Social Variation

Language is probably the most important instrument of socialization that exists in all human societies and cultures. It is largely by means of language that one generation passes on to the next its myths, laws, customs, and beliefs, and it is largely by means of language that the child comes to appreciate the structure of the society into which he is born and his own place in that society. As a social force, language serves both to strengthen the links that bind the members of the same group and to differentiate the members of one group from those of another. In many countries there are social dialects as well as regional dialects, so that it is possible to tell from a person's speech not only where he comes from but what class he belongs to. In some instances social dialects can transcend regional dialects. This is notable in England, where standard English in the so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) can be heard from members of the upper class and upper middle class in all parts of the country.

In Britain and the United States and in most of the other English-speaking countries, people will almost always use the same dialect, regional or social, however formal or informal the situation and regardless of whether their listeners speak the same dialect or not. (Relatively minor adjustments of vocabulary may, however, be made: an Englishman speaking to an American may employ the word "elevator" rather than "lift" and so on.) In many communities throughout the world, it is common for members to speak two or more different dialects and to use one dialect rather than another in particular social situations. This is commonly referred to as code-switching. Code-switching may operate between two distinct languages (e.g., Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans in New York) as well as between two dialects of the same language.

In every situation, what one says and how one says it depends upon the nature of the situation, the social role being played at the time, one's status and that of the person addressed, one's attitude towards him, and so on. Within each of the dialects there is a considerable variation in speech according to education, socioeconomic group, and ethnic group. Some differences correlate with age and sex. Much (if not most) of the variation does not involve categorical distinctions.

There is an important polarity between uneducated and educated speech in which the former can be identified with non-standard regional dialect and the latter moves away from regional usage to a form of English that cuts across regional boundaries.

Educated English naturally tends to be given the additional prestige of the government agencies, the professions, the political parties, the press, the law court, and any institution which must attempt to address itself to a public beyond the smaller dialectal community. It is codified in dictionaries, grammars, and guides to usage, and it is taught in the school system of all levels. It is almost exclusively the language of printed matter.

Language interacts with nonverbal behaviour in social situations and serves to clarify and reinforce the various roles and relationships important in a particular culture. Sociolinguistics is far from having satisfactorily analyzed or even identified all the factors involved in the selection of one language feature rather than another in particular situations. Among those that have been discussed in relation to various languages are: the formality or informality of the situation; power and solidarity relationships between the participants; differences of sex, age, occupation, socioeconomic class, and educational background; and personal or transactional situations.

Social language variation provides an answer to questions 'Who are you?' or "What are you? In the eyes of the English speaking society to which you belong?" It provides several answers, because people acquire several identities as they participate in social structure. They belong to different social groups and perform different social roles. A person might be identified as 'a woman', 'a parent', 'a doctor', 'a husband', 'a failure', 'a political activist', 'a senior citizen', 'a Times reader' or in many other ways. Any of these identities can have consequences for the kind of language we use. Indeed, it is usually language - much more so than clothing, furnishing or other externals - which is the chief signal of both permanent and transient aspects of our social identity.

Certain aspects of social variation seem to be of particular linguistic consequence. Age, sex, and socio-economic class have been repeatedly shown to be of importance when it comes to explaining the way sounds, constructions and vocabulary vary. Choice of occupation has a less predictable influence, though in some contexts (such as word of the law) it can be highly distinctive. Adopting a social role (such as chairing a meeting, or speaking at a wedding) invariably involves a choice of appropriate linguistic forms.

In all of this, attitudes to social variation vary widely. All countries display social stratification, for example, though some have more clearly-defined class boundaries than others, and thus more identifiable features of class dialect. Britain is usually said to be linguistically much more class-conscious than other countries where English is used as a first language. A highly valued national literature may identify norms of achievement in language use towards which children are taught to aspire. And a particular set of historical circumstances (such as a strong system of privileged education) may make one country, or section of society, especially sensitive to language variation.

Children are in general brought up within the social group to which their parents and immediate family circle belong, and they learn the dialect and speaking styles of that group along with the rest of the subculture and behavioral traits and attitudes that are characteristic of it. This is a largely unconscious and involuntary process of acculturation, but the importance of the linguistic manifestations of social status is not lost on aspirants for personal advancement in stratified societies. The deliberate cultivation of an appropriate dialect, in its lexical, grammatical, and phonetic features, has been the self-imposed task of many persons wishing "to better themselves" and to feel secure in their social status. Much of the comedy in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion turns on Eliza's need to forget her native Cockney if she is to rise in the social scale. Conversely, it is apparent today that middle class people, mostly adolescents, who for some reason want to "opt out" of the social group of their parents make every effort to abandon the distinctive aspects of the social dialect that would mark them, along with dress and general behaviour, as members of a group whose mores they are, at least temporarily, affecting to reject.

Culturally determined taboos play a part in all this, and persons who want to move up or down in the social scale have to learn what words to use and what words to avoid if they are to be accepted and to "belong" in their new position. A good part of the material for "comedies of manners" has come from the social role of language variation within a society. The same considerations apply to changing one's language as to changing one's dialect. Language changing is harder for the individual and is generally a rarer occurrence, but it is likely to be widespread in any mass immigration movement. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the eagerness with which immigrants and the children of immigrants from continental Europe living in the United States learned and insisted on speaking English is an illustration of their realization that English was the linguistic badge of full membership in their new homeland at the time when the country was proud to consider itself as the melting pot in which people of diverse linguistic and cultural origins would become citizens of a unified community.

The same sort of self-perpetuation, in the absence of deliberate rejection, operates in the special languages of games and of trades and professions. Game learners, apprentices, and professional students learn the locutions together with the rest of the game or the job. The specific words and phrases occur in the teaching process and are observed in use, and the novice is only too eager to display an easy competence with such phraseology as a mark of his full membership of the group; e.g., golfers are keen to talk of birdies, fairways, and slicing. Languages and variations within languages play both a unifying and a diversifying role in human society as a whole. Language is a part of culture, but culture is a complex totality containing many different features, and the boundaries between cultural features are not clear-cut, nor do they all coincide.

Physical barriers such as oceans, high mountains, and wide rivers constitute impediments to human intercourse and to culture contacts, though modern technology in the fields of travel and communications make such geographical factors of less and less account. More potent for much of the 20th century were political restrictions on the movement of people and of ideas, such as divided western Europe from formerly Communist eastern Europe; the frontiers between these two political blocs represented much more of a cultural dividing line than any other European frontiers.

The distribution of the various components of cultures differs, and the distribution of languages may differ from that of nonlinguistic cultural features. This results from the varying ease and rapidity with which changes may be acquired or enforced and from the historical circumstances responsible for these changes. In mid- to late-20th-century Europe, as the result of World War II, a major political and cultural division had cut across an area of relative linguistic unity in East and West Germany.

Sociolects are dialects determined by social factors rather than by geography. Sociolects often develop due to social divisions within a society, such as those of socioeconomic class and religion. In New York City, for example, the probability that someone will pronounce the letter r when it occurs at the end of a syllable, as in the word fourth, varies with socioeconomic class. The pronunciation of a final r in general is associated with members of higher socioeconomic classes. The same is true in England of the pronunciation of h, as in hat. Members of certain social groups often adopt a particular pronunciation as a way of distinguishing themselves from other social groups. The inhabitants of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, for example, have adopted particular vowel pronunciations to distinguish themselves from people vacationing on the island.

Slang, argot, and jargon are more specialized terms for certain social language varieties usually defined by their specialized vocabularies. Slang refers to informal vocabulary, especially short-lived coinages, that do not belong to a language's standard vocabulary. Argot refers to a nonstandard vocabulary used by secret groups, particularly criminal organizations, usually intended to render communications incomprehensible to outsiders. A jargon comprises the specialized vocabulary of a particular trade or profession, especially when it is incomprehensible to outsiders, as with legal jargon.

In addition to language varieties defined in terms of social groups, there are language varieties called registers that are defined by social situation. In a formal situation, for example, a person might say, "You are requested to leave," whereas in an informal situation the same person might say, "Get out!" Register differences can affect pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

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