Social Dialect and Language History

WITHIN ANY recognizable speech community, variations are normally found on all levels of linguistic structurephonological, grammatical, and lexical. Some of these variations are correlated with geographical location: there are systematic differences, for instance, between the English of London and the English of New York. This type of linguistic variation has been studied in detail by dialectologists. Other types of linguistic variation, however, have received less attention. Some of this variation may be said to depend on the identity of the person spoken to or spoken about; the classical instances are those in Nootka, where separate linguistic forms are used in speaking to or about children, fat people, dwarfed people, hunchbacks, etc. (Sapir 1915). Other variations are correlated with the identity of the speaker. These include cases of difference between men's and women's speech, e.g. in Koasati (Haas 1944). More typically, linguistic variation is correlated with the social status of the speaker; this may be termed a variety of sociolinguistic variation. An instance which has recently received considerable attention is that involving "U" (upper-class) and "non-U" (middleclass) speech in England; it is claimed that the difference in speech has now become virtually the only overt mark of difference between these two classes (Ross 1954:20-23). This type of variation thus provides a potential diagnostic index to social status, though sociologists have exploited this potential very little so far. It should be noted that some cases of linguistic variation are correlated simultaneously with the identity of the person spoken to and the identity of the person speaking. Thus "female speech" in Yana was used not only by women, but also by men in speaking to women; "male speech" was used only by men speaking to men (Sapir 1929). In the sociolinguistic area, linguistic variation often reflects the relation between the status of the speaker and the status of the person addressed, rather than the absolute status of either; an example is Vietnamese (Emeneau 1950:206-09). Still other cases of linguistic variation are correlated not primarily with the identity of persons, but with other factors in the social and cultural context. For instance, a special type of speech was used by the Chiricahua Apache when on the war-path (Opler and Hoijer, 1940). A type of variation which is familiar in most societies is correlated with the difference between formal and informal situations-"formality" and "informality" being defined, of course, in terms of each particular society. Thus, as most Americans can confirm, pronunciations like huntin' are found more commonly in informal situations, while pronunciations like hunting are more common in formal situations (Fischer 1958:50). Variations such as this one in English are, to be sure, usually correlated with other factors besides that of formality. In some languages, however, the styles of speech used in formal vs. informal situations are highly standardized and strictly differentiated. Ferguson (1959) has applied the term diglossia to this type of linguistic variation, and has described it in the Arabic, Swiss German, Haitian French, and modern Greek language communities. We may consider this another type of sociolinguistic variation, correlated with the varying social context within which an individual communicates. Here too, the linguistic differences provide a potential means for definition and recognition of social situations. The Indian subcontinent is an exceptionally good field for the study of both types of sociolinguistic variation, and a volume describing such phenomena in several South Asian languages is now being issued (Ferguson and Gumperz 1960). First of all, the Indian caste system makes for easy recognition of the social levels with which linguistic variation is correlated. Thus, in the Dharwar District of Mysore State, "there appear to be three styles of conversational Kannada which correspond to the three main cleavages in the social system . the Brahmin, the non-Brahmin, and the Harijan ['untouchable']" (McCormack 1960). Secondly, several of the languages of South Asia show a clear difference between formal style (usually equated with the "literary language") and informal or colloquial style. Thus, in Kannada, overlying the dialect differences which correspond to caste and to geography, there is a single formal style which all educated people use in certain situations-in lecturing, in dramatic performances, and in all written composition. See Table 1 for a few comparisons between the formal style, on the one hand, and two colloquial dialects, the Brahmin speech and the middle-caste speech of the Bangalore area, on the other hand. It seems likely that distinct caste dialects have existed in India for a long period, always remaining similar enough to preserve mutual intelligibility. Yet both the Brahmin and nonBrahmin dialects of modern Kannada show historical changes from the Old Kannada and Medieval Kannada languages. In some respects the two dialects show different changes, but they agree in many changes, as in the loss of medial vowels. To explain the cases of identical change in the two dialects, we may consider three hypotheses: (1) the Brahmin dialect inaugurated the changes, and the non-Brahmin dialect followed suit; (2) the non-Brahmin dialect was the innovator, and the Brahmin followed suit; (3) the two dialects independently developed in the same directions. Putting the possibilities in the form of a more general question, we may ask: In the over-all history of a language, are changes initiated predominantly by the higher social strata or by the lower? It has been suggested that phonetic change, and perhaps linguistic change in general, are initiated by the upper strata, in order to "maintain a prestigemarking difference" from the lower strata (Joos 1952:229). The lower classes are said to narrow the gap again by imitating their social superiors, who are then forced to innovate once more. Thus language change is explained as a "protracted pursuit of an elite by an envious mass, and consequent 'flight' of the elite" (Fischer 1958:52). For a test of this hypothesis, we may consider the Kannada evidence. It can be shown that the Brahmin dialect does indeed innovate more as regards vocabulary change (Bright 1960). Thus in the middle-caste dialect, "curry" is yesru, from Old Kannada esar (attested from the 13th century); but the Brahmin form is huli, originally meaning "sour, a sour substance," and used to mean "curry" only in recent times. Much vocabulary change involves borrowings from Sanskrit or English, and the Brahmin dialect here often introduces foreign sounds along with the foreign words. Thus the Brahmin dialect introduces /z/ in words like dazan from English "dozen," where non-Brahmins say