Sociolinguistics (Social Dialect)

Article

By:
Sella Safitri
B Class
13-530-0149

English Education Department

Faculity of Teacher Training and Education
University of PGRI Adi Buana Surabaya
2015

Chapter I
A. Background
People often use a language to signal their membership of particular groups and to
construct different aspects of their social identity. Social status, gender, age, ethnicity and
the kinds of social networks that people belong to turn out to be important dimensions of
identity in many communities.
No two people speak exactly the same. There are infinite sources of variation in
speech. A sound spectrograph, a machine which represents the sound waves of speech in
visual form, shows that even a single vowel may be pronounced in hundreds of minutely
different ways, most of which listeners do not even register. Some features of speech,
however, are shared by groups, and become important because they differentiate one
group from another. Just as different languages often serve a unifying and separating
function for their speakers, so do speech characteristics within languages.
B. Objective
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)

To know about what social dialect is.

To know about social classification
To know about the different of the vocabulary in social dialect
To know about the different of the pronunciation in social dialect
To know about the different of the grammatical pattern in social dialect

Chapter II
A. Social Variation
In earlier centuries, you could tell where an English lord or lady came from by their
regional form of English. But by the early twentieth century, a person who spoke with a
regional accent in England was most unlikely to belong to the upper class. Upper-class
people had an upper-class education, and that generally meant a public (i.e. private!)
school where they learned to speak RP.
RP stands not for Received Pronunciation the accent of the best educated and most
prestigious members of English society. It is claimed that the label derives from the
accent which was received at the royal court, and it is sometimes identified with the
Queens English, although the accent used by Queen Elizabeth II, as portrayed so
brilliantly by Helen Mirren in the movie The Queen , is a rather old-fashioned variety of
RP.

RP was promoted by the BBC for decades. It is essentially a social accent not a
regional one. Indeed, it conceals a speakers regional origins.
B. Social Dialect
The term dialect can also be used to describe differences in speech associated with
various social groups or classes. There are social dialects as well as regional ones. An
immediate problem is that of defining social group or social class, giving proper weight to
the various factors that can be used to determine social position, e.g., occupation, place of
residence, education, new versus old money, income, racial or ethnic origin, cultural
background, caste, religion, and so on. Such factors as these do appear to be related fairly
directly to how people speak. There is a British public-school dialect, and there is an
African American Vernacular English dialect found in cities such as New York, Detroit,
and Buffalo. Many people also have stereotypical notions of how other people speak, and,
as we will see in chapter 7 in particular, there is considerable evidence from work of
investigators such as Labov and Trudgill that social dialects can indeed be described
systematically.
Whereas regional dialects are geographically based, social dialects originate among
social groups and are related to a variety of factors, the principal ones apparently being
social class, religion, and ethnicity.
Dialects are linguistic varieties which are distinguishable by their vocabulary,
grammar and pronunciation; the speech of people from different social, as well as
regional, groups may differ in these ways. Just as RP is a social accent, so Standard
English is a social dialect.
C. Standard English
Standard English is more accommodating than RP and allows for some variation
within its boundaries. The dialect we grace with the name Standard English is spoken
with many different accents. But, as illustrated in the discussion of regional dialects, there
are also many standard Englishes. US Standard English is distinguishable from South
African standard English and Australian standard English, for instance, and all three differ
from the British standard dialect.
In social terms, linguistic forms which are not part of Standard English are by
definition non-standard. Because the standard dialect is always the first to be codified, it
is difficult to avoid defining other dialects without contrasting them with the standard.
Vernacular is a term which is used with a variety of meanings in sociolinguistics, but
the meanings have something in common. Just as vernacular languages contrast with
standard languages, vernacular dialect features contrast with standard dialect features.
Vernacular forms tend to be learned at home and used in informal contexts. So all uses of

the term vernacular share this sense of the fi rst variety acquired in the home and used in
casual contexts. Vernacular dialects, like vernacular languages, lack public or overt
prestige, though they are generally valued by their users, especially as means of
expressing solidarity and affective meaning.
D. Social Classification
Sociologists use a number of different scales for classifying people when they attempt
to place individuals somewhere within a social system. An occupational scale may divide
people into a number of categories as follows: major professionals and executives of large
businesses; lesser professionals and executives of mediumsized businesses; semiprofessionals; technicians and owners of small businesses; skilled workers; semi-skilled
workers; and unskilled workers. An educational scale may employ the following
categories: graduate or professional education; college or university degree; attendance at
college or university but no degree; high school graduation; some high school education;
and less than seven years of formal education. Once again, however, some caution is
necessary in making comparison across time: graduating from college or university in the
1950s indicated something quite different from what it does today. Income level and
source of income are important factors in any classification system that focuses on how
much money people have.
Likewise, in considering where people live, investigators must concern themselves with
both the type and cost of housing and its location
E. Vocabulary
Social dialect research in many different countries has revealed a consistent
relationship between social class and language patterns. People from different social
classes speak differently. The most obvious differences in vocabulary are in many
ways the least illuminating from a sociolinguistic point of view, though they clearly
capture the public imagination. In the 1950s in England, many pairs of words were
identified which, it was claimed, distinguished the speech of upper-class English people
(U speakers) from the rest (non-U speakers). U speakers used sitting room rather than
lounge (non-U), and referred to the lavatory rather than the (non-U) toilet.
F. Pronunciation
This speech variable is widely called [h]-dropping a label which you should note
represents the viewpoint of speakers of the standard. It has been analyzed in many social
dialect studies of English. The highest social group drops the least number of [h]s and the
lowest group omits the most.
The pronunciation -ing vs -in ([i] vs [in]) at the end of words like sleeping and
swimming distinguishes social groups in every English-speaking community in which it

has been investigated. The Brisbane data was collected from adolescents, but the data
from the other communities is representative of the communities as a whole. In each
community, people from lower social groups use more of the vernacular [in] variant than
those from higher groups.
The more people used post-vocalic [r]. And even within stores a pattern was evident.
In one store, for instance, nearly half the socially superior supervisors used post-vocalic
[r] consistently, while only 18 per cent of the less-status-ful salespeople did, and the stock
boys rarely used it at all.
Post-vocalic [r] illustrates very clearly the arbitrariness of the particular forms which
are considered standard and prestigious. There is nothing inherently bad or good about the
pronunciation of any sound, as the different status of [r]-pronunciation in different cities
illustrates. In New York City, pronouncing [r] is generally considered prestigious. In
Reading in England it is not. In one city the higher your social class the more you
pronounce post-vocalic [r]. In the other, the higher your social class the fewer you
pronounce.
Measuring the presence or absence of [h] or [r], or the difference between [in] and
[i], is difficult enough when you are listening to tapes of interviews.
G. Grammatical Pattern
On average, it was found that children from lower-class families used more vernacular
verb forms than children from middle-class families.
This pattern has been noted for a variety of grammatical variables. Here are some
examples of standard and vernacular grammatical forms which have been identified in
several English speaking communities.

The higher social groups use more of the standard grammatical form and fewer
instances of the vernacular or non-standard form. The third person singular form of the
present tense regular verb (e.g. standard she walks vs. vernacular she walk), there is a
sharp distinction between the middle-class groups and the lower-class groups.
Sentence (6) in the list illustrates a pattern of negation which is sometimes called
negative concord or multiple negations. Where Standard English allows only one
negative in each clause, most vernacular dialects can have two or more. In some dialects,
every possible form which can be negated is negated.

Chapter III

A. Conclusion
Many factors interact in determining the proportion of vernacular or standard forms a
person uses. Some of these are social factors such as the age or gender of the speaker.
Another factor, however, which was mentioned briefly y above, is the linguistic
environment in which a word occurs.
In exploring the relationship between language and society, this article has been
concerned almost exclusively with the dimension of social status or class. The evidence
discussed indicates that the social class someone belongs to is generally signaled by their
speech patterns. Many people, however, are not very conscious of belonging to a
particular social class. They are much more aware of other factors about the people they
meet regularly than their social class membership. A persons gender and age are probably
the first things we notice about them..

References
Holmes, Janet.1992. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics fourth edition. New York: Routledge.
Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2006. Introducing Sociolinguistics. USA: Routledge.
Wardhaugh, Ronald & Fuller, Janet. M. 2015. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics seventh
edition. UK: Wiley Blackwell.
Wardhaugh, Ronald. 2006. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics fifth edition. UK: Wiley
Blackwell.