6 Regional and social dialects n the fi rst section of this book, the focus was on language variation in multilingual I communities. In this section, the focus moves to language variation in monolingual communities. People often use a language to signal their membership of particular groups and to construct different aspects of their social identity. Social status, gender, age, ethnicity and the kinds of social networks that people belong to turn out to be important dimensions of identity in many communities. I will illustrate the way people use language to signal and enact such affi liations in this second section of this book. Example 1 Telephone rings. Pat : Hello. Caller : Hello, is Mark there? Pat : Yes. Just hold on a minute. Pat (to Mark) : There’s a rather well-educated young lady from Scotland on the phone for you. When you answer the telephone, you can often make some pretty accurate guesses about various characteristics of the speaker. Pat was able to deduce quite a lot about Mark’s caller, even though the caller had said nothing explicitly about herself. Most listeners can identify that the caller is a child without any problem. When the caller is an adult, it is usually easy to tell whether a speaker is female or male. If the person has a distinctive regional accent, then their regional origins will be evident even from a short utterance. And it may also be possible to make a reasonable guess about the person’s socio-economic or educational background, as Pat did. No two people speak exactly the same. There are infi nite sources of variation in speech. A sound spectrograph, a machine which represents the sound waves of speech in visual form, shows that even a single vowel may be pronounced in hundreds of minutely different ways, most of which listeners do not even register. Some features of speech, however, are shared by groups, and become important because they differentiate one group from another. Just as different languages often serve a unifying and separating function for their speakers, so do speech characteristics within languages. The pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of Scottish speakers of English is in some respects quite distinct from that of people from England, for example. Though there is variation within Scotland, there are also 131 An introduction to sociolinguistics some features which perform an overall unifying function. The letter r in words like girl and star is pronounced in a number of English-speaking areas, and Scotland is certainly one of them. And a Scot is far more likely to say I’ll not do it than I won’t do it . Similarly the pronunciation of bath with the same vowel as in sat distinguishes a speaker from the north of England from a southerner. And while many speakers of English use the same vowel in the three words bag , map and bad, workers in Belfast pronounce them in ways that sound like [beg], [ma::rp] and [bod] to English people. Speech provides social information too. Dropping the initial [h] in words like house and heaven often indicates a lower socio-economic background in English. And so does the use of grammatical patterns such as they don’t know nothing them kids or I done it last week . We signal our group affi liations and our social identities by the speech forms we use. Regional variation International varieties Example 2 A British visitor to New Zealand decided that while he was in Auckland he would look up an old friend from his war days. He found the address, walked up the path and knocked on the door. ‘Gidday,’ said the young man who opened the door. ‘What can I do for you?’ ‘I’ve called to see me old mate Don Stone,’ said the visitor. ‘Oh he’s dead now mate,’ said the young man. The visitor was about to express condolences when he was thumped on the back by Don Stone himself. The young man had said, ‘Here’s dad now mate’, as his father came in the gate. There are many such stories – some no doubt apocryphal – of mistakes based on regional accent differences. To British ears, a New Zealander’s dad sounds like an English person’s dead , bad sounds like bed and six sounds like sucks . Americans and Australians, as well as New Zealanders, tell of British visitors who were given pens instead of pins and pans instead of pens . On the other hand, an American’s god sounds like an English person’s guard , and an American’s ladder is pronounced identically with latter . Wellington sux Auckland nil Graffi ti on a wall in Wellington There are vocabulary differences in the varieties spoken in different regions too. Australians talk of sole parents , for example, while people in England call them single parents , and New Zealanders call them solo parents . South Africans use the term robot for British traffi c-light . British wellies ( Wellington boots ) are New Zealand gummies ( gumboots ), while the word togs refers to very different types of clothes in different places. In New Zealand, togs are what you swim in. In Britain you might wear them to a formal dinner. 132 Chapter 6 Regional and social dialects Exercise 1 You may like to check out the extent of US vs British influence on vocabulary in your region. The following questions provide a simple way of measuring this. Ask ten of your friends to answer them and work out how many US items vs how many British items they choose. You should allow for the fact that some may use both. If you are not sure which is the British item and which is used in the USA, check in a big reference dictionary such as Webster’s Third New International Dictionary or the big Oxford English Dictionary . (a) When you go window-shopping do you walk on the pavement or the sidewalk ? (b) Do you put your shopping in the car’s trunk or in the boot ? (c) When the car’s engine needs oil do you open the bonnet or the hood ? (d) Do you fill up the car with gas or with petrol ? (e) When it is cold do you put on a jersey or a sweater ? (f) When the baby is wet does it need a dry diaper or nappy ? (g) Do you get to the top of the building in an elevator or a lift ? (h) When the children are hungry do you open a can or a tin of beans? (i) When you go on holiday do you take luggage or baggage ? (j) When you’ve made an error do you remove it with an eraser or a rubber ? Example 3 (a) Do you have a match? (b) Have you got a cigarette? (c) She has gotten used to the noise. (d) She’s got used to the noise. (e) He dove in, head fi rst. (f) He dived in head fi rst. (g) Did you eat yet? (h) Have you eaten yet? Pronunciation and vocabulary differences are probably the differences people are most aware of between different dialects of English, but there are grammatical differences too. Can you distinguish the preferred US usages from the traditional British usages in the sentences in example 3 ? Speakers of US English tend to prefer do you have , though this can now also be heard in Britain alongside the traditional British English have you got . Americans say gotten where people in England use got . Many Americans use dove while most British English speakers prefer dived . Americans ask did you eat ? while the English ask have you eaten? Are the US or the British usages predominant where you live? In New Zealand, where US forms are usually regarded as more innovative, younger New Zealanders say dove , while older New Zealanders use dived . The differences that English speakers throughout the world notice when they meet English speakers from other nations are similar to those noted by speakers of other languages too. Spanish and French, for example, are languages which are extensively used in a variety of countries besides Spain and France. Speakers of Spanish can hear differences of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar in the varieties of Spanish spoken in Mexico, Spain, Argentina and 133 An introduction to sociolinguistics Paraguay, for example. Native speakers of French can distinguish the French used in Montreal from Parisian and Haitian French. There are differences in the vocabulary of different varieties. So, for example, a Parisian’s travail (‘work’) is a djobe in Montreal. The word for ‘beggar’ is mendiant in France but quêteux in Quebec. And Canadians tend to use aller voir un fi lm , while Parisians prefer aller au cinéma . Even grammatical gender assignment differs in the two varieties. Appétit (‘appetite’) and midi (‘midday’), for instance, are feminine in Canada, but masculine in France, while the opposite is true for automobile and oreille (‘ear’). Clearly Canadian French and Parisian French are different dialects. Sometimes the differences between dialects are a matter of the frequencies with which particular features occur, rather than completely different ways of saying things. People in Montreal, for example, do not always pronounce the l in phrases like il pleut and il fait . Parisians omit the l too – but less often. If you learned French in school you probably struggled to learn which verbs used avoir and which used être in marking the perfect aspect. Getting control of these patterns generally causes all kinds of headaches. It would probably have caused you even more pain if you had realised that the patterns for using avoir and être are different in Montreal and Paris.