Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Style and Styling 183
competently, one must have both a linguistic as well as a sociocultural
competence (Hymes, 1972). Most signifi cantly, in terms of its effect on the
linguistic discipline, Labov drew attention to the fact that the assumption
of linguistic homogeneity obfuscates the systematics of language change.
After all, structuralists were aware they were studying a constantly evolving
object, so in their wish to study the systematicity of language they
temporarily froze their object of study in time, at the cost of making
abstraction from real time altogether and creating a static linguistic object.
Consequently, they could not explain linguistic evolution, or did so only
by jumping discontinuously from one internally structured system to
another (cf. Meeuwis & Brisard, 1993: 15ff.). It is one of Labov’s great
achievements that he was able to demonstrate that all language use is
characterised by structured rather than random variability, and furthermore,
that these structured linguistic differences could be seen as evidence
of linguistic change in progress (cf. Coupland, 2007).
More particularly, Labov managed to show how language use in New
York City was socially distributed (cf. also Coupland, 2007: 33–37; Hudson,
1996: 155–159; Labov, 1966). He was aware that New Yorkers sometimes
used a postvocalic [r] in words such as ‘far’ or ‘fourth’, but at other
moments refrained from this. The choice, furthermore, appeared to stand
for a change taking place: New Yorkers were gradually moving away from
a ‘British’ norm (with no [r] produced in a word like ‘farm’) to a more
general American trend where [r] in postvocalic position is always pronounced.
As the newer trend was associated with the high-status community
outside New York, Labov predicted that the ‘zero’-form (with no or
very few [r]s) would still be used by lower-status speakers, and that higher-status
speakers would generally adopt the ‘innovative’ pronunciation.
He collected his data by asking shop-assistants where certain articles were
that Labov knew were on the fourth fl oor: ‘Excuse me, where are the
women’s shoes?’, to which most shop-assistants unsurprisingly replied
‘fourth fl oor’ or ‘on the fourth fl oor’. He would then lean forward, pretending
not to have understood, to allow himself a second opportunity to
listen to the directions given and observe whether a second, more careful
utterance would make any difference. It turned out that shop-assistants in
high-status shops produced a higher frequency of postvocalic [r], and that
this frequency was systematically lower or very low in shops visited by
middle- and low-status clienteles. Labov furthermore noticed that those
who did not usually use a postvocalic [r], precisely did so on occasions
where speakers paid more attention to their speech, and in this way symbolically
dressed themselves with prestige or social status.
In so doing, Labov did not only manage to point out that very small
linguistic differences laid bare a thoroughly hierarchised social context,
but also that language users were somehow aware of these differences.
Most importantly, with regard to structural linguistics, Labov managed to