The Link Between Accent and Identity
How the sounds we use reveal who we are and where we're from.
Each of us speaks our own idiolect: a version of a dialect that’s specific to us. And inside our own idiolect, we usually have multiple ways of speaking that are slightly-to-very different from the rest.
When I speak to my cousins or close friends, English and Spanish have no boundaries. A good song is called a bopsito (an invention of bop + -sito) and sentences like “ay que cute” are not uncommon.
But when I speak to my parents, I almost always opt for either English or Spanish. And when I go to the doctor or the dentist, it’s always fully in English, though if I know they know Spanish, I may sprinkle some in. At school, I only spoke in English.
The point is, we’re all constantly shifting the ways we speak our language depending on whom we’re speaking to.
The job of the sociolinguist is to disentangle all of this language and to view it from an outside perspective. From the outside, they could analyze my language and tell that I live in and English-Spanish bilingual city, but that it seems to be English-dominant, since that’s what I speak with doctors and teachers.
The crazy thing about sociolinguistics is that a sociolinguist could have reached that conclusion by listening to a recording of my voice knowing nothing about my story. From the sounds I make, they could deduce that my English has features of Miami English, and from the way I pronounce certain words in English and Spanish, they could deduce that English is my dominant language.
That’s sociolinguistics in a nutshell: studying language in the context of society and seeing how society influences language.
Today, we’re diving into one of the earliest and most famous sociolinguistics paper that showed this connection between who people are and how they sound.
New York, New York
The paper we’re discussing is based on the New York dialect of U.S. English. The New York accent can be traced back to 1800s London. Like the Received Pronunciation (RP) London accent, the New York accent is non-rhotic, which means the /r/ is not pronounced in certain positions. For example, in a word in which /r/ comes after a vowel, or at the end of the word, the /r/ is not pronounced. So a word like floor pronounced with a schwa sound at the end instead of an /r/.
In England, having a non-rhotic accent is a sign that you’re speaking RP, the standard. In New York, William Labov noticed that the trend appeared to be the opposite. His theory was that the non-rhotic accent was more prevalent in working class communities, while the rhotic accent was seen more as the standard.
Methodology
In order to record people saying /r/, Labov had to come up with a unique methodology to circumvent what’s known as the observer’s paradox, or the idea that by observing something the researcher is likely influencing the thing being studied.
For example, if you knew that a linguist was listening to each and every sound you make in order to record and study it, would you alter the way you speak?
Whether consciously or not, you likely would.
Cue Labov’s famous design.
First, Labov needed to find groups of people from different socioeconomic statuses in a natural environment. As department stores in the U.S. tend to have different price points, and as previous research showed that employees working at stores tend to borrow prestige from the shoppers in the stores1, Labov decided to conduct his research in department stores.
Comparing the prices of items as well as the wages that the employees earned, Labov decided to test three stores (from most expensive to least expensive): Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and S. Klein’s.
Then, he had to find a way at each store to elicit words with the /r/ sound. So what he did was at each store he approached a worker to ask a question for which the answer would be “fourth floor.” After hearing the phrase one time, he’d ask a second question that would elicit the same phrase, as the second time someone is asked something, they usually enunciate more so that they’re better understood.
So, it went something like this:
“What floor is the women’s department?”
“The fourth floor.”
“What about women’s shoes?”
“The fourth floor.”
Labov would then quickly write down whether the worker pronounced the postvocalic /r/ or not. Labov did this 264 times across the three stores.
The Results
It turns out, Labov’s hypothesis was right. Here are the results from the experiment:
Store Rhotic Dialect Non-rhotic Dialect
Saks 63% 37%
Macy’s 44% 56%
S. Klein 8% 92%
There is a clear trend in the data: the higher the socioeconomic status of the store, the higher the use of the rhotic dialect. The less high the socioeconomic status of the store, the higher use of the non-rhotic dialect.
There’s a correlation between the use of the rhotic dialect and being from a working class background.
And so, variation sociolinguistics emerged, a field devoted to finding these trends in the ways certain groups use language.
Works Cited
Labov, W. (1986). The social stratification of (r) in New York City department stores. In Dialect and language variation (pp. 304-329). Academic Press.
AKA mimic their accent.