Phonological Correlates of Social Stratification

their evolution, and their role in community life, it is useful to reverse this attitude. If a feature of language is constant from place to place and speaker to speaker, the fact will then appear to us pale and uninteresting. But the moment we hear a difference between two speakers or two speeches, our interest is quickened. Does the difference recur? Is it generalized in any context or social group? Does it have social meaning? As we turn from the study of linguistic constants to linguistic variables, we acquire more realistic methods of comparing systems and measuring differences between structures. Moreover, as we develop quantitative methods, correlations between linguistic patterns and other cultural patterns begin to emerge. The important word here is quantitative. As naive and native speakers of a particular region and generation, we all receive a great deal of qualitative information from small differences in the speech of others. The linguist's task is to construct quantitative measures by which such information becomes a precise medium for comparison and further abstract manipulation. There is an element of paradox in this emphasis on quantitative procedures. One of the undisputed achievements of structural linguistics was the analysis of various continuous dimensions into qualitative units, conceived as absolutely different from one another, bounded by sudden transitions in terms of binary choices. This model was a successful representation of a synchronic structure with only one function: that of cognitive communication. Its limitations have become increasingly apparent as linguists begin to analyze the many functions of language in the context of the speech community (Hymes 1962.). Further questions are raised by the search for the origins and dynamics of linguistic change: in several empirical studies it has been possible to outline a detailed quantitative structure which lies below the level of the quantitative functional unit. In a previous study of the speech of the island of Martha's Vineyard (Labov 1963), a numerical index was constructed to measure a complex distribution of small differences in the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/. The linguistic pat