Dialectological researches

Those urban dialectologists, who recognized that this was the case, were therefore forced to work out how they were to describe, fully and accurately, the speech of large towns and cities, and it was in response to this problem that urban dialectology eventually became sociolinguistic. In 1966, the American linguist, William Labov, published the results of a large-scale survey of the speech of New York citizens entitled The Social Stratification of English in New York City. He had carried out tape-recorded interviews, not with a handful of informants, but with 340. Even more important, his informants were selected, not through friends or personal contacts (as had often been the case earlier), but by means of a scientifically designed ‘ random sample ’, which meant that everybody had an equal chance of selection for this interview.

By using the sociological methods such as random sampling Labov claimed that the speech of his informants was truly representative of that of New York (or at least of the particular area he investigated, the Lower East Side). Since the informants were a representative sample, the linguistic description could therefore be an accurate description of all the varieties of English spoken in this area. Labov also developed techniques, later refined, for eliciting [получить] a normal speech from people in spite of the presence of the tape-recorder. He also developed methods for the quantitative measurements of linguistic data. Since this breakthrough many other studies of urban dialects have been made, in many parts of the world, on the same sort of pattern.

The methods developed by Labov have proved to be very significant for the study of social-class dialects and accents. Early methods of traditional dialectology may be called adequate only for the description of caste dialects (though even this is doubtful) since any individual, however selected, stands a fair chance of being not too different from the caste group as a whole. But it is not possible to select individual speakers and to generalize from them to the rest of the speakers in their social-class group. This was an important point that was demonstrated by Labov. The speech of single speakers (their idiolects) may differ considerably from those of others like them. Moreover, it may also be internally very inconsistent.

The speech of the most New York dwellers varies in a completely random and unpredictable manner. Sometimes they would say guard with an /r/, sometimes without. Sometimes they would say beard and bad in the same way, sometimes they would make a difference. Linguists have traditionally called this 'free variation'. Labov showed, however, that the variation was not free. Viewed against the background of the speech community as a whole, the variation was not random but determined by extra-linguistic factors in a quite predictable way. That is, the researcher could not predict on any one occasion whether individuals would say cah or car, but he could show that, if they were of a certain social class, age and sex, they would use one or other variant approximately 99% per cent of the time, on average, in a given situation. The idiolect might appear random, but the speech community was quite predictable. In any case, by means of methods of the type employed by Labov the problem of the speech heterogeneity of the communities has been, at least partly, overcome. We are now able to correlate linguistic features with a social class accurately, and obtain thereby a clearer picture of social dialect differentiation.

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