LING480 Study Guide - Final Guide: Social Stratification

• School: University of Delaware
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING480
• Professor: Darrell Larsen

Document Summary

This article discusses the difference in the use of the prestige standard between middle class women and working class men. These different patterns between the sexes are indicating a linguistic change in complex urbanized societies. The author notes that this is an area of research that has not been greatly explored. Using the parameter of sex to explain a linguistic change has not been studied to the same extent as variables such as social stratification or social context and age. In one of the studies using a random group of 60 language samples, particular phonological variables were surveyed in order to make correlations between sex and social class for norwich english. These results were extendable to british english, as the same phonological variable is present. He recorded his results by taking an index of the use the variable (ng), (pronunciation of the suffix -ing). Norwich english there are two possible pronunciations of this variable: [uj] (prestige accent) and.