Social Class and Language Status

Social Class and the Patterned Variation of Language Use

The father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, made a key distinction between langue, or language as a system, and parole, or speech. In a collection of his lectures published posthumously in 1916, Saussure asserted that langue is the proper object of linguistic study and analysis. Early linguists followed his lead, and although it was observed that people actually did use language quite differently across different areas and in different social situations, they wrote off these differences as instances of free variation. Free variation was seen as the random, inexplicable differences in language use. Noam Chomsky's concepts of competence and performance mirror langue and parole, respectively, in many ways. Chomsky also stressed that his object of study was language competence, not language performance. Indeed, he viewed performance as a secondary level or layer to language analysis, whereas within competence lay the key to understanding the true nature of language.

During the 1960s, however, a group of scholars began working to show that language use in everyday social situations is patterned in interesting ways, when it had previously been discounted as random free variation. Moreover, these scholars noted that the regularities [Page 753]of language use revealed the social structures within which people use language. The work of this group of scholars came to be known as sociolinguistics. Specifically, studies in correlational or variationist sociolinguistics sought to link a particular linguistic variable to its social significance. By using quantitative methods, researchers were able to prove that the idea of free variance was flawed, that language use is patterned in regular ways. A linguistic variable can be any salient feature that marks difference in language use; often researchers chose phonological markers because they were easy to identify and count—for example, whether the vowel in the words pen and pin are pronounced the same or differently, or whether the “-ing” tense is pronounced with the final sound as [η] as “playing” or [n] as in “playin.” A linguistic variable can be a grammatical feature as well, such as the way the third-person singular is conjugated (“he does” versus “he do”). Finally, word choice can also be a variable, say whether a person uses bag or sack.

...