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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Introduction
In the light of more than two decades of research in the Labovian framework, conducted mainly in urban speech communities, there exists a widespread belief that linguistic variability is most likely to appear when there is strong socio-economic stratification, or even that it only appears under these circumstances. This is the impression left, intentionally or not, by statements such as the following by D. Sankoff and Laberge (1978:239):
Though it is well known that the internal differentiation of spoken language is related to social class, the scientific study of this relationship poses a number of very different problems.
and by Labov (1966:111):
Variation in linguistic behavior does not in itself exert a powerful influence on social development, nor does it affect drastically the life chances of the individual; on the contrary, the shape of linguistic behavior changes rapidly as the speaker's social position changes.
Quantification of linguistic data according to linguistic environment and according to the speaker's social class is basic to the methodology of this branch of sociolinguistics. It is also an underlying assumption that variables involved in a linguistic change necessarily carry sociosymbolic meaning.
In the language death literature, it has been shown that variation may arise in languages undergoing attrition as a result of a language death process whereby simplified variants gradually replace more complex variants, especially in the speech of semi-speakers (see e.g. Dorian 1978c). Schmidt (1985a) also gives evidence for the creation of new, complex variants in dying Dyirbal.
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