Vocabulary Richness: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

A regression analysis of lexical diversity in the informal speech of 120 mature speakers of French in Montreal reveals no direct effect of socioeconomic level or residential milieu. All social effects are mediated by a single variable: educational attainment. The analysis also confirms a continuing enrichment ofproductive vocabulary with increasing age. The linguistic correlates of social stratification have provoked a variety of evaluative attitudes about the nature of "upper-class" versus "lower-class" speech. These range from the verbal deprivation (1) and distorted communication (2) descriptions of ghetto or working-class speakers, through the more subtle assessments of differentiated functional capacities of "elaborated and restricted codes" (3), and finally to the relativism characterizing much urban sociolinguistics (4). In our work on a million-word corpus of spoken French in Montreal (5), focusing on pthonological (6), syntactic (7), and semantic (8) differentiation according to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of 120 speakers, we have found no justification for positively or negatively evaluating any of the linguistic attributes that distinguish among these speakers. We have begun a computer-assisted analysis of lexical usage in the corpus, and in this area there do exist quantifiable notions such as the range or richness of vocabulary which might provide grounds, however superficial, for such evaluation. We report here the first results of this study. The quantitative data we analyze are the number of different words, D, in each of the 120 interviews, compared to the total number of words, T, in the same interviews, and six socioeconomic and demographic factors pertaining to each speaker. The interviews averaged about I hour and all covered the same broad topic, everyday life in Montreal, past and present, a subject with which all speakers were equally familiar. The word counts, from a computer-stored transcription, were not corrected for homonymy, nor for differently conjugated or declined forms of the same root, but these sources of error apply to all of the speakers in a presumably uniform way. In general, the number of different words in a text is a nonlinear function of its total length. In our data it appears to be of the form D = a + bTr where a and b are 14 NOVEMBER 1975 constants, and r is approximately 0.7. We have repeated the analyses reported below using a range of values of r between 0.65 and 0.75, without substantially changing the results. The demographic data include age (from 15 to 85 years) and sex, and the socioeconomic factors are mean income of speaker's residential area, educational level attained, and index of occupational status of the head of speaker's household, and a similar index for the speaker himself. Needless to say, these last four are highly correlated. To find which factors contribute independently to D in a significant way, we carried out a multiple regression of D on Tr and the six variables, allowing for quadratic terms and products, and using the "forward selection procedure" (9) to determine which coefficients are statistically significant. Apart from Tr, only one term has a significant coefficient (P < .05), namely the product of age, A, and educational level, E. Even when the other factors are "forced" into the regression, they have small coefficients, while the age-education interaction effect remains large and significant. Detailed investigation of this interaction results in the regression D = 24.7 + 1.912T°7 + 2.775A07E where A is measured in years and E in coding categories 1 to 5, each representing an increment of about 4 years' schooling. This formula indicates that in the population represented by our sample, each person incorporates new words into his productive vocabulary at a slowly decreasing rate over time, but this rate can be magnified up to five times through extensive education. Allowing less strict significance criteria (P < .1) does not enable any of the factors other than A or E to attain significance. By allowing higher order terms in A and E, such as A2E, we can modify the regression function somewhat so that D initially rises faster in the case of highly educated speakers, peaks near age 50, and then declines slightly, but this effect is of borderline significance. Within each of the five educational categories considered separately, the data contain too much scatter to confirm the relationship between A and D in any detail. However, for all five categories, by forcing A into the regression we always obtain a positive coefficient and preclude the significance of any of the other social or demographic factors. The important fact that emerges from this analysis is that any contribution to richness of vocabulary (as indicated by D) from such socioeconomic factors as residential milieu or occupational status of parent are completely accounted for by the effects of these factors on educational attainment. This lends no support to theories that linguistic competence is degraded by an "impoverished" childhood environment. Also of interest is the importance of age. Enrichment of productive vocabulary continues at least until age 50. These two observations tie in with other work on the same speech community. Linguistic competence with respect to syntax of children from different socioeconomic milieus (but in the same school grade) shows little systematic variation (10). The lexicon is among the most malleable components of a language and the most responsive to the circumstances of language use (11). This is illustrated by the systematic, although highly variable acquisition rates we find among adults. Such acquisition does not generally occur among adults, as far as is known, with respect to phonology or syntax. This malleability of the lexicon explains why the language of educated people can be lexically richer, while no comparable objective measure exists which might reveal a "better" phonology or a more functional or logical syntax. DAVID SANKOFF REJEAN LESSARD Centre de Recherches Mathematiques, Universite de Montreal, C.P. 6128, Montreal H3C 3J7, Quebec, Canada References and Notes 1. C. Bereiter, S. Engelmann, J. Osborn, P. A. Reidford, in Pre-School Education Today, F. M. Hechinger, Ed. (Doubleday, New York, 1966), pp. 105 135. 2. C. Mueller, in Recent Sociology, No. 2: Patterns of Communicative Behavior, H. P. Dreitzel, Ed. (Macmillan, New York, 1970), pp. 101 -113. 3. B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control (Routledge, London, 1971), vols. I and 2. 4. W. Labov, Language in the Inner City (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1973); P. Trudgill, The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich (Cambridge Univ. Press, London, 1974); H. J. Cedergren, thesis, Cornell University (1973). 5. G. Sankoff and H. J. Cedergren, Lang. Soc. 1, 173 (1972); D. Sankoff and G. Sankoff, in Canadian Languages in TheirSocial Context, R. Darnell, Ed. (Linguistic Research, Edmonton, 1973), pp. 7-64. 6. G. Sankoff and H. J. Cedergren, in Linguistic Diversity in Canadian Society, R. Darnell, Ed. (Linguistic Research, Edmonton, 1971), pp. 61-87. 7. G. Sankoff, in New Ways ofAnalyzing Variation