Sociolinguistics: Nobody Speaks Just the Language

In 1962 a young linguist walked into three New York department stores, one expensive, one middling and one cheap, and asked shop assistants where to find something he knew was on the fourth floor. "Fourth floor," they said. Then he said "Excuse me?" and they said it again, more carefully. He was not shopping. He was counting how often each person pronounced the r in fourth and floor.

The linguist was William Labov, and the stunt was a way of asking an old question in a new way: does the way people talk follow social patterns, and can you measure them? It does, and you can. Nobody in those stores was speaking carelessly. Every one of them was following a rule, one that depended on their job, the store, and how closely they were watching their own words.

The graduate of this course keeps a shift in attitude. A dialect is not a damaged version of a standard, and an accent is not a lack of one. Variation is the normal state of any language, and it carries social meaning that speakers read in a fraction of a second.

Variables: Labov and the sounds of a city

A sociolinguistic variable is something that can be said in two or more ways without changing the meaning: -ing or -in', an r after a vowel or none, I don't have any or I don't have none. Each way is a variant. Labov's idea was that you do not ask whether a speaker "has" a feature. You count how often, in which setting, among which people.

The department store study (carried out in 1962, published 1966) compared Saks (upmarket), Macy's (middle) and S. Klein (discount). He gathered a little over 250 short interviews. The pattern was the one he predicted: the expensive store's staff used the prestigious r most, the discount store's least, and Macy's in between. He also found that within each store, the repeated "careful" version had more r. Speakers shift towards the prestige form when they pay attention. In a wider survey of New York, Labov found something more striking. The lower middle class, when reading word lists aloud, overshot: they used more of the prestigious form than the upper middle class did. He called this hypercorrection: the group most anxious about status over-applies the rule.

Without JavaScript: in casual speech the upper middle class pronounces the most r and the lower class the least. In word lists and minimal pairs, the lower middle class overtakes the upper middle class.

Labov's other early study, on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (1963), showed that a sound change can carry identity. Islanders, particularly fishing families wanting to stay, raised the starting vowel of words like right and house more than those who planned to leave, as the island filled with summer visitors. The change was social: a way of saying I belong here.

Variation also tracks age. Comparing generations at one time ("apparent time") lets researchers see change happening, since younger speakers lead most sound changes. Studies of women and men across many cities have often found women leading changes towards the standard, and sometimes changes away from it, a pattern that is robust but not universal, and which is explained differently by different researchers.

Dialects, continua and who gets called a language

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." The line is usually credited to the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who in 1945 said that a listener had given it to him. It makes a real point. Linguistically, there is no sharp border between a language and a dialect. The popular test is mutual intelligibility, but it fails both ways. Swedish, Norwegian and Danish speakers understand one another to a good degree, and they are three standard languages. Mandarin and Cantonese are called dialects of Chinese, but their speakers cannot understand each other's speech without study. In both cases the label follows politics, history and writing, not sound.

The reason is the dialect continuum. Walk from village to village in a rural region, in Germany and the Netherlands, along the Romance-speaking regions of Europe, or across northern India, and each village sounds only slightly different from the next, yet the two ends of the walk may not understand each other. Dialectologists draw isoglosses, lines on a map where one variant gives way to another. When many lines bunch together you have a dialect boundary, though it is rarely clean.

Without JavaScript: in the invented valley, villages next to each other differ in at most one of five features, while villages 1 and 12 differ in all five; three of the five lines bunch around villages 5 to 8.

Notice what the tool lets you do. No single line splits the valley, and the three lines at the ridge give the best case for a boundary. Where you draw "two dialects" depends on how many features you require. The same problem sits under the count of the world's languages. Ethnologue's recent editions list a little over 7,100 living languages, and Glottolog and other catalogues give different totals, because each must decide where a language ends and a dialect begins.

Dialects and creoles are full languages

"Standard" languages are dialects that won: the dialect of a capital, a court or a printing trade, then codified in dictionaries and schools. It is not more logical or more expressive. It is the one with institutions behind it. Linguists use "standard" and "non-standard" for that reason, and avoid "correct" and "broken."

Labov showed the point with African American English (AAE) in a 1969 paper on the English copula, the verb to be. Standard English can contract is to 's and are to 're: He's nice. AAE can delete it: He nice. Labov noticed that deletion happens exactly where Standard English can contract, and nowhere else. You can say He's tall, but not That's what he's at the end of a sentence. AAE likewise says He tall, but never That's what he. This is a precise rule, shared with Standard English, applied one step further.

Without JavaScript: He is nice contracts (He's nice) and deletes (He nice). I know where he is does neither: neither *I know where he's nor *I know where he is possible.

AAE has other precise features. He be working (habitual be) means he works regularly, while He working means he is working now: a distinction Standard English marks with adverbs. Lisa Green's African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (2002) is the standard description.

Creoles are the clearest case of languages that outsiders dismissed. A pidgin is a simplified contact language used between groups with no shared language, and has no native speakers. When children grow up speaking it as a first language, it becomes a creole, with a full grammar. Derek Bickerton argued in the 1980s that children's own inborn capacity creates the grammar, a claim that was widely debated; John McWhorter and others stress features that creoles share because of their young age. Creoles are official languages in several places: Haitian Creole is, with French, an official language of Haiti under the 1987 constitution, and Tok Pisin is among the official languages of Papua New Guinea alongside English and Hiri Motu.

Tok Pisin has a distinction that English lacks: yumi ("we, including you") against mipela ("we, excluding you"). Many other languages do the same, including Quechua and Tamil.

Code-switching: a skill, not a failure

Bilingual speakers move between languages within a conversation, or even within a sentence. A common view, held for decades, was that this mixture showed confusion or a lack of full command of either language. Shana Poplack's study of Puerto Rican speakers in New York, in a paper titled with a sentence that does what it describes ("Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español," 1980), found the opposite. The most fluent bilinguals switched within sentences most smoothly, and they switched where the grammars of both languages line up. Carol Myers-Scotton's Matrix Language Frame (1993) gave another model: one language supplies the grammatical frame, and the other fills in.

Why switch? John Gumperz (1982) listed functions: quoting, choosing an addressee, stressing a point by repeating it, marking a change of topic or activity, and signalling shared identity. Jan-Petter Blom and Gumperz (1972), in Hemnes, Norway, found that people shifted between the local dialect and the standard when the situation changed (an office, a street) and also to mark a change of topic with the same people.

Without JavaScript: the Spanish quotation inside an English story is a quotation; the repeated Hindi warning is emphasis; the Welsh greeting before English business marks a change of activity; the child-then-visitor switch picks an addressee; the Indonesian-English "bro" marks shared identity.

Switching differs from diglossia, Charles Ferguson's 1959 term for two varieties with different jobs in one society, such as a written standard and a spoken vernacular in the Arabic world, German-speaking Switzerland, Haiti and the Greek of that time. In diglossia the choice is set by the occasion; in code-switching, speakers are using both languages by choice at once.

Language and identity: who we sound like

Why would anyone pronounce words in a way their teachers marked wrong? Because it works. Peter Trudgill's 1972 study of Norwich, England, found that many working-class men claimed in tests to use the standard forms less than they did, and many women claimed more. He called the pull of the non-standard form covert prestige: it signals toughness, solidarity and belonging, and not wanting to sound like "them." Penelope Eckert's study of a Detroit-area high school (published 2000) found that students' vowels followed their social category: the "jocks," who looked to the wider world, and the "burnouts," who rooted themselves locally, sounded different, and the pattern tracked how they saw themselves, not their parents' income alone.

Sound carries consequences too. In a 1999 study by Thomas Purnell, William Idsardi and John Baugh, Baugh phoned landlords about advertised flats in several Bay Area neighbourhoods. He used three voices (standard American English, African American English and Chicano English). Callers heard as African American or Chicano were less often offered appointments, and the gap varied with the neighbourhood. Rosina Lippi-Green's English with an Accent (1997) names the thing behind it: a standard language ideology, the belief that one variety is simply better, which treats judgments about speech as if they were judgments about people.

The implication is not that standards should vanish. A shared written standard has real uses: it lets strangers read each other, and it opens doors that many people have to go through. The sociolinguist's claim is narrower: the standard's advantages are social, so teaching it is a good idea, and calling everything else wrong is not.

Language policy: who decides what is official

Governments choose languages for schools, courts and offices, whether they intend to or not. Four cases show the range. The tool below sets out the written rule, the dated numbers, and where tension remains.

Without JavaScript: India's Union official language is Hindi in Devanagari, with English continued under the Official Languages Act 1963, and 22 scheduled languages. Paraguay has two official languages, Spanish and Guaraní (1992). Spain's Castilian is official nationally and Catalan, Galician, Basque and Aranese are co-official in their regions. South Africa has 12 official languages since the 2023 addition of South African Sign Language.

The cases make an argument among themselves. India's states were redrawn largely along linguistic lines in the 1950s because a single shared language was not available, and attempts to push Hindi nationally have met strong resistance, especially in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s. Paraguay is unusual: the indigenous language is spoken by a large share of non-Indigenous citizens as well, and mixing with Spanish (Jopara) is everyday speech. Spain's model gives regions the power to co-officialise their languages, and disputes over the language of schooling are argued in courts and parliaments by people who think they are protecting a language and others who think they are protecting individual choice. South Africa's constitution gives eleven spoken languages parity on paper; critics point out that English dominates government and business in practice, and defenders say the framework still protects languages that had no official status before 1994.

These are values questions as well as linguistic ones. The linguist's contribution is the evidence: which languages are dying (UNESCO and Ethnologue both count a large share of the world's languages as endangered), what children learn best in (research on early mother-tongue teaching generally favours it), and what a rule costs to apply. The decision is the community's.

What a graduate just sees

• Variation has rules: count how often, among whom, in what setting.
• People shift towards prestige forms when they pay attention, and anxious groups overshoot.
• A dialect continuum has no clean border; "language" versus "dialect" is a social decision.
• AAE, like every variety, follows precise rules, and creoles are complete languages.
• Code-switching is a skill that fluent bilinguals use, with grammar and with purposes.
• Non-standard speech can carry covert prestige and belonging.
• Judging speech is often a way of judging people, and the standard's advantage is social, not logical.
• Language policy is a choice about whose language the state uses.

Where it shows up next

• Historical Linguistics (36/25): sound changes begin as variation inside a community, as on Martha's Vineyard.
• Languages of the World (36/29): how many languages there are, how endangered, and why counts differ.
• Language Acquisition (36/27): children acquire the variety they hear around them, including its social meaning.
• Computational Linguistics (36/30): speech recognition that works for some accents far better than for others.
• In the world: classroom practice, courtroom interpreting, hiring and housing bias, and language revival from Welsh to Māori to Hawaiian.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Miriam Meyerhoff, Introducing Sociolinguistics (Routledge, 3rd edition 2018), or Janet Holmes and Nick Wilson, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (Routledge, 5th edition 2017). Check for a newer edition.
• 📘 Gentler. Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent (2nd edition 2012); John McWhorter, The Power of Babel (2001).
• 🌐 Free text. Labov's "The Logic of Nonstandard English" (1969) is widely available online, and the open textbook Essentials of Linguistics has a chapter on language variation.
• 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 24.900 Introduction to Linguistics (Spring 2022) includes units on dialects and on historical change.