07. Social Dialect

Social Dialect is examining the relationship between social class, prestige factors, and language choices.

How do speakers talk differently in different social groups?

How do speakers use language to identify themselves with a particular social group?

Social dialects defined:

 a variety of language that reflects social variation in language use, according to certain factors related to the social group of the speaker such as education, occupation, income level (upper-class English, middle-class English and lower-class English. For example: Standard English can be classified as a type of social English spoken by the well-educated English speakers throughout the world.



A linguistic variable is a single feature of speech (pronunciation, lexical, or syntactic) "which is found in the speech of some, but not all, members of a speech community; and/or is found sometimes, but not always in the speech of an individual."

William Labov

 
To account for stylistic variation, which based on speech context, i.e., variation in the speech of an individual, William Labov began by distinguishing two varieties of the speech of an individual:

William Labov

Vernacular speech is the variety of speech used by individuals in casual social interactions with peers.  It is always the variety one learns first, many speakers stay monodialectal in it all their lives, it is typically of low prestige, and there is social pressure on upwardly mobile speakers to modify their vernacular speech in favor of superposed speech.

Superposed speech is a prestigious variety of speech used in more formal situations and when speakers are paying closer attention to their speech.  It is the native variety of higher prestige groups, learned later than vernacular by lower prestige groups and therefore not learned as well so speakers will have a tendency to slip back into the vernacular when they aren't paying close attention.








"Social Dialect"