Social factors and social markers

In all English-speaking countries there exists a close and obvious connection between language and social class: speech stratification correlates with social stratification. But only in England the phonetic factors assume a predominating role which they do not generally have in other parts of the English-speaking world.

Peter Trudgill, a well-known British sociolinguist, claims that it is of­ten possible to tell whether the speaker has been to a major public school i >r only to a minor one on the strength of the phonetic evidence, the qual-uy of/u:/. Peter Roach describes the young people's change in quality of /Li/ as fronting, compared to a fully back position of more conservative ways of /u:/ articulation {Roach 2001).

RP (mainstream and conservative)/oou? [fu:d] RP (advanced)/ood [f Lid]

In 1972 survey carried out by National Opinion Polls there was a question: "Which two of these eleven specified factors would you say are most important in being able to tell which class a person is? " The respondents were a random sample of the British public. The factor which scored highest overall was "The way they speak"; next in order came "Where they live", "The friends they have", "Their job", "The sort of school they went to", "The way they spend their money", and only then "The amount of money they have" and other factors (Reid 1977:27). Hence speech was regarded as more indicative of social class than occupation, education, and income; and the likelihood is that by "the way they speak" respondents meant, above all, accent.

Thus accents are associated with the people who use them, with their way of life, and may have symbolic values. The accents of big urban centres like Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow in U.K. may have negative associations with the polluted environment of industrial area.

In the U.S.A., New York is viewed as the centre of crime and drug taking (but also the financial and intellectual centre). Although there is no necessary connection at all between personality types and accents, most people react as if there were.

There is a stereotype of an RP speaker, for instance, to possess authority, competence, intelligence and ambition while a local accent is associated with friendliness, personal integrity, kindness. In a broadcasting experiment with thousands of people listening to a simple everyday talk (four men answered the question "When did you last buy a pair of shoes?"), among the four accents RP accent was coupled with a lawyer's profession, while Liverpool accent was attributed to a chimney sweep. RP speaker may be disliked because he sounds "posh", "affected", "highfollutin", while a person with a working class accent may be positively assessed for "friendship", "fight," "solidarity", "personalintegrity".

In the U.S.A., a Southern accent evokes associations with the agricultural area, with ignorance, conservative views and habits, but also with southern aristocracy and "southernbeauties".

Most often these stereotypes are unjustified, but they are nevertheless powerful and a factor to be reckoned with. Very often mass media, films and videos support and revive stereotypes, to the detriment of those who are discriminated against. Linguists and social psychologists protest, while the public enjoy the cartoons and commercials in which dark-haired vil­lains shock their fair-haired victims with a thick nasal twang, and where a rude New York policeman makes fun of a dumb southern driver (Lippi-Green 1997, Metcal/2000).

Sociolinguists have compared accent variation in England to a pyramid in which the horizontal dimension represents geographical variation and the vertical dimension indicates social variation. The pyramid is broad at the base since working-class accents exhibit a great deal of regional variation (urban and rural local accents). Among the lower middle classes the geographical variation is greater than in the middle middle class but less than in the working class. The pyramid rises to a narrow point at the top where upper class accents exhibit no regional variation. The model implies that RP being a social accent of upper and upper middle class (U-RP and UM-class), it is placed at the top of the social ladder, that regional standards are spoken by middle middle (MM) and lower middle (LM) classes, that upper working and lower working (UW and LW) classes are in command of local accents diversity.

It should be noted that the status of RP has changed. British phonetitians agree that RP is still an implicitly accepted social standard associated with the speech of BBC announcers. But, over the last 20 years, both the BBC and other national radio and TV channels have been increasingly tolerant of broadcasters' accents. Nevertheless, in their choice of newsreaders, the national TV and radio channels still use predominantly RP speakers. However, in view of the number of people using it, RP is an accent of such a small minority that there may be more foreign speakers of RP than native speakers of that accent of English (Crystal 1997).

There is a new classification of RP types in the 6^th edition of A.C. Gimson's "Introduction to the Pronunciation of English" revised by Alan Cruttenden in 2001: General RP, Refined RP and Regional RP (Cruttenden 2001: 80).

As we can see, the authors have combined two basic principles of accent classification here: the social and the regional, showing that there are neither categorical boundaries between the three types of RP, nor between RP and regional pronunciations. Refined RP is defined as an upper-class accent (used to be called U-RP) mainly associated with upper-class families and with professions which have been traditionally recruited from such families, e.g. officers in the navy and some regiments. The number of speakers using Refined RP is increasingly declining. The authors suggest an explanation for this: for many other speakers (including other types of RP) a speaker of Refined RP has become a figure of fun, and the type of speech itself is often regarded as affected. Particular features of Refined RP are:

/эи/ as /eu/ in so, go, oh; a very open word-final /e/ and /i/ as in better, letter, dear, fare, sure, city;

/з:/ is also very open in all positions, as in first, nurse;

/зе/ is often diphthongized as [эеэ] in I don't understand Picasso.

The term Regional RP must be actually used in the plural (see Regional Standards above) because it reflects regional variation and varies according to which region is involved. It is used to describe the type of speech which is basically RP except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which may go unnoticed even by other speakers of RP. For example:

• vocalization of dark [1] to [u] in words like held [heud], ball [boo], a characteristic of Cockney and some other regional accents, passes un­noticed in an otherwise fully RP accent,

• the use of/а/ге/ instead of/a:/ before voiceless fricatives in words like after, bath, past which is a sign of the northern accent within England, may be similarly acceptable.

But some other features of regional accents may be too stigmatized to be acceptable as RP, e.g.:

• /t/ pronounced as a glottal stop between two vowels, as in waiter [wetfa], a Cockney feature;

• no distinction between /л/ and /u/, as in look, luck, pronounced as [luk] in both cases, a typical northern feature.

There is one regional type, RP modified towards Cockney, which has provoked much discussion in the press under the name of "Estuary English". (The name Estuary English was first used because such a pronunciation was thought to have spread from London along the Thames estuary and not only into rural areas all around London but also into urban areas remote from London.) Estuary is said to be being adopted by those wishing to avoid the stigma of RP as "posh" and by upwardly mobile speakers of local dialect. It is often characterized by younger speakers as having "street credibility" or "streetcred", i.e. as being fashionable. The phonetic features of Estuary English include:

• the replacement of dark [1] by [o] as infield [fiud];

• the glottalization of/t/ preconsonantally and before a pause, as in not that [nt>? daet], eat ice [i:? ais];

the use of Cockney-type realization of the diphthongs /ei, ai/, as in late [Ы], light [hit];

• Cockney-type vowel allophones before /1/, e.g. cold [kouud];

• /tj/ and /dj/ pronounced as affricates in tune [t|u:n], during [Мзи:пп];

• elision of/j/ after /n/, as in new [nu:].

Some other characteristics claimed for Estuary English are not based on Cockney but may be changes more generally in progress in General RP.

• One intonational characteristic of Cockney that has spread into Estuary English, and even more widely, is the use of the falling tone in tag questions where the listener (who is supposed to agree) clearly has no relevant knowledge: The postman came knocking on the door, 'didn't he?

• Another intonational feature is a spreading usage of preposition and auxiliary verb accenting, e.g. / didn't do anything because there was nothing TO do. You couldn't have seen me in London because I haven't BEEN in London.

Everywhere else outside England the situation is different as far as RP is concerned because in Scotland and Ireland RP is generally seen as a foreign (English) accent. In the United States regional variation characterizes American accents of all social classes, as can be demonstrated by the speech of American presidents: an upper-class New England accent is different from an upper-class Arkansas or Texas accents.

Phonetic evidence accumulated by William Labov, the American sociolinguist, in New York and Philadelphia has demonstrated social variation of accents in an urban community. The linguistic variable is normally selected from those phonetic features which are liable to change. In New York, which, on the whole, is part of the non-rhotic area, the growing tendency to pronounce r is a prestige social marker of middle class. The pronunciation of a plosive [d] instead of the dental fricative [3], as in the stereotype of a Brooklynese accent, is a feature of the lower class:

Table 13

Variables	[r]	[d,t]
Middle class
Working class
Lower class

The important finding consists in the following: although the social marker is more common for one class than the others, traces of the sanu-tendency can be found in all the strata of the speech community, and there is gradience in the transitions from one to the other. Thus the idea of continuum is demonstrated by the presence of the same trend in all the classes and the gradual transitions from one class to the other. Mutual intelligibility within the speech community is maintained by the presence of the continuum in language change.

Here is another example of language change in progress which today is still perceived as deviation from the norm. Peter Trudgill in a little town of Norwich in the south-east of England applied Labov's methodology to investigate accent variation. The variables were consonants: /o - n/ in unstressed -ing endings, as in looking, loving, glottalization of the syllable — final /t/, as in butter, bet and 'A-drop,' as in hat, ham. The social classes scored as follows (after Trudgill 1974):

Table 14

Variables	/g-n/	/t-?/	/h-0/
MM
LM
UW
MW
LW

As can be seen from the above-adduced data, the linguistic variables are treated differently: A-drop has been stigmatized as a social marker since the 18^th century and, therefore, its occurrence in middle class speech is limited to pronouns him, his, her, whereas glottalization (and especially pre-glottalization) is gaining.

Social status as a permanent characteristic of the personality includes, beside the socio-economic class, occupation, education, gender and age. Together with the regional background they present a set of social factors relevant for accent variation. "William Labov first based his social class grouping on a complex class index which included income, occupation, education and place of residence but later on it was found that occupation alone could be the basic classifying factor. However, gender and age reveal other aspects of verbal behaviour which cannot be neglected.

In the 60-s A.C. Gimson distinguished three kinds of RP based on age and professional background. They are: conservative RP (lawyers and clergy), general RP (BBC newsreaders), and advanced RP (young people, University graduates, exclusive social groups). Nowadays the general, BBC type of RP, is also called mainstream RP.

To illustrate the way pronunciation varies with time we will have a look at the words paw, pore, poor:

Table 15

	paw	pore	poor
Conservative	o:	ЭЭ	ОЭ
Mainstream	o:	э:	0Э
Advanced	o:	э:	d:

Monophthongization or "smoothing" affects both diphthongs and the so-called triphthongs:

Table 16

Conservative	Mainstream	Advanced
tyre	tyre	tyre = tar
taia	taa	ta:

In advanced RP the words there, pear /e:/, fire, power, our /a:/ may all turn to be monosyllabic.

Opinion Poll research reported in LPD (Longman Pronunciation Dictionary) by J.C. Wells demonstrates generation preferences with regards to around 100 English words of variable pronunciation. Among the alternatives of cigdrette — 'cigarette, schedule /J-/—/sk-/, garage /дэега:з/—/дэегк1з/, Feb­ruary /'februan/ — /'febjuan/, careless /-lis/ — /-bs/ the young generation invariably choose the second, a more advanced form.

Much research has been devoted to gender differences in pronunciation. The most general observation is that women tend to be more accent-conscious and use more prestigious forms if they are aware of their social value (Labov 1966, 2000).

To conclude:

There is an obvious connection between social and regional accent variation in both English-speaking countries: people tend to make social judgements about accents by associating them with the kind of people who use them and the areas they live in. Most of the stereotypes are unfair to the people who are stigmatized against but it is a factor to be reckoned with, as long as the stereotypes are revived in mass media and in everyday communication.

Phonetically each particular social or regional accent category may be characterised by a cluster of identifying features which serve as social markers. The most powerful stratifying social factor is that of occupation as it determines the social status of the person and maybe correlated with the person's accent type. However, generation and gender factors are relevant too: generation differences reflect phonetic change in progress (see 6.5) to which women of marginal strata (lower middle and upper working classes), as reported by William Labov, are especially sensitive (Labov 1966).

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11