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What is sociolinguistics? - It is the study of language in its social context. It is a field of investigation which describes all areas of the study of the relationship between language and society. In the late 1960 s and the early 1970 s, a widespread interest in sociolinguistics developed. The study of language in relation to society has a long tradition, but a recognizable growth in sociolinguistics took place in the 60 s and 70 s. As most other fields of investigation as well, sociolinguistics is partly theoretical and partly empirical. The development of quantitative studies of speech has coincided with that of sociolinguistics and, for many linguists whose main interest is the structure of language, this part of sociolinguistics apparently makes the most relevant contribution, providing new data which need to be reconciled with current linguistic theories.
The work which is done quantitative studies is all based on the study of spoken rather than written language (though in some cases the speaker is reading from a written text, such as a list of words), and its aim has been to find out about everyday speech of ordinary people, in reaction to the high degree of idealization that is typical of transformational-generative grammar. The aim of this branch of sociolinguistics, like that of the 'dialect geography' branch of dialectology, is explicitly comparative - to compare texts with one another, rather than to make some kind of 'total' analysis of each text without reference to others. It is the purpose of studying texts - to test hypotheses about relations among linguistic and social variables. The fact that the investigator starts with a predetermined list of linguistic variables and their variants shows that he expects the variants in his list actually to occur in the sort of texts he has collected, and he also generally starts with a range of hypotheses about the social variables to which those in his list are related, such as region, social class, or sex.
If each text contained instances of only one variant for each variable, then it could be located in the relevant multi-dimensional linguistic space without using quantitative methods. Different variants of the same variable occur together in the same text, and texts can be arranged on a continuous scale according to how often the variants occur. The relations between different linguistic variables are also a matter of degree, some being more closely related than others; and the same is true of relations between linguistic and social variables. It is rare indeed to find any linguistic variable whose variations exactly match those of any other linguistic or social variable, though it is common to find variables which match each other sufficiently closely to convince one that there is some kind of causal connection between them. A 11 these facts call for a quantitative treatment of the "data, using appropriate statistical techniques. The person mainly responsible for the use of quantitative methods in the study of texts is the linguist, William Labov.
In his studies of linguistic variation, William Labov paid a good deal of attention to methodology. The questions he was concerned with were how to collect data, how to analyse it well, and how to interpret the results successfully. Following the classical Labovian approach to quantitative studies, we differentiate five different stages. In a sociolinguistic text study, we differentiate five different stages.
Those are: A -selecting speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables; B - collecting the texts; C - identifying the linguistic variables and their variants in the texts; D - processing the figures E - interpreting the results. A - selecting speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables - The selection of speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables involves some extremely important decisions, which are to a certain extent dictated by hypotheses about the expected results. It is similarly important that all the speech should be collected under the same circumstances, so far as this is possible. There is a major problem of definition here, both for social variables relating to speaker and circumstances, and for the linguistic variables themselves. How can we define 'manual worker'?
How can we distinguish old from young? Even worse is the problem of defining the community to be studied, since 'speech communities' are not self-defining. The researcher has to provide solutions which are at least reasonably satisfactory, to avoid the real danger that his results will be valueless because of ambiguities in defining the variables. B - collecting the texts - The collection of texts necessitates finding appropriate speakers who are willing to participate.
This means finding people willing to be interviewed and recorded for about an hour in their homes, but many alternatives are described in the literature. C - identifying the linguistic variables and their variants in the texts - At this stage, one might expect the least difficulty, since we already know what the variants to be distinguished are, and all we need do is listen for them. However, there is a considerable degree of subjectivity in recognizing phonetic variants, and different researchers can produce different analyses of the same text, even when they are highly trained phoneticians. One may also need to record information about the linguistic environment in which each instance of a variable is used since this often influences the choice of one variant rather than another, but this is only possible if there is already a clear hypothesis as to which aspects of that environment are relevant. D - processing the figures - The processing of the figures involves counting the number of identified occurences of each variant in each text, and comparing the figures for different texts. The obvious step is to reduce all the figures to percentages, since this makes comparison much easier.
The next step is to discover which differences between texts are significant, i. e. which would form a reasonable basis for general ising to other texts of the same types. The investigator has to use statistical tests in order to decide how significant the figures are.
It is also important to understand that statistical techniques allow one to calculate the likelihood of some pattern of results occurring without any causal connection between the figures concerned, but never provide proof either for or against the existence of causal connection. Even where a causal connection between two factors is reflected by the statistics, it does not follow that one factor is the cause of the other. It is possible that they are both results of some other factor. E - interpreting the results - The interpretation of the results is in some ways the most difficult stage, since this is where the findings have to be fitted into a general theoretical framework dealing with the structure of language and its relations to society and individuals. Success at this stage depends not only on correct methodology at all the previous stages, but also on having an adequate general theoretical framework.
These methods were first developed by William Labov in his innovatory urban study The social stratification of English in New York City (1966). Labov attempted to attain representativeness in the Lower East Side of New York City by taking his informants from a previously constructed random sample of the population. A sample frame is any list which enumerates the relevant population, simple examples being electoral registers and telephone directories; the main principle of random sampling is that anyone within the sample frame has an equal chance of being selected. Although Labov was by no means the first urban dialectologist to be sensitive to the need to give a representative account of urban speech, his sampling methods are, however, important and distinctive in that they were part of a larger, , principled programme for the quantitative study of language variation, which itself was designed to address important theoretical problems in linguistics.
Labov's ultimate description of results was based mainly on 88 speakers - just over one quarter of the original random sample. The data was collected in just a few hours and which is a classic example of the method of rapid anonymous observation. The chosen variable represents the presence or absence ( (r): [r] versus (r): &# 61597; ) of a consonantal constriction corresponding to the letter r in words like fa...
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