33 Sociolinguistic correlations: Place
If you sit back and think about how different people speak or sign the same language in different ways, the first social distinction that comes to mind just might be region or place. As dialectologists have been aware of for a long time, people from different places tend to have different regional varieties. Egyptian Arabic and Syrian Arabic are distinct; Continental French, Quebec French and Moroccan French are distinct; Spanish in Mexico, in Puerto Rico, and in Spain are all distinct. Within one nation there are also dialect differences, Acadian French (a variety spoken in the Maritimes) differs from Laurentian French (a variety spoken in Quebec, Ontario, and Western Canada); New York City English differs from Chicago English; nêhiyawêwin (Plains Cree) differs from nîhithawîwin (Woods Cree). In some cases, a particular variety has been put on a pedestal as the ‘standard’ and most prestigious representation for the language. However, the standardization of one variety over another is never about the linguistic nature of the variety and is always rooted in power structures and politics. A stereotypical feature of standard British English is the deletion of non-prevocalic r (or ‘r-dropping’) as in dark [dɑːk] and car [kɑː]. This “Queen’s English” (note the explicitness of power and politics right there!) is perceived as the standard, prestigious, and most posh way of speaking for people in, for example, Brixton and Hammersmith. However, the same phonological feature, deletion of non-prevocalic r, which is also common in New York City English, is perceived as non-standard, low-status, and lacking prestige in Williamsburg and Greenwich Village. Same linguistic process, diametrically different perceptions!
Do you say ‘soda’ or ‘pop’? ‘Cottage’ or ‘cabin’? In 2013, the most read piece published by the New York Times was “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk”, an interactive ‘dialect quiz’ that asked readers a series of questions about the lexical items they used for various concepts (e.g., ‘a large, wild cat, native to North America’, ‘a small road parallel to a highway’, ‘a small gray bug that curls up into a ball when touched’). Upon completion, readers were given a map pinpointing the quiz’s best guess at their location (within the United States) based on their responses. The piece highlighted the diversity of regional varieties of American English. Of course, regional variation exists within languages other than English too. For example, the words BIRTHDAY, STRAWBERRY, and PIZZA (among many others) have several regional variants in ASL (Lucas, Bayley, and Valli, 2003). You can see four regional variants of BIRTHDAY in this YouTube video .
Taking this example further, it’s safe to say that r-dropping is strongly associated with London English and New York City English (regardless of its other local associations). This association comes about through indexicality, the semiotic concept that a sign (in our case, a