Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION AND CHANGE IN URBAN INDIA
mean % std. 'N'
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
SCH BC MAR BRAH
MIDDLE CLASS Girls
WORKING CLASS Girls
MIDDLE CLASS Boys
WORKING CLASS Boys
Fig.3 Percent standard (N) by caste, social class and sex
A cursory look at the table shows that overall it is the middle class children
who use the standard variant of the (N) variable more frequently than the
working class children; similarly, girls get higher percent standard scores
than the boys in general, and the Brahmin children score higher than the
non-Brahmin caste groups.
Within the Brahmin group, the middle class girls are the most
conservative scoring 100% on this phonological variable. Working class
girls and boys get high scores too, though, strikingly, the middle class
Brahmin boys get a low group score of 89.3% (refer back to fig. 2). On
closer examination I found that five of the eleven boys in this group scored
well short of 100%. It is interesting to note that both the middle class
Brahmin boys and girls interact with non-Brahmin children in their school
friendship networks.
By contrast with the Brahmin group, the effect of class appears to be
more distinctly marked within the non-Brahmin group, with the middle class
children getting noticeably higher scores than the working class children. In
the working class group, the Maratha girls and boys along with the boys
from the scheduled group used the retroflex nasal variant less frequently.
Among the children from middle class families (which coincide more or less
with the more educated non-Brahmin families in the sample), the Backward
children get the highest group score (85%) with the girls of this caste group
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