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William Labov and The Social Stratification of R

This brief paper summarizes and describes the sociolinguistic experiment that William Labov performed in the late 20th century on shoppers in New York. The goal was to see if social status affects the pronunciation of the phoneme /r/.

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287 views3 pages

William Labov and The Social Stratification of R

This brief paper summarizes and describes the sociolinguistic experiment that William Labov performed in the late 20th century on shoppers in New York. The goal was to see if social status affects the pronunciation of the phoneme /r/.

Uploaded by

Samara
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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William Labov and the Social Stratification of /r/

Hypothesis

In his 1966 study, William Labov hypothesized that the pronunciation of the /r/ sound

was a social differentiator across the population of New York City. The general hypothesis was

that if two groups are ranked by the systematic differences in their social status or prestige, then

they will be ranked similarly by their differing use of /r/. Labov tested this theory by

interviewing salespeople at three different New York City department stores, each associated

with a difference social status. He predicted that salespeople in the highest-ranked store, Saks

Fifth Avenue, would have the highest value of /r/, those in the middle-class store, Macy’s, would

have intermediate values of /r/, and those in the lowest-class store, S. Klein, would have the

lowest values.

It was assumed that salespeople at these three stores had the social characteristics of the

respective classes that the stores catered to; salesgirls at the highest-ranked store took on the

prestige of their customers. The stores were clearly stratified by number of advertising pages in

different newspapers, prices and how prices are displayed, and spaciousness and layout of the

store itself. Labov also hypothesized that observation of speech in a natural context, rather than a

formal interview, could be used for a systematic study of language.

Method

The interviewer, Labov himself, observed employees of each store saying the words “fourth

floor” by posing as a customer asking for directions to a section he knew to be on the fourth

floor. Upon asking for clarification, the interviewer would receive another utterance with more

careful style and emphatic stress. Labov then noted the independent variables of which store, the
floor within the store, the age (within a five- year estimate) and sex of the salesperson, their

specific occupation within the store, their race, and any foreign or regional accent.

The dependent variable was the use of /r/, and the interviewer obtained four occurrences of the

sound per salesperson: “fourth floor” said casually, and “fourth floor” repeated emphatically.

Also noted were any other occurrences of /r/ in the speech of the informant throughout the course

of the interview. For full pronunciation of /r/, (r-1) was marked, and for each non-constricted

pronunciation, lengthened vowel, or no representation, (r-0) was marked.

This was repeated on every aisle of every floor in the entire store as many times as

possible without the informants noticing that the same question had already been asked. On the

fourth floor, the question asked was “Excuse me, what floor is this?” By utilizing this method of

interviewing via a casual, normal, salesman-customer exchange, the informants spoke with their

usual style of speech. Results were not affected by the perceived pressure of a formal interview,

and the occurrences of /r/ were observed in the desired social context.

Overall Stratification

As hypothesized, the salespeople were ranked in the same order based on their use of /r/ as

the social class of their respective stores. The percentages of store employees who pronounced /r/

fully without exception (r-1) rose from 4% at Kleins, to 20% at Macy’s, and 30% at Saks (Figure

13.1). Conversely, when comparing data for complete responses only, the percentages of those

who did not pronounce /r/ (no r-1) fell from 82% at Kleins, to 41% at Macy’s, and 30% at Saks

(Table 13.2). The data shows clearly that the store with higher social prestige had higher rates of

employees pronouncing /r/ fully, and lower rates of /r/ being omitted, while the opposite was true

for the store with lower social prestige.


What is interesting to note, however, is that /r/ pronunciation was viewed as ideal by

employees at both Macy’s and Kleins. The majority of Macy’s employees aimed for r-

pronunciation, and instances of r-1 were higher in their emphatic speech, but it was not the

method of speech that they used as a norm. Rates of Macy’s employees pronouncing /r/ rose to

nearly the same level as those from Saks, which was the highest increase among all three stores.

For Kleins employees, the percentage of salespeople pronouncing /r/ rose from 5% to 18% as the

context became more emphatic. Saks employees, however, showed a much less marked

difference in r-pronunciation as speech became more emphatic, which suggests that those in a

higher social class are more secure in a linguistic sense.

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