Social groups and class Flashcards
(11 cards)
Describe labovs vineyard study in the context of social class
-vistited vineyard which is fishing industry but gets flooded with 40,000 visitors in summer
-interviewed 69 people of different social groups (age, occupation)
-focused on pronunciation of diphthongs ‘aw’ and ‘ay’ like in mouse and mice. Made convo natural to avoid demand chs
What were the findings of Labovs vineyard study?
Among the younger speakers movement in pronunciation took place from association with standard English to association with vineyard speaker (divergence).
This was a deliberate shift of pronunciation away from the standard norms to reject the summer people
-young men exaggerated their vineyard pronunciation to establish themselves as an independent social group
Describe labovs New York study
264 interviews with a variety of people with different social classes.
-studying how often ‘r’ was used in sales assistants from 3 stores of different social ranking Saks (high) Macy’s (middle)
- influenced each assistant to answer with ‘fourth floor’ and pretended not to hear to get repeat
What was the findings of labovs New York study
-those with higher socioeconomic status pronounced their ‘r’ more frequently (saks used r the most)
-lower classes are more aware of overt prestige and more likely to change how they speak when thinking about how they ‘should’ speak
What was Eckers American study?
he defined groups in terms of social practices that speakers engaged in by observing friendship groups in schools
Jocks- associated with school sponsored activities, high social status and respect
Burnouts- associated with resistance to school culture, lower social status and anti authority, drinking, smoking
What were the results of eckerts study?
-people tended to speak more like their friends rather who shared the same social practices than people belonging in the same social class
-negation is the most clear linguistic variable that reflects the different between Jocks (used 13% of time) and burnouts (48%) reflecting their lack of education
What did Eckert find about these social categories?
He found that these social categories influenced students behaviour and linguistic choices showing that language can reflect and reinforce social identity
What was Cheshire 1982 interested in researching?
-She compared speech of adolescence to adults using long term ppt observation
- to gain data about relationship between the use of grammatical variables and attachment to peer group culture
-recorded how often 2 groups of boys and 1 group of girls used 11 diff variables
What were the results of Cheshires study?
(groups of girls)
grouped girls into 2
Group a= didn’t have positive attitudes to weapons, fighting and swearing
Group b= approved of weapons, fighting and swearing
Group B used more non standard forms of language (non standard ‘s’ to conform to gangs)
What was Milroys social network theory?
-investigated how social networks enable language change
(Studied ‘th’ and ‘a’)
-2 main categories of social
networks:
Open netw- personal contacts don’t know each other
Closed netw- contacts generally know one another
-selected 3 working class comms in Belfast
-Measured how integration effects language use by using network strength score
(each informant told her how many other people in the community they knew and how well they knew them)
-Milroy interacted with all informants and observed their language use as they spoke to others in comm
What were Milroys social network theory findings?
People who had higher social networks score tended to use more non standard
Meaning the more integrated people were in their community the more ‘casual’ their linguistic choices
-people had stronger accents when working together and weaker accents when working at home
