Since man first began uttering words and creating phrases, lan­guage has been in a constant state

of change—and still is. New words are being evolved, while others disappear. Sentence structure alters, sounds of vowels rise and fall, and consonants are dropped or added.

Although linguistics is a well-defined discipline with consistent, underlying principles and reliable methods of anal­ysis, linguists still have little knowledge of why languages undergo constant change and what precise factors influ­ence the development of new forms.

But they're making a beginning.

Ancient Studies—New Developments

Languages and their variations have been studied for many centuries by dif­ferent races—for instance, the Indians have been analyzing their dialects for more than ten centuries. Only in the past century, however, has linguistics become a separately organized, self-consistent, and formal discipline in English-speaking countries. And only since World War II have independent departments of lin­guistics become generally established in universities.

Although features and patterns of colloquial speech have been analyzed and

recorded in dialectological atlases and dictionaries, the formal study of linguis­tics in recent years has developed into a philosophical, scholarly discipline in which primary sources of data have come from internal evidence—that is, from the intuitions of the linguists themselves or the formal responses of a small number of subjects. Wide-ranging variations of speech commonly used in communities have for the most part been ignored.

This general atmosphere reflects the theoretical outlook of several dominant linguists. Early in this century, a Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, provided new focus by suggesting that language is a systematic structure or "code" rather than an aggregate of isolated forms of speech which can be adequately de­scribed by techniques of classification. Speech, he pointed out, must be distin­guished from the general aspect of language: It is only the variable mani­festation of the language code. In em­phasizing the importance of this general language system, Saussure implied that the data of everyday speech might be set aside for study at some future time.

In the mid-1950's, Noam Chomsky (now at MIT) further turned linguistics in this direction, asserting that linguists need only their own individual intuitions

to judge which linguistic structures are "grammatical" and which are not. He saw language as a capacity for forming rules, largely built into the brain net­work from birth. Speech is performance, and is only an imperfect reflection of language competence—"a mass of errors" imposed upon the inborn human com­petence to learn and create language based on a finite set of rules.

Today, however, some researchers be­lieve that linguists must become more involved with the actual speech of various communities, not only to uncover more knowledge of man's innate language, but also to understand factors of change.

Out of the Abstract, Into the Real

William Labov, professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying speech empirically, then looking at his data in the light of the economic and social status of the speaker —his environment, ethnic group, geo­graphic area, age, and sex. He is now using all of Philadelphia and its en­virons as his laboratory. In essence, Labov is attempting to move current lin­guistic theory out of a preoccupation with the isolated study of abstract lan­guage and into the realistic world of everyday speech.

Language is restless. It's no wonder we don't always understand each other.

26 MOSAIC Winter 1973

After Ladefoged, 1967.

HIGH

LOW FRONT

Dictionary symbol Phonetic symbol As in

BACK

e a 6 oo

[ * ] beet, mean bat, ban got, on boot, moon

Diagram of the International Phonetic Al­phabet. This shows the quadrangle posi­tions of four basic cardinal vowels. These positions roughly correspond to positions of the tongue in a person's mouth as he pronounces the vowels.

"Language is generally agreed to be a form of social behavior/' Labov says. "Yet, strangely enough, it's generally been studied by asocial methods. The current emphasis on intuitions and in­ternal structural relations has never eliminated the tradition of dialectology, phonetics, and field linguistics which freely drew on the techniques of other disciplines such as acoustics, anthropol­ogy, and psychology." Yet, he adds, linguistics has never extended its formal techniques to the variations of language as spoken in communities.

"Only now are we starting to focus on language and dialects as actually spoken and to watch the effect of social behavior and change on language," he says.

By collecting tapes of vernacular speech from varied communities in the United States and Europe, Labov is in­jecting a new and lively interest into the study of language variation and the principles underlying language change.

Most linguists have deliberately ex­cluded social factors from their research for a number of different reasons—some valid and others not, Labov believes.

They are quite justified in their argu­ment that considerable progress has been made in abstract studies of language. Linguists working with internal struc­tural arguments have made remarkable contributions to knowledge of language, but, says Labov, "we seem to have gone as far down that road as it pays to go." Yet many linguists still prefer not to make expenditures of time and effort of

recording the actual speech of individual people.

Until recently, it's been difficult to obtain significant samples of vernacular speech. The acoustic phonetician usu­ally organizes his subject in a sound­proof room with optimum acoustical conditions and has him carefully read through lists of words. Even the field linguist elicits isolated sentences and poses questions on what the subject thinks is grammatically "right"—but then the speaker becomes self-conscious and tends to speak unnaturally. The tech­nical difficulties of studying everyday speech are formidable, even in a com­fortable environment such as his own home or a gathering place where the informant is at ease in accustomed sur­roundings; there may be mechanical or other interferences—noises of the family in other rooms or outside street noises, a distracting but real part of his life. But now, with today's high-quality equip­ment, vernacular speech can be ac­curately recorded and studied in detail many times over. Labov makes full use of modern instrumentation such as con­denser microphones, professional tape

recorders, sound spectrography, and spectrum analyzers in his dialectological work and is beginning to pick out nu­ances in dialect pronunciation that even a finely tuned ear may not detect.

Labov points out another factor that serves to discourage the study of speech: a mythical concept that everyday speech is a mass of ungrammatical forms.

"Language of everyday life is much more systematic than people tend to think it is," he says. "Not only do most people speak in grammatical sentences most of the time, but much of the varia­tion believed to be random and chaotic turns out to be governed by intricate and regular rules." Labov lays the blame for such a myth on long-held tendencies to follow traditional linguistic frames of reference without examining actual facts around them.

Breaking D o w n the Barriers

Labov is trying to break down these institutionalized barriers between lan­guage and speech and make everyday speech available as evidence for linguistic theory.

Specialized linguists have used many devices to determine bases for their theories, he points out. Surprisingly enough, the one element that has not been used until recently is direct obser­vation of actual speech—one of the things that seems most sensible and natural.

To encourage people to talk freely and naturally, researchers work out methods to overcome the normal effects of the interview situation and help speakers lose the self-consciousness and stilted speech of question-and-answer format. Techniques used range from anonymous observation in public places (like Pro-

Sound spectrogram. For two pronunciations of the name Ann, the vowel formants or bands of energy (marked as F 1 and F 2) are shown as a low front vowel [se : n] and also as a high front vowel rhyming with Ian [i :an]. An acoustic diagram is made by plotting locations of formant 1 (F 1) against formant 2 (F 2) for a series of sound spectrographs of different words.

28 MOSAIC Winter 1973

Professor Higgins' observation of Eliza in (My Fair Lady) to informal group sessions ind long-term observations with a tape ecorder or television camera. While the effect of the observer can never be eliminated, a skilled field worker can break through the major barriers and get the speaker to relax and talk in his vernacular dialect.

Patterns of Language

Labov, after years of listening to peo-ple talk, now has massive amounts of data stored on tapes, films, and spectro­graphs or voice prints. And from them he finds differences and similarities of languages that people never knew existed, as well as nuances and changes in language that indicate a continuing shift in the language and relate to changes in the past.

"We are finding repeated waves of sound changes and shifts going through today's language that are surprisingly parallel to the well-known sound shifts if the past," he says. "Most communities how variation across generations: older people are talking one way while the younger generations talk another. In small villages or on islands we can see the results of the same kind of changes over a period of ten or more years. And from what we find in historical linguistic records, we believe such language shifts have been going on for centuries." For the past three years, Labov's re-

earch group has concentrated upon one of the main sources of change in English: the shift or rotation of vowels. While the fundamental reason for these shifts ; not yet understood, Labov's work is beginning to uncover the general tendencies which move different kinds of vowels in different directions, others in another. Throughout the United States, short a as in man and bad is being lengthened and raised in a very dramatic manner. (All short a words are affected in the northern cities of Buffalo, Roches-teri, Detroit and Chicago; but only certain nes in New York, Philadelphia, and the South.) Thus, the word man is first lengthened to maan (spelled phonetically as mse : n) and then shifted towards lay-un [me : an], with the vowel heard is in yeah or where. As short a moves further upwards, man may even be pro-ounced mee-un [mi:an], to rhyme with in. Labov observes that he recently Let a couple in Philadelphia named John and Ann who named their son Ian. John's relatives in Massachusetts are

continually confused when he calls them up: is he talking about Ann or Ian?

These large-scale shifts were first traced by the impressionistic recording and diagraming of the International Pho­netic Alphabet. This method uses a set of four basic "cardinal" vowels that de­fine the extreme positions: these four vowels make a quadrangle in which vowels appear as high and low (near the top and bottom) or front and back (left and right) roughly corresponding to the position of the tongue in a person's mouth as he pronounces the vowels. Thus the movement of Ann [se:n] to rhyme with Ian [i:an] represents the "raising" of a low front vowel to a high front vowel. This terminology reflects the rough correspondence to the position of the highest point of the tongue as the vowel is pronounced.

The IPA diagram actually corresponds closely to acoustic diagrams such as those produced from sound spectrographs, which register the frequencies of vowel "formants" (bands of energy that define the "timber" or "color" of the vowel). When these formants are plotted on an acoustic diagram the same arrangement shows up as in the IPA diagram. So, in the acoustic diagram for James Adamo, 55 years old, from Detroit, the short a words are low and to the front. But the diagram for Chris Adamo, his 13-year-old son, shows the short a words stream­ing upward past the mid-point, and sev­eral have reached the high front position of long e.

One of the first principles to emerge in this instrumental study of change is that vowels before nasal consonants m and n are the leaders in the raising proc­ess, which moves like a wave through the various sub-types of short a words such as ham, man, and stand. In all the di­alects of English, these words make their way to the top before all others—a find­ing that is still mysteriously resistant to explanation. In the diagram of 15-year-old Kathy from Detroit, the short a words have moved into high position as a whole, and many of them have even passed the long e words. The contrast between speech patterns of Chris and Kathy illustrates a remarkable fact: In almost all of the sound changes traced so far, women are almost a full genera­tion ahead of men. In their casual speech, women show more advanced forms of linguistic change in progress. At the same time, it has also been found that women are more attentive than men

James Adamo, 55, Detroit

In the speech of James Adamo, 55, of Detroit, words with short a such as bat and ban are pronounced with the tongue in a low front position, while the long e words such as meet and mean are in the high front, and the long a, as in bait and mate, are midway in the front. Short a words (represented by w ) are clustered in the lower left corner, and short o words (rep­resented by • ) are grouped toward the lower right corner.

Chris Adamo, 13, Detroit

Vowels of the younger generation in Detroit have shifted. In the speech of Chris Adamo, 13, son of James Adamo, the short a words (shown as^ r ) have risen past the mid point into the high front position, while the short o words (shown as • ) have shifted farther to the front. The short a words can still be distinguished from long e words by the inglide sound of "uh" ; for instance, man is pronounced "mee-uhn," while mean is "meen."

Formant 2

Kathy, 15, Detroit

This speech diagram of Kathy, 15, from Detroit, shows her short a words have moved into a high position as a whole and many of them have even passed the long e words. In almost all of the sound changes traced so far, Labov points out, women are almost a full generation ahead of men in shifting of their vowels.

MOSAIC Winter 1973 29

Listening labo\?. By recording and sludying the speech of many people in natural surroundings, William Labov is taking linguistic theory into the realistic world of everyday speech.

to traditional social prestige forms and formal style. The fact that women show these two extreme tendencies fits in with a general sociolinguistic principle that those who show the most extreme forms of a stigmatized feature in their casual speech are quickest to correct it in their formal speech—and in the speech of others.

Linguists studying the speech com­munity have speculated as to why women show this tendency. It may be they are close to change because of their close contact with young children as mothers and caretakers, and so are also more concerned with what is considered correct. Or it may be that in Western culture women are permitted more ex­pressive gestures than men, and so develop extreme forms of speech.

In any case, Labov is convinced that social factors play a larger role in the evolution of language than most linguists have been willing to admit.

For instance, he has been watching the socioeconomic pressures working on the reintroduction of the consonant r after a vowel—a language change that is occur­ring throughout the northeastern areas •—even around Boston. It is well known to dialectologists that Boston, New York, Richmond, and Charleston are "r-less" dialects; that is, natives talk without sounding the final r; cah [ka :] is more natural than car; bee-ah [bi:a] than beer. But Labov's close studies of New York City showed that r had become a prestige item after World War II. The higher on the social scale a person stands, and the more formal the situation, the more he pronounces the r after a vowel. To gather a wide range of data on this trend, Labov walked through three department stores—-Saks on elegant Fifth Avenue, Macy's at midtown, and Klein's in the

lower Manhattan working district. He asked for an item he knew was on the fourth floor, and found salespeople at Saks pronounced the r of fourth floor more than those at Macy's, who in turn pronounced it more than at Klein's. At all three stores, floorwalkers pronounced their r's more often than the salespeople did, and salespeople more often than stock boys.

He also found that when people who grew up in New York City moved to the more prestigious suburbs, they pro­nounced the r in careful speech, but dropped it in casual or excited speech. The next generation, their children, growing up in a conscientiously r-sound-ing environment, however, pronounced it with ease.

Relating the Present to the Past

Labov proposes that the main forces operating today and changing language are essentially the same that created sim­ilar changes in the past and are responsi­ble for the whole evolution of language. Linguists are observing events today that have roots deep in linguistic history, Labov says. With modern equipment for recording and storing data, research­ers have excellent records of present-day language, including evidence of change across several generations living in the same community. Such good data can­not be found in historical records, for the people writing those records were hardly concerned with language construction and dialect. "So we have to accept what accidental writing survived in the way of poetry, plays, records, scribblings on walls." And even with these data, spell­ing was often erratic, varied, and not at all standard.

But the deeper currents of sound change, says Labov, take place well be­

low the level of public awareness and follow more regular principles. Vowels often move together in a whole series of related changes or rotations which linguists call "chain shifts." The most famous example is the English "Great Vowel Shift" which moved all the long vowels of English one full notch around and is responsible for the fact that the English alphabet no longer matches the values of i, e, and a that are common to

Recent studies of speech within part of some Black communities are starting to isolate some cultural differences of considerable sig­nificance, says Labov.

Black English has its own set of rules and relations that differ radically from the surrounding white dialects. But teachers and psychologists who fail to under­stand these rules see Black English as a long list of errors in the use of standard English.

For instance, the deletion of verbs such as is or are in Black English is not the result of erratic or illogical behavior, he says. It follows the regular rules of stand­ard English contraction, which are used automatically by everyone. Whenever standard English can contract a noun and a verb, Black English uses either the contracted form, or more commonly, deletes the verb altogether. Thus "He wild" corresponds to the contracted "He's wild" or to the full sentence. "Fie is wild."

Because of this lack of under­standing, teachers have run into serious problems of teaching in inner city schools. Often the ex­pressions such as "He over there/ ' or "She gone" are dismissed as "a series of badly connected words."

"We cannot conclude that the child has no grammar, but only that the investigator does not understand the rules of grammar/' says Labov.

The study of Black English has greatly enriched linguists' under­standing of the kinds of rules which can appear in English gram­mar, and the theory of grammar as it can apply to all languages of the world.

30 MOSAIC Winter 1973

How Do Children Acquire Language?

In studying how children learn language, linguists deal with a sep­arate, unknown, pre-literate cul­ture, says Labov. Children are ex­cellent language learners, and we still don't understand how they learn a structured language as quickly as they do. The basic pat­terns are learned from the child's parents by four years of age. But curiously enough, Labov points out, this does not seem to be the actual form of language that the child takes with him into adult life. From four to 13, the child acquires the detailed pattern of his "ver­nacular" from his agemates outside of the family. In the pattern of geographic mobility, this vernacu­lar may differ strikingly from the parents' speech. No one yet knows at what age most children move outside the linguistic influence of their parents and fall under the dominant influence of their peer group, says Labov. "We don't know whether new rules of peers are added to old rules learned from parents, or if there is actually a re­structuring of the whole language. Yet we do know that in the long run most children acquire the di­alect of their friends, rather than that of their parents."

European languages (and are reflected in the phonetic symbols). For instance, English long e corresponds to phonetic [i]. Labov and his fellow workers have been studying a wide variety of similar chain shifts which they have found in New York, Philadelphia, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, central Texas, and many cities in the south of England. They find that these chain shifts obey three laws: (1) long vowels rise; (2) short vowels fall; and (3) back vowels move to the front. They also find strong con­firmation of these principles in their studies of a wide range of completed changes in the historical records of lan­guages as diverse as German, Portuguese, French, Swedish, Czech, Old Prussian, Lettish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Syrian Arabic.

The raising of the lengthened short a in the vowel diagrams of James, Chris,

and Kathy is an example of the first principle in action, Labov points out. Once the short a becomes lengthened, it enters an upward bound track and moves steadily upward. The short o words as in got and Tom then move into the vacuum formed by the movement of short a, following the third principle that back vowels move to the front. Thus, the short o words in Chris Adamo's speech as represented by squares have moved quite far forward as compared to his father's pronunciation and come close to the low front position formerly oc­cupied by short a. Labov has found some dramatic demonstrations that this "Northern cities shift" has rotated the vowels an entire notch. One boy from Chicago introduced his friend John with a pronunciation that made Labov look around for a girl named Jan. Kathy from Detroit remarked that New Yorkers were so funny because they said "bah-ttle" [batl] for bottle [bsetl] and they said "baa-tle" [baetl] for battle [bi:atl]. In other words, Kathy's short o words are rotated to match New York City's short a words, while her own short a words are now so high that most New Yorkers can't recognize them at all.

Although linguists are learning more about current language changes, Labov admits that "because we have no firm data from the past, we can only offer a more plausible explanation of many mysterious facts."

One such mysterious fact was that in London English of the 15th century all words spelled with ea—meat, seat, and so on—were once apparently pronounced very much like words spelled with an a. So that meat was pronounced the same as mate—much the way the Irish pro­nounce it today. But at a later date,

Reference reading for Linguistics

The Study of Nonstandard English, by William Labov, National Coun­cil of Teachers of English, Cham­paign, Illinois, 1970. "The Place of Linguistic Research in American Society," by William Labov, in Linguistics in the 1970's, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D. C , 1971. "Academic Ignorance and Black In­telligence," by William Labov, The Atlantic, June 1972.

somewhere in the 16th and 17th century, meat separated from mate, became dis­tinct, and then merged with meet. Now historical linguists are disagreeing as to whether there ever was a merger of the two words. Some linguists have said there couldn't have been a merger be­cause mergers "by their very nature" can't be separated again. "So we have this contradiction," says Labov. Some say that once merged, words cannot be separated again; others say they can. Still others say maybe they never merged at all. "With today's equipment and ex­periments," he says, "we have reason to think that historical spelling is not enough of a basis to make assumptions about the past. Our answer comes from work on sound change."

For instance, some vowels in current dialects are pronounced so closely to­gether that people themselves can no longer distinguish between the words in natural speech. This has happened to fool and full, pool and pull in many areas. Many speakers in the Southwest cannot distinguish the difference, no mat­ter how hard they try. But on the spec­trograph—a visual record of what they actually say—the sounds appear dis­tinctly different in their own speech.

One neat example of that kind of occurrence is the argument raised with the words line and loin. In the 18th century, these two were believed to be pronounced the same. According to poetry and other documents, it was clear the words were merged. Afterwards, they separated again, as indicated by the spelling of that time—although these words were much used by the common people who didn't spell.

The argument was resolved when Labov read about a contemporary merger in pronunciation of the words line and loin in a little village in Essex, England. He went to Essex where, indeed, he found people unable to distinguish be­tween the two words. But when he recorded their speech with the spectro­graph, the differences showed up dis­tinctly.

"This is a clear case where we used our present-day studies to illuminate what might well have been the case in the 18th century," he says. "Might, mind you; it hasn't been proven. But we are well on the right road to under­standing more not only about the trends of language today, but also the evolution in the past, and where it might all be going in the future." •

MOSAIC Winter 1973 31