6 : SOCIOPHONOLOGY1.1 IntroductionW

6 : SOCIOPHONOLOGY

1.1 Introduction

While the sociolinguist studies all aspects of language variation, sociophonology is that aspect of the discipline which studies only those differences of pronunciation which are perceived as socially significant. These are differences which are unlikely to be part of the idiolect of only one speaker, but rather they are shared by groups of speakers, and may or may not coexist with other features of a regional or social dialect in its spoken form, such as distinctive grammatical forms, lexis, and idiom.“Pronunciation” is used here as a broad term which in this context includes other features such as intonation and “articulatory set.”

It is a commonplace of linguistics that spoken language is more variable than written, and that variation in speech (aside from age and gender: see chapters 8 and 9) is a function of (a) region, (b) social group, and (c) situation. The speech forms of regional and social groups, in addition to the pronunciation of particular words in distinctive ways, are characterized by generalized sound features whose patterns are distinctive of each such group. To take the example of the dialects known respectively as British English and American English, most speakers of the former pronounce the two particular words leisure and lever as [3le45] and [3li:v5], but in American English the vowel values in the first syllable of each of the two words are reversed. In addition to such examples, the standard varieties of British and American English are distinguished by a whole pattern of regularized differences, including an important consonantal difference – the need in standard AmE to realize post-vocalic [r] – and many systematic vowel differences such as AmE [æ] for BrE [a:] in words like grass, path, plant; AmE [a:] for [;] in words like hot, wash; and many more. It is the complex of these latter specific consonantal and vowel features which constitutes what we call accent, and which enables an individual speaker's accent to be identified as either standard British English or American English, or as being predominantly one or the other. In Britain and the USA, as in most countries, accent varieties are commonly described in terms of variation from or approximation to the sounds of a standard variety of accent (e.g., BrE, AmE, etc.).




1.2 Accent standardization: The case of RP

The emergence of standard varieties of language, which in Western Europe took place between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, is referred to elsewhere in this book (chapter 13). The most substantial contributory factors were the rise first of a print culture and then of nation-states with mass education systems, bringing in their train vastly increased access to mass media of the written and later the spoken word. These changes were accompanied by the greatly accelerated geographical and social mobility associated with industrialization and urban agglomeration. Written forms of the language were the first to be standardized, with spoken standards usually following a considerable distance behind.

To take the case of England, the written standard developed from the use, in government records from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, of the East Midlands dialect associated with the region around Cambridge, London, and Oxford, and this variety was widely diffused by printing after 1476. The spoken version of this dialect soon acquired influence as a model, and by Shakespeare's time was being taught as such by schoolmasters. The eighteenth-century passion for linguistic prescription and codification – partly a function of greater social mobility – included a marked concern with the “correct” pronunciation of words.

The wider diffusion of this spoken standard, beyond the ranks of the upper social classes (and of the more educated members of the population) within a 60-mile radius of London, had to await the development from around 1870 onwards of an interacting system of boarding schools, known quaintly as “public schools” (i.e., exclusive private schools), attendance at one of which was normally preceded by attendance, from around age 7, at what in Britain is called a preparatory (“prep”) school (Honey, 1977; Leinster-Mackay, 1984). Such attendance became after that date the expectation of all, and the actual experience of most, of the sons of the upper, upper-middle, and professional classes in England (and indeed Britain), and by 1900 of many of their daughters also, throughout ten very impressionable years of their lives. Moreover, thanks partly to the success of the products of these schools in dominating every area of British social life, and also because of an enormous popular literature based on this kind of schooling, the influence of this model of school life reached down into the humblest day school for the lower classes, so that the linguistic forms which the public schools promoted, and especially their standardized English accent, acquired general prestige throughout British society (Honey, 1988b). One consequence of all this was that, while upper-class families in the early part of the nineteenth century still spoke with accents strongly influenced by regional forms, after about 1870 it was rare for any member of the upper classes to speak with any traces of a regional accent. Another curious result was that, because the criteria for being a public school were fuzzy and no one knew exactly which schools counted, the mere fact of speaking with an RP accent came to imply that its speaker must be a “public school man,” with all the social and occupational advantages which that status implied.

In the twentieth century the responsibility for the diffusion of the RP accent passed from the preparatory and public schools to the new medium of radio (established in 1922, in an organization where linguistic forms were closely controlled) and later to TV, which first reached a mass audience in the 1950s. This accent, originally labelled Public School Pronunciation by the phonetician Daniel Jones, has come to be known since 1926 as “Received Pronunciation” (RP), a term which uses the older sense of “received” as “generally accepted as authentic, especially among those qualified to know,” as in “received opinion” (Honey, 1985).

1.3 Two forms of RP

The connotations of prestige which attach to British English RP must not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that this blanket term itself embraces two forms of accent, which can conveniently be labelled as “marked” and “unmarked” RP, where markings are indicators of special social privilege or pretension. While neither form gives any clue as to the speaker's region of origin, unmarked RP is the mainstream variety, conventionally associated with BBC newsreaders and also with schoolteachers, doctors, and secretaries. Marked RP is associated with members (except nowadays the younger ones) of the royal family, with the aristocracy, and with an older generation of senior army and naval officers and university teachers at Cambridge and Oxford. Among many characteristic features, the pronunciation [N] in words like often, cross, and cloth most readily identifies this variety of the RP accent to native speakers who hear it, as does the tendency to give words like really and rarely the same pronunciation, or to move (with Prince Charles) abite the hice. As with all accents, marked RP often involves a distinctive articulatory setting (see Honikman, 1964) which in turn gives its speakers a distinctive voice quality (see Laver, 1980). Originally part of a full British upper-class dialect or sociolect (since perhaps the sixteenth century) with other distinctive lexical and idiomatic features (Honey, 1989: 41), it used to confer special prestige on its speakers and opened many doors to jobs, to commissions in the armed forces, and in the marriage market. Until very recently its acquisition justified investment for one's children in especially expensive forms of education, at the most socially prestigious “public” schools like Eton and Harrow (and comparable schools for girls), followed by Cambridge or Oxford. It must further be noted that, beyond the groups of its own speakers, it could also arouse a degree of ridicule, and is now less common. Outside England (and especially the south of England), the unmarked form of RP may itself be regarded as hyperlectal (i.e., carrying overtones of social pretentiousness outside its own group of speakers), and this is also true for Scotland (and Scottish English has other hyperlectal forms of its own) and for former British possessions overseas like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where a distinctive local accent has become established whose most educated variety is the effective model in the educational system and the preferred form for radio and TV newsreaders. (On the relative status of RP in Nigeria and in Hong Kong, compare Ufumata, 1990, with Bolton and Kwok, 1990.) In Australia, a vast country with remarkably little regional accent variation, it has been estimated that about a third of Australians speak with what is known as a broad Australian accent, just over half with a general Australian accent,
and about one tenth use cultivated Australian, associated especially with education (McCrum et al., 1986: 294). In South Africa, accent features usually make it possible to distinguish among speakers of standard English as between mother-tongue English-speakers, Afrikaans-speakers, mother-tongue speakers of African languages, and “coloreds” (persons of mixed race), and often also South Africans of Indian descent.

These two forms of the standard accent of British English now coexist with a great variety of local accents which are the successors of the mass of local speech forms of medieval Britain. Readers of the classic novel Wuthering Heights (1847) are confronted by many baffling utterances such as “What is he abaht, girt

Results (Malay) 1:

6: SOCIOPHONOLOGY1.1 pengenalanManakala sociolinguist dalam pengajian segala aspek perbezaan bahasa, sociophonology adalah bahawa aspek disiplin yang pengajian hanya mereka perbezaan sebutan yang dianggap penting seperti sosial. Ini adalah perbezaan yang tidak mungkin menjadi sebahagian daripada idiolect di-Pertua hanya satu, tetapi sebaliknya mereka dikongsi oleh sekumpulan Penutur, dan mungkin atau mungkin tidak wujud bersama-sama dengan ciri-ciri dialek Daerah atau sosial dalam bentuk pertuturan, seperti bentuk tatabahasa yang tersendiri, lexis, dan peribahasa yang lain. " Sebutan"digunakan sebagai istilah umum yang dalam konteks ini merangkumi ciri-ciri lain seperti Intonasi dan"articulatory set." It is a commonplace of linguistics that spoken language is more variable than written, and that variation in speech (aside from age and gender: see chapters 8 and 9) is a function of (a) region, (b) social group, and (c) situation. The speech forms of regional and social groups, in addition to the pronunciation of particular words in distinctive ways, are characterized by generalized sound features whose patterns are distinctive of each such group. To take the example of the dialects known respectively as British English and American English, most speakers of the former pronounce the two particular words leisure and lever as [3le45] and [3li:v5], but in American English the vowel values in the first syllable of each of the two words are reversed. In addition to such examples, the standard varieties of British and American English are distinguished by a whole pattern of regularized differences, including an important consonantal difference – the need in standard AmE to realize post-vocalic [r] – and many systematic vowel differences such as AmE [æ] for BrE [a:] in words like grass, path, plant; AmE [a:] for [;] in words like hot, wash; and many more. It is the complex of these latter specific consonantal and vowel features which constitutes what we call accent, and which enables an individual speaker's accent to be identified as either standard British English or American English, or as being predominantly one or the other. In Britain and the USA, as in most countries, accent varieties are commonly described in terms of variation from or approximation to the sounds of a standard variety of accent (e.g., BrE, AmE, etc.).1.2 Accent standardization: The case of RPThe emergence of standard varieties of language, which in Western Europe took place between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, is referred to elsewhere in this book (chapter 13). The most substantial contributory factors were the rise first of a print culture and then of nation-states with mass education systems, bringing in their train vastly increased access to mass media of the written and later the spoken word. These changes were accompanied by the greatly accelerated geographical and social mobility associated with industrialization and urban agglomeration. Written forms of the language were the first to be standardized, with spoken standards usually following a considerable distance behind. To take the case of England, the written standard developed from the use, in government records from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, of the East Midlands dialect associated with the region around Cambridge, London, and Oxford, and this variety was widely diffused by printing after 1476. The spoken version of this dialect soon acquired influence as a model, and by Shakespeare's time was being taught as such by schoolmasters. The eighteenth-century passion for linguistic prescription and codification – partly a function of greater social mobility – included a marked concern with the “correct” pronunciation of words. The wider diffusion of this spoken standard, beyond the ranks of the upper social classes (and of the more educated members of the population) within a 60-mile radius of London, had to await the development from around 1870 onwards of an interacting system of boarding schools, known quaintly as “public schools” (i.e., exclusive private schools), attendance at one of which was normally preceded by attendance, from around age 7, at what in Britain is called a preparatory (“prep”) school (Honey, 1977; Leinster-Mackay, 1984). Such attendance became after that date the expectation of all, and the actual experience of most, of the sons of the upper, upper-middle, and professional classes in England (and indeed Britain), and by 1900 of many of their daughters also, throughout ten very impressionable years of their lives. Moreover, thanks partly to the success of the products of these schools in dominating every area of British social life, and also because of an enormous popular literature based on this kind of schooling, the influence of this model of school life reached down into the humblest day school for the lower classes, so that the linguistic forms which the public schools promoted, and especially their standardized English accent, acquired general prestige throughout British society (Honey, 1988b). One consequence of all this was that, while upper-class families in the early part of the nineteenth century still spoke with accents strongly influenced by regional forms, after about 1870 it was rare for any member of the upper classes to speak with any traces of a regional accent. Another curious result was that, because the criteria for being a public school were fuzzy and no one knew exactly which schools counted, the mere fact of speaking with an RP accent came to imply that its speaker must be a “public school man,” with all the social and occupational advantages which that status implied. In the twentieth century the responsibility for the diffusion of the RP accent passed from the preparatory and public schools to the new medium of radio (established in 1922, in an organization where linguistic forms were closely controlled) and later to TV, which first reached a mass audience in the 1950s. This accent, originally labelled Public School Pronunciation by the phonetician Daniel Jones, has come to be known since 1926 as “Received Pronunciation” (RP), a term which uses the older sense of “received” as “generally accepted as authentic, especially among those qualified to know,” as in “received opinion” (Honey, 1985).1.3 Two forms of RPThe connotations of prestige which attach to British English RP must not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that this blanket term itself embraces two forms of accent, which can conveniently be labelled as “marked” and “unmarked” RP, where markings are indicators of special social privilege or pretension. While neither form gives any clue as to the speaker's region of origin, unmarked RP is the mainstream variety, conventionally associated with BBC newsreaders and also with schoolteachers, doctors, and secretaries. Marked RP is associated with members (except nowadays the younger ones) of the royal family, with the aristocracy, and with an older generation of senior army and naval officers and university teachers at Cambridge and Oxford. Among many characteristic features, the pronunciation [N] in words like often, cross, and cloth most readily identifies this variety of the RP accent to native speakers who hear it, as does the tendency to give words like really and rarely the same pronunciation, or to move (with Prince Charles) abite the hice. As with all accents, marked RP often involves a distinctive articulatory setting (see Honikman, 1964) which in turn gives its speakers a distinctive voice quality (see Laver, 1980). Originally part of a full British upper-class dialect or sociolect (since perhaps the sixteenth century) with other distinctive lexical and idiomatic features (Honey, 1989: 41), it used to confer special prestige on its speakers and opened many doors to jobs, to commissions in the armed forces, and in the marriage market. Until very recently its acquisition justified investment for one's children in especially expensive forms of education, at the most socially prestigious “public” schools like Eton and Harrow (and comparable schools for girls), followed by Cambridge or Oxford. It must further be noted that, beyond the groups of its own speakers, it could also arouse a degree of ridicule, and is now less common. Outside England (and especially the south of England), the unmarked form of RP may itself be regarded as hyperlectal (i.e., carrying overtones of social pretentiousness outside its own group of speakers), and this is also true for Scotland (and Scottish English has other hyperlectal forms of its own) and for former British possessions overseas like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where a distinctive local accent has become established whose most educated variety is the effective model in the educational system and the preferred form for radio and TV newsreaders. (On the relative status of RP in Nigeria and in Hong Kong, compare Ufumata, 1990, with Bolton and Kwok, 1990.) In Australia, a vast country with remarkably little regional accent variation, it has been estimated that about a third of Australians speak with what is known as a broad Australian accent, just over half with a general Australian accent,and about one tenth use cultivated Australian, associated especially with education (McCrum et al., 1986: 294). In South Africa, accent features usually make it possible to distinguish among speakers of standard English as between mother-tongue English-speakers, Afrikaans-speakers, mother-tongue speakers of African languages, and “coloreds” (persons of mixed race), and often also South Africans of Indian descent. These two forms of the standard accent of British English now coexist with a great variety of local accents which are the successors of the mass of local speech forms of medieval Britain. Readers of the classic novel Wuthering Heights (1847) are confronted by many baffling utterances such as “What is he abaht, girt