William Labov introduced the concept of style in sociolinguistics in the 1960s to refer to typical ways of speaking. Style relates to social factors like the speaker's relationship with the addressee, context, social class, and register. People accommodate their speech styles, such as using more standard forms with unfamiliar people and more casual forms with friends. Accommodation shows politeness and liking, while divergence can be a political message or show social aspirations. Different styles, from vernacular to careful, can be elicited through topic manipulation and social context. Linguistic features indicate both social class membership and contextual variation between styles.

1. STYLES, CONTEXT and REGISTER
WilliamLabov firstintroducedthe conceptof style inthe contextof sociolinguisticsinthe 1960s, thoughhe didnot
explicitlydefine the term. Itrelatestothe typical waysinwhichone or more people doa particularthing.Foran
example:
Three dif f erent requests f or inf ormation:
1. From a friend: Where were y ou last night? I rang to see if y ou wanted to come to the mov ies.
2. In court from a lawyer: Could y ou tell the court where y ou were on the night of Friday the sev enteenth of March?
3. From a teacher to his pupils in school on the day after Hallowe’ en:
I know some of y ou went ‘trick-or-treating’ last night and so I thought we might talk a bit today about how y ou got on. Did y ou go out last night Jimmy ?
Addressee as an Influence on Style:
People use more standard forms to the people whom they don’t know, while hey use more casual forms to the
people whomtheyare familiarwith.The speaker’srelationshipwiththe addressee is important in determining the
appropriate style of speaking. Many social factors determine the relationship between the speakers:
A - Age of Addressee: we use different styles in talking to elderly people or children. When talking to a child, one
woulduse simple andcommonvocabularyandgrammatical constructions.Someof the words may also have a sing-
song intonation and “baby talk” words.
B - Social Background of Addressee:Strongevidence tothe factthat the social backgroundaffectsstyle is when the
newsreadersuse differentstyleswhen addressingdifferentpeople withdifferentsocial backgrounds. The news and
the reader are the same, but the only change is in audience. The newsreader would use a less formal style when
reading the news to the audience of a mid-level radio station, while he/she would read the same news in a more
formal style onhigherradiostations.These responsive shifts are to accommodate with the audience. On the other
hand, Peter Trudgill found out that he accommodated his speech to the people whom he interviewed. When he
interviewedlower-classpeople,he used100%of glottal stops,butusedaround25% of glottal stopswiththe highest
social group.
What causes speech accommodation?
Accommodation Theory:
Each person’s speech converges towards the speech of the person who is being talked to. This process called
“speechaccommodation”.Ittendstohappenwhenthe speakerslikeone another.Itisa polite speech strategy, and
impliesthatthe addressee’sspeechisworthimitating.Forexample,inmultilingual countrieslike Singapore or Zaire,
people accommodate toothersbyusingthe code that ismost comfortable fortheiraddressees.InMontréal,French
Canadian traders may converge to English when they identify English customers in order to improve chances of a
good sell.
Speech Divergence:
Speechdivergence isdeliberatelychoosingalanguage not used by one’s addressee. When the Arab nations issued
their oil statement in Arabic this served as apolitical message to the western world that meant rejection of
cooperation.Also,some of Maori people insisted on using Maori, although they are fluent in English, in court, and
demanded the existence of an interpreter.
We can alsosee accentdivergence:workingclasspeoplerespondtothe educatedstudentswhojoinforthe summer
workby usingmore vernacularformsandmore swearing.Whilethose whohave social aspirationswill diverge from
the low class and use more standard forms.
Divergence doesnotalwayshave anegative attitude towards the addressee. A foreigner can get help from people
when using an accent or vocabulary that reflect a good command of the language.
Accommodation Problems:
Over convergent behavior may be perceived as the speaker is making fun of others. Listeners react differently to
different types of convergence. If divergence is perceived as unavoidable, the reaction of the listeners would be

2. tolerant. However, deliberate divergence is regarded as antagonistic. Someone who sues English to a French
speaker, although he is fluent in French, would be considered as uncooperative.
Influence of Style, Context and Class on Speech Style:
A - Context and Social Role:
The formality of the context as well as the roles and statuses of the speaker and the addressee in the context will
affectandinfluence speechstyle.Forexample,acourt(as a context) isa formal settingwhere the social roles of the
participantsdetermine the linguisticformsusedby each person. A catholic priest would be called “father” even by
hisownfatherwhenthe contextisina church.He is forcedtocall him“father”due to the social rolesof each one of
them.
B - Different Styles within an Interview
A survey conducted by Labov devised ways in order to elicit information over a range of styles in one interview.
Labov made intervieweesreadlistsof words,whichincludedminimal pairslike (ten-tin) or (pen-pin), and a passage
of a continuousspeech. He found out that people paid higher attention to their pronunciation in reading minimal
pairsrather thanreadinga passage of continuousspeech.Theyusedless vernacular forms in reading minimal pairs
rather than reading a passage of a continuous speech.
To elicitamore casual style,Labovaskedinterviewees about experiences where they were emotionally involved.
Therefore,people’sattentionwasshiftedtoalesscareful speechstyle.Labovtherefore defines “vernacular” as the
style in which a minimum of attention is given to the monitoring of speech. in this sense, vernacular is the most
basic style of the speaker. To capture this style, Labov used the “observer’s paradox”: observing the way people
speakwhentheyare not beingobserved.He alsomanipulated discussions with the interviewees by asking people
abouttopicsor storiesin which they were emotionally involved. The result was that the interviewees did not pay
attention to the tape recorder or the strange interviewer.
There are otherstrategiesbeside topicmanipulationtoelicitvernacularstyleliketapingthe speechof groups rather
than individuals in a comfortable setting. Labov in a study collected data from African-American adolescents who
were in groups in the street where they met.
The same happens when a person recounts a country story to his family members in a living room. He/she would
use a verycasual style torecountthe story.This vernacularorcolloquial style isdistinguishable fromthe formal one.
For example,we findspeakersinTasmanianinformal narrative use personal pronouns with inanimate objects. For
example, a speaker would refer to the tree as “he”. This pattern of animating objects has been noted in the
colloquial speech of New Zealand men.
C - The Interaction of Social Class and Style
There is a relationship between social class, style and linguistic variation. Each social class uses more vernacular
forms than the one above it, and less than the one under it. A low frequency of vernacular pronunciation (in) or a
higher frequency of vernacular pronunciation of (iŋ) indicates that the speaker belongs to a high social class, or
speakinginaformal context.If a linguisticfeatureisfoundtooccur inthe speechof low class itwill often be used in
casual speechof differentspeakers.Inthiscase,the same linguisticfeature distinguishesaclassfromanother(inter-
speakervariation) isalsousedtodistinguish between the speaker’s different styles varying from casual to formal.
(Intra-speaker variation).
The speech of each social group remains in the same relationship to other groups whatever the style. It has been
suggested that the stylistic variation derives from the variation between speakers of different social groups. So if
one wants to shift style, one would imitate another speaker from another social group. So when they shift style,
people oftenadoptthe linguisticfeaturesof adifferent social group.The lowersocial groupsshifttheirspeechmore
as they move from one style to another than the higher social groups do.

3. Hyper-Correction:
A studymade by Labovon the post vocalicr variable showedthatthe more formal the style is the more post vocalic
r is used,andthe higherthe social classone belongsto,the more postvocalicr one uses.Whenspeakers of the Low
Middle Class (LMC) pronounce post vocalic r more than the Upper Middle Class (UMC) this is a hyper corrected
behavior. This means that the LMC speakers go beyond the norms of the UMC speech. Their speech sound more
correct or super standard.
Style in Non-Western Societies:
In Japanese, there is a group of grammatical contrasts to express politeness and respect. Before choosing which
style to choose, the Japanese speaker evaluates their status with the addressee (gender, age, family background,
formality of the context). According to these factors, the speaker chooses the appropriate style.
Knowledgeof the stylisticvariationinJapaneseforeshadows one’s education and social status. Therefore, the way
the speaker chooses style gives clues about the social background and education.
In Tehran Persian, the status must be evaluated to choose the appropriate grammatical forms, vocabulary and
pronunciation, meaning the appropriate style.
The choice betweenthe vernacularandstandardforms of sounds reflects the social context. The standard variants
mark readingstyle notsocial membership.Thisisbecause there isadramaticincrease inthe percentage of standard
variants in reading and word lists style compared to people careful speech or casual speech.
In Javanese, the choicesfacingaspeakerof Javanese are two ranked social dialects, within each of which there are
three stylisticlevels.Selectingthe appropriatelevel of Javanese involvesevaluatingthe speaker’srelationship to the
addressee incontextaswell as solidarity. So here, both social group membership and social context influence the
style used by the speaker.
This section showed how linguistic features that signal social group membership can often signal contextual
variation.
The followingsectionshowshowlinguistic features can be markers of social context rather than particular groups.
Register
The term register describes the language of groups of people with common interest or jobs. Others use the term
register in a narrow sense to describe the specific vocabulary associated with particular occupational groups.
The term registerisalsoassociatedwithparticular groupsof people orsometimes with particular situations of use:
baby talk, journalese, legalese, sports announcer talk, and airline pilots.
The example taken to explain the term register is sports-announcer talk:
The talk of sports announcers is known by play-by-play description: it focuses on the action, and is characterized
by telegraphicgrammarwhichinvolvessyntacticreductionandthe inversionof normal wordorderinsentences.For
example,the verb (be) and the subjects (he) or (it) are omitted. The omitted parts are predicted in the context so
theydo notaffectthe meaning. In syntactic inversion, the announcer focuses on the action. In such sentences the
wordorder isnot normal (Subject-Verb-Object) but rather the subject comes at the end of the sentence. Routine
and formulas isanotherinterestingfeature of sportsannouncer’stalktoreduce the memoryburdenonthe speaker.
Registerslike hockeycommentariesorneedexcessiveoral formulas. The formulas are made up of small number of
fixedsyntacticpatternsandanarrow range of lexical items. In this case information about the sports even is given
or conveyedformulaically(inpre-determinedformulas).Soinhorse racesfor example,we have a start formula, and
a horse locator formula.These formulasindicate informationaboutthe start and the position of the horses. Pauses
and hesitationsare notacceptable insportscommentary.The commentator must sound fluent and fast. The use of
formulas allows for giving information with the minimum demand on short term memory.
Sports commentators must also maintain the drama of the action. That is why they use volume and intonation.