William Labov stopped being an industrial chemist in 1960. He went back to school, to a graduate program in New York City at Columbia University. He was 33. Bill 1 had been working in the world of industry making dyes for a myriad of different clients. The work was laboratory based, but it also involved interacting with all kinds of people from factory workers to businessmen. Bill had a knack for listening. He discovered that you can learn a great deal about people when you notice how they talk. Indeed, he observed something quite intriguing – people sometimes speak one way and sometimes another. Even more curious is that the same person in the same conversation can pronounce a word differently from one time to the next. Often Bill is quizzically pondering why people are doing this rather than attending to what they are saying.
Language has many different parts and levels – sound, word, sentence, expression – and it all can vary. In the course of conversation one person might say, “I came from town this morning ,” whereas another might say “I come from town this mornin’.” Now, notice the different ways of speaking. The verb come is pronounced as came one time and come the next. Words with final ing can be pronounced at the back of the mouth, ing or at the front of the mouth, in. These alternations are called linguistic variables. A linguistic variable in its most basic definition is two or more ways of saying the same thing (Labov, 1964: 166). Pronunciations can vary, you say po-tay-to; I say pot-ta-to (phonology). Words can vary, potato, tatter, teeter, tatti (lexis). Parts of words can vary, I say; I says (morphology). Word order can vary, I do not know; I know not (syntax). Even the funny little words that most people think don’t mean anything vary, you know, well, gosh, by golly, and stuff like that. In Variationist Sociolinguistics (VSLX) all this difference is called “inherent variation” because it is an alternation of different forms (variation) and yet it is a core attribute of language (inherent).
Bill sets out to explore this problem – why do people sometimes say one thing and sometimes say another? As it will soon become apparent, such people have odd antennae for language.
Martha’s Vineyard – 1960
There is an island off the northeastern coast of the United States called Martha’s Vineyard. It is a place of rugged shores, sandy beaches, and lighthouses. Fishermen have been going out to sea from the many marinas on the island for hundreds of years. People from the mainland go to enjoy the sun and sand. When visiting, Bill notices the same phenomena he was surrounded with at work. The islanders pronounced certain words a little different than other people. Words like mice and mouse rhyme with price and house but sometimes they can sound quite different. People hear these alternative pronunciations as a “twang” or an “accent.” Some islanders use the strange pronunciations and others do not and sometimes even the same person varies from one pronunciation to another. Bill wonders, “Why?”
Bill also notices that people talk in very different ways from one situation to the next. When they talk about their life experiences, their childhood, and the stories from their experience, their voices change a lot. To Bill it seems that their words shine with the expression of their innermost selves. He calls this instinctual type of language the vernacular, the style in which minimum attention is paid to speech (Labov, 1972b: 108). Bill decides to go to Martha’s Vineyard to tap into the everyday talk of the island. In so doing, he will find out about the place and its language. He talks with many people born and raised on the island, the locals. Bill has a flair for talking to people with straightforward interest and honest enthusiasm. “Hi, my name is Bill Labov. I’m from New Jersey, I’m interested in what life is like around here.”
In the course of conversation, the people Bill talks to discover an opportunity for reflection. Opinions, ideas, and memories spill out cathartically and often poignantly. In the sounds of the vowels in words such as right, about, now, Bill discovers a striking array of alternations. Some of the people use a particular sound a lot and others use it only a little. Sometimes one of the sounds appears to go with age and sometimes it seems to go with the area of the island and sometimes it goes with occupation. Fishermen speak differently than shopkeepers and young people yearning for the mainland sound more like the mainlanders than the Vineyard fisherman. Bill wants to make sense of it all. With his science background, he is used to counting and figuring and tallying things up. So, he applies the same method. How many times did one sound occur; how many times the other, and under what circumstances? This is what has come to be referred to as the Principle of Accountability (Labov, 1966: 49; 1969a: 737–738, n. 20; 1972b: 72), the tenet that dictates that all the relevant forms, not simply the variant of interest, must be included in an analysis. Then, how many times for fishermen compared to how many times for storekeepers? Bill’s ability to quantify who said what, in the precise circumstance in which it was said, leads him to an astounding discovery. The more people identify with the island, the more they want to stay on the island, to work and live and make their way in the world on the island, the more they use certain pronunciations – traditional, older pronunciations. It is a relative thing, not absolute. Everyone on the island uses the same sounds, but they use them to different degrees. The mainlanders, however, do not make these sounds. The whole system is a dynamic with an intricate underlying orderliness.
Bill had tapped a pattern that has now been found in hundreds of other places since. People in small rural communities under pressure from metropolitan regions tend to use traditional pronunciations, expressions, words, and ways of speaking as a symbol of their local identity. The Vineyarders loyal to the island were subconsciously using the sounds that link them, linguistic...
