other words, legitimate or worthwhile to apply the methods of traditional rural dialectology to large urban areas? The answer was eventually 'No'.

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