Languageandsocialclass语言与社会阶层..doc

Language and social class If you are an English-speaker you will be able to estimate the relative social status of the following speakers solely on the basis of the linguistic evidence given here: Speaker A Speaker B I done it yesterday I did it yesterday He ain’t got it He hasn’t got it It was her what said it It was her that said it If you heard these speakers say these things you would guess that B was of higher social status than A, and you would almost certainly be right. How is it that we are able to do this sort of thing? The answer lies in the existence of varieties of language which have come to be called socialclass dialects. There are grammatical differences between the speech of these two speakers which give us clues about their social backgrounds. It is also probable, although this is not indicated on the printed page, that these differences will be accompanied by phonetic and phonological differences— that is to say, there are also different social-class accents. The internal differentiation of human societies is reflected in their languages. Different social groups use different linguistic varieties, and as experienced members of a speech community we have learnt to classify speakers accordingly. Why does social differentiation have this effect on language? We may note parallels between the development of these social varieties and the development of regional varieties: in both cases barriers and distance appear to be relevant. Dialectologists have found that regional-dialect boundaries often coincide with geographical barriers, such as mountains, swamps or rivers: for example, all local-dialect speakers in the areas of Britain north of the river Humber (between Lincolnshire and Yorkshire) still have a monophthong in words like house (‘hoose’ [hu:s], whereas speakers south of the river have had some kind of [haus]-type diphthong for several hundred years. It also seems to be the case that the greater the geographica