Dialect Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian Village - eScholarship

Dialect Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian Village 1 JOHN J. GUMPERZ University of California, Berkeley I T IS generally recognized that dialect differences exist in every large speech community. When these differences are minor and do not appreciably affect mutual intelligibility, they are disregarded for most purposes of linguistic description. Areas in which there are no significant linguistic barriers are thus ordinarily said to contain speakers of a single language or dialect. However, detailed studies by dialectologists of the distribution of minor speech variants have shown that these are .not idiosyncratic, as had been assumed by some, but are patterned and socially determined. Leonard Bloomfield postulates a direct relationship between linguistic diversity and the amount of verbal interaction among individual members of a community.2 The model he provides is quite similar to the sociogram of the modern social psychologist. He states: The most important differences of speech within a community are due to differences in the density of communication .... Imagine a huge chart with a dot for every speaker in the community and imagine that every time any speaker uttered a sentence, an arrow were drawn into the chart pointing from his dot to the dot representing each one of his hearers. At the end of a given period of time, say 70 years, that chart would show us the density of communication in the community .... We believe that the differences in communication are not only personal and individual but that the community is di­ vided into various systems of subgroups, such that the persons within a subgroup speak much more to each other than to persons outside their subgroup .... Subgroups are separated by lines of weakness in this net of oral communication. These lines are local, due to mere geographical distribution and non-local or as we say social. If this model is valid, then investigations into the relations of speech dif­ ferences to other types of social interaction should be of great interest to stu­ dents of social structure. Work in this field, however, is still in its beginnings. 3 The first systematic attempts to formulate relationships along the above lines were made by McDavid (1946, 1948, 1951). His data were drawn from the field records of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States, a geographical survey aimed primarily at collecting data for historical studies, but which used a sample drawn from the upper, middle, and lower strata of American society. The distribution of the dialect differences discovered was found to be deter­ mined by social as well as geographical factors. McDavid suggests that these social speech styles reflect what he calls social tensions such as those existing between Negroes and whites, Catholics and non-Catholics, and others in northern industrial communities. The field methods and sampling of the Ling­ uistic Atlas have recently been severly criticized on grounds of reliability and