Urban sociolinguistics: methodology and problems

William Labov’s objective of investigating speech variation in a cross-section of speakers from New York City in the 1960s raised an immediate methodological problem: how could one gain access to the natural speech from informants who knew they were the subjects of investigation? How, in other words, could what became known as the Observer’s Paradox be overcome? An ingenious early response can be seen in his pilot study, undertaken with a team of researchers in three New York department stores: Saks, Macy’s and Klein’s, which could be graded as high, middle and low status respectively on a number of external criteria (e.g. prices of similar display goods, range of goods offered, publications in which the stores advertised).

Labov focused on a single linguistic variable (i.e a speech form known to be used variably within a community), namely non-prevocalic /r/, which may be deleted in New York. The variable (r) (sociolinguistic variables are conventionally placed in round brackets) therefore had two variants, labelled (r)-0 and (r)-1: