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Social Factors Labov Summary

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‘Principles of linguistic change – Social factors’, by William Labov is the second volume of Labov’s three volume work of Language Change, which was preceded and followed by ‘Principles of linguistic change – Internal Factors’ and ‘Cognitive and cultural factors’ respectively. William Labov has been a prominent voice in American linguistics since the early 1960s. He pioneered an approach to investigate the relationship between language and society and developed a new area of study and analysis known as “variationist sociolinguistics” - A central doctrine of this field holds that variation or language change is inherent to the linguistic structure. The three volumes address the principles underlying linguistic change and the second volume …show more content…

Instead of throwing light on ‘Why does language change?’, Labov here essentially focuses on the question ‘Who are the leaders of language change?’ – This point is precisely with which I can draw parallels with, in my thesis. This is because the leaders or the initiators of language change are not only the ones who innovate or shift their language from one form to another, but they are people who by virtue of their presence and location in the neighborhood and the society and their behavior and response to the societal constructs, advance and carry forward the language change strongly. According to him, the primary objective is not to hypothesize and analyze the social life based on the linguistic pluralism and behavior, but to note the factors that initiate this change or shift of linguistic variables. If I want to inculcate the same in my study, it shall be to identify, which are the factors that influence or rather force speakers of regional dialects of Bangla to shift to the modern standard Bangla, which is widely spoken and accepted in the metropolitan …show more content…

While the paragraphs above just narrated the story of the west, South Asia as a linguistic area has multiple languages and hence innumerable change and variation stories to offer, where a new feature called – caste, is also added along with literacy, literary traditions, diglossia and social categorization.
William Bright, in his book ‘Language variation in South Asia’ addresses different aspects such as social dialect, structural borrowing, areal linguistics, the relation between literary and colloquial varieties and the role of written language, while analyzing the different languages and their variations in South Asia.
The reason why I mentioned this is because I want to analyze – Bengali, an Indo European > Indo Aryan language in terms of Labov’s ideas on language variation and change but without forgetting it is also an essential South Asian Language in the same landscape as well, which has a long language history and needs mature sociolinguistic sensitivity for a proper

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