19 Ways 1 Guy Totally Changed How We All Understand Language
Ever noticed that similar people tend to sound like each other? Like, how you just know someone is a Karen the second they open their mouth.
Well, there's actually a whole field of study devoted to explaining how that works. It's called sociolinguistics, and it pretty much took off thanks to this one guy, William Labov...
1. It all started in the 60s, when differences in people's speech were still mostly explained in terms of where they lived - so, for example, all people in New York should, in theory, have sounded the same. That wasn't ever totally the case though, so most linguists would explain differences between New Yorkers as something called 'free variation'. This basically means the differences happened without any pattern, totally randomly.
2. Labov was more 'lawful good' than 'chaotic evil' so when he arrived on the New York linguistics scene, he set about trying really hard to find some sort of pattern among all that chaos. He started to spot some sort of connection between social class and different ways of speaking.
3. To test his idea, Labov decided to... go shopping. No, really!! He went to three different department stores, figuring that Saks Fifth Avenue would be full of super classy people, while S. Klein (basically Home Bargains for boomers) would have a load of super trashy people, and Macy's would be somewhere in between. His linguist spidey-senses told him that the fancier the department store, the more clearly people would pronounce /r/ (so like New York, not New Yawk).
4. And what Labov did next was kiiiind of genius. He chose an item that he knew was kept on the fourth floor and then, pretending to be a customer, asked loads of different staff members where that item was. He then noted down whether they had replied with fourth floor (pronouncing the /r/), or something more like fawth flaw (with no /r/). No matter how loudly they spoke, he then said "Excuse me?", so that they repeated themselves more carefully.
5. Labov freaked out at the results - his theory seemed totally legit. The fancier the department store, the more /r/ he recorded!
Most people Labov spoke to also used more /r/ in their careful, repeated speech (so after he said 'excuse me') than in their more relaxed first attempt. So, the more closely someone was paying attention, the more they would say fourth floor and not fawth flaw. Labov took that to mean that people saw using /r/ as the better pronunciation, even if that wasn't how they would usually speak. Macy's employees generally showed the biggest jump in /r/ use between their relaxed and careful speech, which also suggested that the middle class group had the best awareness of what sounded classy and what sounded trashy.
6. These findings were a huuuuge OMG moment for linguistics - they showed that speech could vary, not randomly, but according to highly-patterned social differences. And not only that, but Labov showed that ideas about better and worse ways of speaking could be shared by the whole community - even if some people (usually upper-class ones) used the 'better' features more than others. Together, these patterns of social differences plus their shared community-wide evaluation were what Labov called social stratification.
7. This department store experiment is probs the most famous bit of Labov's New York study. But actually, there is soooo much more to it. Like, seriously. So. Much. More. And a lot of the tables and graphs definitely make you feel a bit like this:
8. But the department store results alone wouldn't have been enough to actually prove Labov's ideas. So he had to keep going and find more solid evidence. Which he did. Through veeeery long, veeeery in-depth interviews with native New Yorkers of various classes, ethnicities, ages and genders.
9. In the interviews, Labov didn't just look at /r/ but also chose some other speech features to measure, like:
- the /oh/ sound in words like coffee (cohw-fee vs cah-fee)
- the /æh/ sound in words like bad (beeh-d vs baa-d)
- the /th/ sound in words like then or thing (then/thing vs ten/ting or den/ding)
10. · Just like in the department store experiment, there were clear differences between upper, middle and lower class people for all the speech features Labov looked at. And, it didn't stop with class. Labov also found important speech differences between other social groups, like men vs women, or Jewish New Yorkers vs Italian New Yorkers (kinda think Bernie Sanders vs Tony Soprano).
It turned out that age had an especially crazy effect on speech differences, and Labov actually used those patterns to see the language changing, like in real time. As in, the older people roughly represented how the language used to be and younger people roughly represented the direction it was going. Wild, huh?
11. Believe it or not, it gets wilder. Labov used different interview questions to get each person to speak either more naturally, like by asking about childhood memories, or more carefully, like by asking them to define 'the successful man' *insert eye roll*. Regardless of their own natural pronunciation, almost everyone Labov spoke to used more of certain pronunciations in their careful speech. Meaning that everyone in the New York speech community seemed to share the same abstract idea of which pronunciations sounded worse vs which ones sounded better, no matter how they themselves actually talked.
12. And, just like the Macy's employees, the lower middle class people Labov spoke to tended to have the clearest idea of what those better and worse pronunciations were. This actually sometimes made them overcompensate. They would try hard to sound how they thought was better (i.e. like more upper-class people), but would end up overdoing it and sounding posher than, well, the actual posh people.
13. But the craziest part is that this was all pretty much happening without anyone even realising...
Ever wondered why you hate the sound of your own voice on camera? Well, according to Labov, we have so little control over our speech that we can never actually speak the way we hear ourselves in our heads.
Labov chose particular features for his study because he thought they were 'immune from conscious suppression' - meaning that New Yorkers wouldn't really be able to control how they pronounced them when they were speaking. He uses two women, Mollie & Debbie S., as examples. They both laughed at the idea that they might use 'trashy' pronunciations like fawth flaw, cohwfee or beeh-d, but, in the interviews, they both actually used those features fairly often, even in their careful speech.
14. Remember when we said that Labov's interviews were long? Well, they were. Like, crazy long. So after a lot of weird questions about near-death experiences and childhood memories (obvs so that he could get a good range of speech for each person), Labov then wanted to test how people felt about speech.
15. He made up some pretty cool quizzes, along the lines of 'If You Think We Can't Guess Your Ideal Career Based On How You Say Fourth Floor, Think Again' and 'If You Think You Can Spot Your Own Pronunciation, You Definitely Can't'.
16. ·And the results pretty much confirmed some stuff he already knew: the New Yorkers all shared the same ideas about better speech vs worse speech, and none of them were all that aware of how they themselves actually spoke.
17. But they also showed some other stuff. Like, that New Yorkers got reeeeally negative vibes from New York speech in general, no matter how classy or trashy it was. They thought it all sounded 'harsh' 'sloppy' and 'careless' (like this Tik Tok) and were super embarrassed about sounding like a New Yorker. Big sad face.
18. Ummm, hating on the NYC accent?
We hope things have changed a bit since then. Labov's findings weren't only important in understanding New York speech, they also pretty much kickstarted sociolinguistics. As in, a whole field of study dedicated to uncovering the secret social meanings of language. And when we know about these things, we can start to question them.
19. So, go tell your New Yorker friends that you love them and their accent, in all its wonderfully classy and trashy forms. And maybe even ask them for directions to the fawth flaw while you're at it.
If we've inspired you to go read Labov's whole book, you can find it in any good library:
Labov, W. (2006). The social stratification of English in New York City (Second ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Images from https://imgflip.com and https://giphy.com (as hyperlinked)