RP in Great Britain

A number of other, rather more complex grammatical features have also been shown to correlate with social class in the same kind of patterned manner: to characterize, by their frequency of occurrence, different (but non-discrete) class dialects. Consider, for example, what happens if we wish to negate the following sentence: I can eat anything. There are two possibilities in the standard variety of English. We can either negate the verb, to produce: I can't eat anything; Or we can negate the pronoun to produce: I can eat nothing.

Social-class accents, in contrast to grammatical features, appear rather more difficult to handle. We know, from our experience, that there is a whole range of socially determined accents, but how exactly are we to correlate these phonetic and phonological features with sociological parameters? The usual method is to investigate, singly, the pronunciation of individual vowels and consonants. It is, for example, relatively simple to count the presence or absence of particular consonants in any stretch of speech. In Norwich the following three features were studied:

1. the percentage of n ' as opposed to ng in walking, running, etc.

2. the percentage of glottal stops as opposed to t in butter, bet, etc.

3. the percentage of 'dropped h ' as opposed to h in hammer, hat, etc.

These three consonants are clearly good indicators of social-class position in Norwich, and are particularly significant as indicators of membership of the middle-class or working-class as a whole. Once again, moreover, it seems that it is not possible to talk legitimately of discrete social-class accents; again there is a continuum, with most speakers using sometimes one pronunciation, sometimes another. The vast majority of Norwich speakers use both pronunciations of all three consonants. It is also particularly interesting to note that even the highest class uses walkin'-type pronunciations 31 per cent of the time, on average.

Probably the first study of consonantal variation of this kind was made by W. Labov in New York City. The hypothesis that non-prevocalic [r] usage would be correlated with social class was tested in an experiment rather more amusing than many linguistic investigations: by examining the speech of shop assistants in three different department stores, of high, medium and low status respectively. The procedure was to find out which departments were on the fourth floor and then to ask as many assistants as possible in the rest of the shop a question like, 'Excuse me, where are the women's shoes on sale? ' The answer to this would be fourth floor - with two possible occurrences of non-prevocalic [r]. In this way information on [r]-usage was obtained from 264 informants (who did not know that they were being interviewed by a linguist). The results were: 38 per cent of the high-ranking store assistants used no [r], 49 per cent in the middle store and 83 per cent in the low-ranking store. Thus, as well as acquiring a vast amount of rather restricted knowledge about the topography of New York department stores, the investigator obtained an important indication of how socially significant a relatively trivial feature of accent can be.

With vowels, which are often socially more significant than consonants, the problem of measurement is greater, since it is not the presence or absence of a particular sound which is involved, but small (often very small) differences of vowel quality. The linguist gets round this problem by distinguishing accurately (although often arbitrarily) between different vowel qualities and treating them as though they were discrete sounds. For example, there is a wide range of socially significant variations in New York English pronunciation of the vowel [æ] in cab, bag, bad, half, path, dance. The different variants form a continuum, but it is possible to split this up artificially into four distinct types: 1. [bied]; 2. [bæd]; 3 [bæ:d]; 4. [bə:d]. Thus, in casual conversation, all New Yorkers use on average a pronunciation between [bied] and [bə:d], but there is a small but consistent difference between the social classes: lower-class speakers tend to use a closer vowel more frequently than higher-class speakers. A very small vowel-quality difference therefore turns out to be socially rather significant.

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