Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Style and Styling 185
from your ordinary or ‘natural’ way of speaking, and this generally meant
moving to a more prestigious or higher status form. The ‘most natural’,
uncorrected speech was then the ‘older’ form, which differed from the
‘newer’ form, spoken by those who have prestige. This is how the presence
of postvocalic [r] in New York meant high prestige but was fairly new
and on the increase, whereas the absence of it signifi ed low prestige and
symbolised a declining tradition. Thus, in a situation where high social
prestige matters, people will often change to the prestigious form. So
clearly, next to ‘attention paid to speech’, another principle was that speakers
displayed an upwardly mobile tendency, meaning that all speakers
gradually adapt to high social status forms, or that the standard language
is the stylistic target for all speakers (Eckert, 2000: 18): speakers of low
social prestige are seen to have a ‘natural’ way of speaking, but to move
from their ‘unstyled’ speech to a ‘styled’ version of it when they adapt to
higher social status conditions.
Consequently, sociolinguists shared an immense methodological concern
on how to reach these older vernacular forms that speakers of lower
prestige use in their ‘true’ linguistic habitats, which were considered
authentic, uncorrected, unmonitored, or in short, ‘real’ speech (cf. Bucholtz,
2003). This was a major concern, since Labov and others usually noted
that such speakers did in fact not produce such unmonitored or ‘unstyled’
speech when they were being interviewed by sociolinguists. Interviewees
often felt that the research situation itself was of high social prestige, and
they produced the forms they had learnt to produce in similar high prestige
circumstances. Labov termed this problem the ‘observer’s paradox’
(Labov, 1975), and variationists worked hard on their empirical discovery
procedures to avoid it and be able to reach the linguistic forms it was seen
to stand in the way of. One of the procedures was to manipulate the topics
in the interview from casual (talking about childhood customs or dangerous
situations) to formal or careful (reading passages, word lists) and in
this way talk interviewees into producing highly formal as well as ‘normal’
or ‘authentic’ speech.
This approach received a fair amount of criticism, however. It was
pointed out, for example, that casual and careful might not be as easily
distinguishable in practice as Labov suggested, since speaking carefully
does not always imply using standard linguistic features – one can carefully
and consciously shift into the vernacular; similarly, speaking in dialect
does not always point to casualness (Coupland, 2007: 6–7, 38–39;
Schilling-Estes, 2002: 382–383). More or less at the same time, Labov and
other researchers furthermore noticed that speakers did not always adopt
prestigious forms (Labov, 1972a; Trudgill, 1983). ‘Why do not all people
speak in the way that they obviously believe they should?’, Hudson quotes
Labov asking, since some groups prefer using their own, less prestigious,
variants instead (1996: 210). This suggested the existence of alternative