Who You Are

Chapter 1 named the social variables: ethnicity, religion, status, gender, education and age. This chapter looks at four of them in turn, and at what the sources actually say, because this is the topic where the gap between careful findings and popular stereotypes is widest.

Sociolect Versus Dialect

Speakers acquire a sociolect passively through their community and actively choose it to show identification with a group. Dialects are tied to geography, sociolects to class, age, gender or ethnicity. The source notes that the terms sociolect, register, jargon and slang are sometimes used as synonyms.

Class

The sociolinguistics article reports that working-class speakers tend to use less standard language. Class aspirations also shape speech, and upwardly or downwardly mobile speakers may hypercorrect: in trying to speak "better" they overshoot the target form. The source illustrates class and prestige at the level of individual sounds with Labov's study of post-vocalic /r/ in the Northeastern US (Chapter 1's history of the field). The Sociolect page I fetched for this chapter does not give Labov's New York City findings or any figures, so none are reported here.

Gender

Wikipedia's Language and gender article describes four approaches to gender differences in speech. They are a good lesson in how theories change.

What the findings say

• Women tend to use more standard variants, such as in negative concord ("I didn't do anything" rather than "nothing"). A study of English pronunciation in Norwich found women more conservative toward the standard dialect, which the page links to women's historical exclusion from the workplace.
• Freed and Greenwood (1996) found no significant gender difference in tag questions like "you know?"
• Victoria DeFrancisco's work says men often fail to take up turn-taking offers implied by hedges such as "y' know" and "isn't it".

Gender meets other variables

• Marital status: in a study of 67 women and 53 men, marital status affected men's self-disclosure to friends but not women's.
• Occupation and power: Cameron's study of UK call-centre workers found emotional labour, which is coded feminine, performed by men without gendered orientation.
• Age: self-promoting talk about achievements was rarely found in conversations among older men.
• Politics: US congresswomen in the 2010s used masculine verbal behaviour like their male colleagues but more feminine non-verbal behaviour; in UK Parliament, women used concrete anecdotes more, and another female MP's presence increased women's participation.

Ethnicity: African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken by most working-class and middle-class Black Americans, and by some Black Canadians. The page describes it as a dialect, ethnolect and sociolect. Middle-class speakers often use it as the informal end of a range of speech styles, switching toward standard American English in formal settings.

The page says AAVE has its own grammar, vocabulary and accent features, and presents patterns such as consonant cluster reduction (test becomes tes) as evidence of consistent rules.

• The majority view among linguists is that AAVE descends from non-standard English dialects brought by settlers to the Southern colonies and later the Southern United States.
• A minority creole theory holds that it may have started as a creole influenced by African languages before converging back toward English. The page says John McWhorter considers the West African contribution minor. This is a question the source leaves open.

Age: Reading a Table

Chapter 1 gave the Toronto "zee" figures. They make a good model for reading any sociolinguistic table:

• Ask who was counted and when. Two years, two age groups.
• Ask what changed between the rows. The younger group uses "zee" more in both years, which is consistent with a change spreading through a generation. The source does not say this; it reports the figures and a hypothesis about a children's alphabet song.
• Ask what is missing: sample sizes, and the group's other characteristics.

Try It Yourself