Malcolm Petyt - Social Variation Flashcards
Where and when did Petyt’s study take place?
Bradford, West Yorkshire, 1985
What was the main linguistic variable Petyt looked at?
|h| dropping
How did he divide up the different social classes?
In a similar way to Trudgill: divided each class into different sections
What were the different sections he divided the social classes into?
Upper Middle Class Lower Middle Class Upper Working Class Middle Working Class Lower Working Class
What were the percentages like for each of the different classes that used the regional form of the linguistic variable?
UMC - 12% LMC - 28% UWC - 67% MWC - 89% LWC - 93%
What did these percentages show?
That the linguistic variable went from one extreme to the other and showed that there was a strong correlation between having a lower social class and using the vernacular form of the linguistic variable.
What else did Petyt discover?
That people who had moved up in social class had modified their accents more to math R.P.
How did Petyt further explore what he discovered?
By looking at another linguistic variable.
What was this additional linguistic variable Petyt looked at?
replacing the vowel sound |ʌ| in R.P. “put” to |ʊ| in R.P “putt”
(u -> UH)
What did he find about this additional linguistic variable?
in many Norther accents |u| os used in both R.P. pronunciations of |ʌ| and |ʊ|.
What did the people who had moved up in social class do with the additional linguistic variable?
They hyper-corrected the use of it. They used both forms, sometimes even using the wrong pronunciation in words.
