Urban surveys: New York and Norwich

The department store study was followed by two major urban surveys on either side of the Atlantic: by Labov himself in New York City, and by Peter Trudgill in Norwich. In both cases, a representative sample of people who had all lived in the city for some time was selected, on the basis of which informants were invited to take part in a sociolinguistic interview. Informants’ age and gender were noted, and index scores for socio-economic class were established for each informant on the basis of scales for a number of criteria, such as education level, occupation and income.

The interview itself was structured in such a way as to elicit a range of speech styles, so that intra- as well as inter-speaker variation could be measured. The early part of the interview in which personal data were gathered, for example, was presumed likely to elicit speech styles at the more formal end of a speaker’s repertoire, but rather less formal than those of reading styles, in which speakers’ attention could be variably drawn to their speech. In Labov’s minimal pair style, the informant is asked to focus very directly on the variables under investigation, e.g. guard and God, which are homophonous for some New Yorkers (); asking informants to read a word list maintained attention on individual words, but their capacity to self-monitor was reduced considerably when they were invited to read a passage of text, in which examples of the key variables had been liberally inserted. But could access to natural vernacular ever truly be obtained in experimental conditions?

Labov and Trudgill were both clear that the Observer’s Paradox could not be overcome as it had been in rapid anonymous observation, but argued nonetheless that it was possible to divert informants’ attention away from their speech and thereby elicit something akin to a natural, or ‘casual’ style. This could be encouraged by interviewing informants with family or friends, allowing digressions or interruptions (e.g. from telephone calls), and by the famous ‘danger of death’ question.