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6 : SOCIOPHONOLOGY1.1 IntroductionWhile 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 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).
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