Language Variation: How Dynamic is Your Language?

Variation in language, as can be perceived, means the distinction in speaking or writing a language among the people of same language based on their places of living or demographic, individual, social or other characteristics. The study of language variation tells an important story about a language and its change over time. Primarily the distinction was associated with the regions (regional variation), but afterward, researchers discovered that the variation does not only exists between places but within them as well. They sought to decipher the subtle differences based on peoples’ social and cultural background, age, gender, race, occupation, and loyalty to a group, which is popularly known as social variation in language (Wardhaugh,. & Fuller, 2015).

One of the most pioneers is William Labov, who is famous for his prominent voices in American sociolinguistics since 1960s. He spent much of his time devising an approach to investigating the relationship between language and society which we now know as variationist sociolinguistics. He believed that variation is not only an integrated aspect of linguistic structure but also a necessary mechanism of its functioning. One of the crucial aspects of social variation in language is its focus on linguistic variables which proved to be the basic conceptual tool necessary for conducting such studies. Linguistic variables are the identifiable variants of a same sound possible in real conversation, for example people tend to either pronounce the sound /r/ in the word [car] or drop it. In this case, /r/ is the linguistic variable with two variants /r as in car/ and /- as in ca/. Variationists sociolinguists classify the linguistic variables into two broad categories, (a) with clear and distinct variations (e.g., ng with /ng as in singing/ or just /n as in singin/; and th either as /th as in ‘with’/, or as /t as in ‘wit’/, or as /f as in ‘wif’/), and (b) variation as the matter of degree originated by differences in utterances based on either preceding or following sounds (e.g., nasalization), place, or manner of articulation (Wardhaugh, & Fuller 2015; Yule, 2016). It is important for variationists to account for even the slightest variation in all aspects of language use (e.g., coupla, grammatical variables, or pragmatic variables like discourse markers). So far, most of the studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom that looked for the linguistic variation, have focused on the phonological variables. Of innumerable possible phonological variables, the (ng), (r), (t), (th), (dh), and (l) are hugely studied (Wardhaugh, & Fuller, 2015).

Professor P. Eckert classified the overall variationist movement into three waves namely, (a) first wave of variation study, (b) second wave of variation study, and (c) third wave of variation studies in “Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation” (2012). She mentioned that the first wave began with Labov’s (1966) study entitled ‘The study of social stratification of English in New York City’ and it incorporated the studies of Wolfram and Trudgil as well. The researchers investigated the variation in language used based on gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity (vernacular languages) from phonological perspectives. William Labov’s ‘The Fourth Floor’ is one of the popular works in this phase, in which he investigated the (r) variable among the people of high, middle, and low social class in the city of New York. Younger people were more likely to pronounce the /r/ sound after a vowel (e.g. in the word floor) than before a consonant (e.g., in the word fourth). Labov believed that r-pronunciation in overall was being reintroduced in the state of New York during this period. He walked around to the city Department Stores clearly demarcated for different social classes, Saks for high social class, Macy’s for middle class, and Klein stores for low social class people and asked for the location of the offices or companies located in the fourth floors and wanted them to repeat their responses pretending not to hear their first responses. He collected data from approximately 264 people (n= 264, Sacks= 68, Macys = 125, & Klein =71). The table below shows the results for his study:

	Saks (%)	Macy’s (%)	Klein (%)
Both [r]	32	31	17
Some [r]	30	20	4

The table shows that the percentage of people uttering [r] in both cases were higher who worked in Saks than in Macy’s and in Klein stores. It was true about in case of at least one [r]. Approximately 79% of the people who worked in the Klein Store did not pronounce [r] at all. That made Labov to conclude that people from higher social background uttered [r]. He further analyzed the data and found that older people in Saks pronounced less [r] compared to young people; and findings of Klein store was inconclusive about this aspect. However, further analysis of Macy’s data revealed a completely opposite phenomena compared to Saks. Thus, Labov concluded that pronunciation of [r] was highly valuable because it represented the upper middle-class people in the city of New York (Wardhaugh, & Fuller, 2015; Eckert, 2012) and it was not always the case. Most of the studies conducted during this period employed the survey design. This wave offered very interesting and unprecedented findings about social use of language and refuted many mythologies that people mistakenly believed to be true (e.g., vernacular language were not fully developed form of language; women tend to use traditional form of a language etc.).

The second wave of variation study began with the study of Milory (1980) that incorporated the social agency to the use of vernacular and standard form with a due focus on vernacular as an expression of local or class identity using ethnographically determined social classes. The researchers got mixed up in the speech communities they wanted to study and collected the first-hand knowledge to better understand the emic perspective of language use. The terminologies like ‘covert prestige’, and ‘overt prestige’ got linguistic definitions to discuss about people’s tendency to align or distance oneself from other. One of the most remarkable studies during this period was conducted by P. Eckert during late 80s which is popularly known as ‘Jocks and burnouts’. She studied the predominantly White Highschool kids who tended to distinguish themselves on the basis of their socioeconomic status. Students who came from working class families were the member of ‘burnouts’, while the middle-class kids were the members of jocks. The burnouts’ use of vowel sounds was more closely associated with the urban orientation, while jocks to suburban orientation in their speech. The girls during this period could not accumulate symbolic capital by participating in physical activities like sports, thus they had to rely in their speech to make such distinctions (Eckert, 1989).

The third wave deviated from second in a sense that it took the stance and stylistic variation in account i.e., the use of different variants based on speakers’ fleeting identities and role in relation with their audience. In first two waves the linguistic variation was seen as to transcend from the social space, but the third wave saw it as an integral aspect of language. In other words, an individual is thought to play a dynamic role in representing the all possible variations of the speech community they live, and it keeps changing continuously. With the help of indexical mutability, they play the stylistic roles in a fairly competitive manner, for example one can role play a member of a clique (with the accent, slang, body language, gestures etc.) and within a matter of time s/he can play a role of a responsible representative of an organization in a formal meeting. The transition takes place instantaneously and smooth (Eckert, 2012).  

One of the popular works in this phase came from Campbell-Kibler (2007) study which tapped into the relationship between the English variable (ing) and two divergent accents (Southern, and gay) as they are conceptualized and given social meaning in listeners’ perception of spontaneous speech. To conduct a group interview of 55 in person participants and 124 web-based participants, Campbell-Kibler used the Matched Guise technique she came up with 32 matched pairs differing only in tokens of (ing) excerpted from 8-different sociolinguistic interviews of people from North Carolina, and California. The result showed that participants viewed the utterance of /ing/ to be superior to /in/. They associated the velar variant of the variable (ing) to formality, education, articulateness, and intelligence, while the apical variant (in as in walkin) as lacking these qualities (Campbell-Kibler, 2007).

Finally, the variation studies took a complete reversal from first to third waves. The first wave looked language users as a static body acquiring language as it is, while the third wave portrayed users as stylistic being engaged in tailoring linguistic styles in ongoing lifelong projects of self-construction and differentiation.

References:

Campbell-Kibler, K. (2007). Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American speech, 82(1), 32-64.

Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual review of Anthropology, 41, 87-100.

Labov, W. (1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. 

Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular (Vol. 3). University of Pennsylvania Press.

Milroy, Lesley. (1980). Language and social networks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Wardhaugh, R., & Fuller, M. Janet. (2015). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.

Yule, G. (2016). The study of language. Cambridge university press.