5. Social Variation: Social factors and social markers.

In all English-speaking countries there exists a close connection between language and social class. But only in England, unlike in other English-speaking countries, the phonetic factors assume a predominating role.

Peter Tradgill, a well-known British sociolinguist, claims that it is of­ten possible to tell whether the speaker has been to a major public school or only to a minor one judging by the qual­ity of /u:/. Peter Roach describes the young people's change in quality of /u:/ as fronting, compared to a fully back position of more conservative ways of/u:/ articulation (Roach 2001).

RP (mainstream and conservative) food [fu:d]

RP (advanced) food [fiid]

In 1972 survey carried out by National Opinion Polls there was a ques­tion: "Which two of these eleven specified factors would you say are most important in being able to tell which class a person is?" The respondents were a random sample of the British public. The factor which scored highest overall was "The way they speak"; next in order came "Where they live", "The friends they have", "Their job", "The sort of school they went to", "The way they spend their money", and only then "The amount of money they have" and other factors (Reid 1977:27).

Thus accents are associated with the people who use them, with their way of life, and may have symbolic values. The accents of big urban cen­tres like Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow in U.K. may have negative associations with the polluted environment of industrial area.

In the U.S.A., New York is viewed as the centre of crime and drug taking (but also the financial and intellectual centre). Although there is no necessary connection at all between personality types and accents, most people react as if there were.

There is a stereotype of an RP speaker, for instance, to possess author­ity, competence, intelligence and ambition while a local accent is associ­ated with friendliness, personal integrity, kindness. In a broadcasting ex­periment with thousands of people listening to a simple everyday talk (four men answered the question "When did you last buy a pair of shoes?"), among the four accents RP accent was coupled with a lawyer's profession, while Liverpool accent was attributed to a chimney sweep. RP speaker may be disliked because he sounds "posh" and "affected" while a person with a working class accent may be positively assessed for "friendship", "fight," "solidarity", "personal integrity".

In the U.S.A., a Southern accent is associated with the agricultural area, with ignorance, conservative views and habits, but al^so southern aristocracy and "southern beauties".

Most often these stereotypes are unjustified, but they are powerful and a factor to be reckoned with.

Sociolinguists have compared accent variation in England to a pyra­mid in which the horizontal dimension represents geographical variation and the vertical dimension indicates social variation.

upper class (U) – RP

upper middle class (UM) - RP

middle middle class (MM and LM) - regional standards

working-class (UW and LW) –local accents

The model im­plies that RP is placed at the top of the social ladder as being a social accent of upper and upper middle class (U-RP and UM-class), that regional standards are spoken by middle middle (MM) and lower middle (LM) classes, and that upper working and lower working (UW and LW) classes use a broad variety of local accents (urban and rural).

It should be noted that the status of RP has changed. British phonetitians agree that RP is still a standard associated with the speech of BBC announcers. But, over the last 20 years, both the BBC and other national radio and TV channels have been increasingly tolerant of broadcasters' accents. Nevertheless, in their choice of news­readers, the national TV and radio channels still use predominantly RP speakers. However, in view of the number of people using it, RP is an ac­cent of such a small minority (3-5%, acc. to different sources) that there may be more foreign speakers of RP than native speakers of that accent of English (Crystal 1997).

There is a new classification of RP types in the 6^th edition of A.C. Gim- son's "Introduction to the Pronunciation of English" revised by Alan Crut- tenden in 2001: General RP, Refined RP and Regional RP (Cruttenden 2001: 80).

Refined RP is defined as an upper-class accent (used to be called U-RP) mainly associated with upper-class fam­ilies and with professions which have been traditionally recruited from such families, e.g. officers in the navy and some regiments. The number of speak­ers using Refined RP is increasingly declining. The authors suggest an explanation for this: for many other speakers a speaker of Refined RP has become a figure of fun, and the type of speech itself is often regarded as affected. Particular features of Refined RP are:

• /эи/ as /eu/ in so, go, oh;

• a very open word-final /e/ and /i/ as in better, letter, dear, fare, sure, city;

• /з:/ is also very open in all positions, as in first, nurse;

• /aе/ is often diphthongized as [aеэ] in I don't understand Picasso.

The term Regional RP reflects regional variation. It is used to describe the type of speech which is basically RP except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which may go unnoticed by other speakers of RP. For example:

• vocalization of dark [1] to [u] in words like held [heod], ball [boo], a characteristic of Cockney and some other regional accents, passes un­noticed in an otherwise fully RP accent,

• the use of/a/ae/ instead of/a:/ before voiceless fricatives in words like after, iurf/z,pas/whichisasignofthe northern accent within England, may be similarly acceptable.

But some other features of regional accents may be too stigmatized to be acceptable as RP, e.g.:

• /t/ pronounced as a glottal stop between two vowels, as in waiter, a Cockney feature;

• no distinction between /u/ and /a/, as in look, luck, pronounced as [luk] in both cases, a typical northern feature.

There is one regional type, RP modified towards Cockney, which was named "Estuary En­glish". The name Estuary English was used because such a pronunci­ation was thought to have spread from London along the Thames estuary. Estuary is often characterized by younger speakers as fashionable. It is being adopted by those wish­ing to avoid the stigma of RP as "posh". By the way, in Scotland and Ireland RP is generally seen as a foreign (English) accent.

The phonetic features of Estuary English include:

• the replacement of dark [1] by [u] as in field [fiud];

• the glottalization of /t/ before consonants and a pause, as in not that, eat ice.

• the use of Cockney-type realization of the diphthongs /ei, ai/, as in late [ai],

• /tj/ and /dj/ pronounced as affricates in tune, during;

• elision of/j/ after /n/, as in new [nu:].

• An intonational feature of accenting prepositions and auxiliary verbs, e.g. / didn't do anything because there was nothing TO do.

In the United States regional variation characterizes American accents of all social classes, as can be demonstrated by the speech of American presidents: an upper-class New England accent is different from an upper-class Arkansas or Texas accents!

Phonetic evidence collected by William Labov, the American sociolinguist, in New York and Philadelphia has demonstrated social varia­tion of accents in an urban community. In New York, which, on the whole, is part of the non-rhotic area, the growing tendency to pronounce r is a prestige social marker of middle class. The pronunciation of a plosive [d] instead of the dental fricative [3], as in the stereotype of a Brooklynese accent, is a feature of the lower class:

Here is another example of language change in progress which today is still perceived as deviation from the norm. Peter Tradgill in a little town of Norwich in the south-east of England applied Labov's methodology to investigate accent variation. The variables were consonants: /g - n/ in un­stressed -ing endings, as in looking, loving, glottalization of the syllable — final /t/, as in butter, bet and 'h-drop,' as in hat, ham. The social classes scored as follows:

As can be seen from the table, /h/-drop is an obvious social marker whereas glottalization is gaining.

LPD Longman Pronunciation Dic­tionary by J.C. Wells demonstrates generation preferences regarding 100 English words of variable pronunciation. Among the alternatives of ciga'rette—'cigarette, schedule /J-/—/sk-/, garage — garage Feb­ruary /'februari/ — /'febjuari/, the young generation choose the second, a more advanced form.

There is an obvious connection between social and regional accent variation in both English-speaking countries: people tend to make social judgements about accents by associating them with the kind of people who use them and the areas they live in.