Dangerous New York, tranquil Norwich?

Towards the end of the interview, Labov would ask his informants whether they had ever been in a situation where they had genuinely feared for their lives (Labov 1966: 107):

Have you ever been in a situation where you were in serious danger of getting killed (where you said to yourself, ‘This is it!’)?

The question subtly diverts speakers’ attention away from their speech and directs it towards the telling of an exciting story: the speaker stands to look ridiculous if it turns out that there was in fact no real danger.

While not all New Yorkers had tales of this kind to tell, this approach generally worked well in New York, but failed dismally in Norwich, leaving Peter Trudgill to wonder whether Norvicensians simply led more uneventful lives than their New York counterparts. Trudgill’s solution – asking informants whether they had had a good laugh recently – worked rather better, while similarly exerting gentle pressure on informants to tell a good story, and thereby diverting their attention away from their own speech. The underlying methodological assumption that formality of speech style increases with attention to speech became known as the audio-monitoring hypothesis, which Labov (1972: 208) sets out thus:

‘There are a great many styles and stylistic dimensions that can be isolated by the analyst. But we find that styles may be ordered along a single dimension, measured by the amount of attention paid to speech. The most important way in which this attention is exerted is in audio-monitoring one’s own speech, though other forms of monitoring also take place.’

The methodology of the structured sociolinguistic interview has been challenged on a number of grounds, including the artificiality of the question-answer format, the non-comparability of scripted and unscripted styles, and the audio-monitoring hypothesis on which many of its assumptions rest. It is simply not true that speakers always use more formal styles when paying attention to their speech, and most sociolinguists would now argue that, since speakers are always tailoring their speech to a particular audience, the very notion of ‘natural vernacular’ is a misnomer. Nonetheless, the controlled experimental data which the New York and Norwich surveys produced are still noteworthy for the insights they yielded, for the first time, about the relationship between language and social factors, the most important of which we review below.