A Possible Sociolinguistic Universal

Abstract

On the basis of an empirical study of urban vernacular in the city of Split, Yugoslavia, the author tries to establish the differences that exist in the speech of two social groups, workers and students. The differences studied are restricted to a few phonological variables (m>n, h>0, d>j, lj>j, v,>j) which are characteristic to the Cakavian dialect as opposed to the standard štokavian. Since the standard language has been influencing and changing the čakavian dialect for some time one of the aims of this article is to point out the direction and the different degrees of change of the mentioned variables. The analysis shows that there is a hierarchy among the variables which can be explained by such linguistic features, as environmental influence, grammatical categories and universal tendencies. The analysis further shows the nonstandard nature of the urban vernacular on the phonological level among the worker’s. Similar findings are presented by J. and L. Milroy in their investigation of Belfast working class speech. Such findings might prove to be a sociolinguistic universal which takes the following form: In every speech community where certain phonological variables co-occur and vary with social group dependency, we can predict that, under ithe influence of the standard language (or the language of social prestige), the phonological variables found in the speech of the working class will remain relatively unchanged in comparison to the changes found in the speech of the other social groups.