Keywords

phonology, social differentiation, urban speech-communities, pronunciation

Abstract

The material for this article bas been drawn from a larger sociolinguistic survey of various aspects of tbe phonology of 18-26 yr olds in Valladolid carried out between October 1976 and April 1977. The methodology used is basically the same as that developed by William Labov for his New York survey and has become one of the most established methods of enquiry into the social differentiation of the phonology of urban speech-communities. Informants were selected from the Valladolid census records in a semi-random manner and assigned to their socio-economic class according to the criteria of Spanish sociologists. Each informant was interviewed with the aid of a Questionnaire designed to elicit speech characteristic of four distinct contextual styles. The different sections into which the questionnaire was divided are conversation style (CS), reading-passage style (RPS), word-list style (WLS) and minimal pairs style (MPS) and represent increasing degrees of formality and anention paid to speech as the interview progressed. All interviews were tape-recorded.

Original Publication Citation

Williams, L. "The Pronunciation of Women: Some Spanish Evidence", Language & Communication, Vol. 3, No 2 (1983), pp.171-9.