Language and Social Groups

Question 1

Cheshire

Answer 1

Teenagers from Reading, Cheshire wanted to study how peer group culture affected spoken grammar. She believed the higher the social class; the more non-standard forms would be used. Cheshire found that, for both boys and girls, patterns of non-standard use were an important part of the identity of each group.

Question 2

Labov

Answer 2

On Martha’s Vineyard a small group of fishermen began to exaggerate a tendency already establishing in their speech. They did this seemingly subconsciously, in order to establish themselves as an independent social group with superior status to the despised tourists. A number of other islanders regarded this group as one which epitomised old virtues and desirable values, and subconsciously imitated the way its members talked. For these people, the new pronunciation was an innovation. As more and more people came to speak in the same way, the innovation gradually became the norm for those living on the island.

Question 3

Giles

Answer 3

Communication Accommodation Theory:
The notion that people change their speech to signal their feelings about who they’re speaking to.
- Convergence: Changing your speech to match the person you’re talking to.
- Divergence: Changing your speech to distance yourself from the person you’re talking to

Question 4

Trudgill

Answer 4

Trudgill’s study on the effects of social class on language use explored the differences between working and middle class backgrounds in their pronunciation of certain sounds, including the velar nasal /n/ at the end of words like ‘running’. He concluded that changing the velar nasal /n/ to an alveolar /n/ - saying ‘runnin’ instead of ‘running’ - was more likely to feature in working-class speech than in middle-class speech, although he also found differences between men’s and women’s use of the non-standard forms. He estimated that only 3% of speakers used RP

Question 5

Petyt

Answer 5

Petyt's study shows that the greater regional accent use in the working class, diminishes as you move up the social class scale. The results from the study shows that the upper middle class rarely used H-dropping compared to the lower end of the social class scale, the lower-working class that had a very frequent use of it. When individuals may move up the social class scale, they would modify their speech a bit further towards RP as well as making less use of non-standard features like H-dropping.
Speakers who moved up in the social class scale made a conscious effort, to change their pronunciation of vowel sounds, known as hypercorrection. For example, using both /u/ and /uh/ forms that often result in the use of the wrong form e.g. /uh/ in the first vowel sound of the word 'cushion'

Question 6

Milroy Social

Answer 6

Milroy argues that increased geographical mobility leads to the ‘large-scale disruption of close-knit, localized networks that have historically maintained highly systematic and complex sets of socially structured linguistic norms’