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Whoa, whoa, whoa, AWESOME: Sound change: who are the culprits? on zompist.com (via languagehat)

One hypothesis we can immediately reject: that people imitate the leaders of society.  Bluntly, people don’t come to talk like the king, or Congress.  All of the ongoing sound changes that have been identified are divergences from the standard.  Labov calls this change from below; other sociolinguists speak of covert prestige.  One obvious example is AAVE, the speech of urban American blacks, which more or less completely ignores both standard General American and the local dialects of northern whites.  Blacks and whites in the US don’t want to sound like each other.  (This isn’t a universal– Jamaican Londoners talk like everyone else, which Labov confirmed by playing recordings of them to white folks; they couldn’t tell that the speakers were black.)

In order to address how sounds change, Labov focussed on whose speech is changing.  The community doesn’t advance uniformly.  His findings:

• The leaders of sound change are almost always women; they’re often a generation ahead of the men.
• Women keep advancing a sound change in a linear fashion; men’s advance is stepwise.  The obvious interpretation is that men don’t pick up the change from their contemporaries, but from their mothers.
• There’s a typical curvilinear function of class: neither the lower class nor the upper class are in the forefront of change, but those in the middle– even more specifically, the upper working class.
• Nonstandard variants often peak in adolescence.  So older speakers may retreat from a change.
• There’s only a very small contribution from ethnicity or neighborhood (except to the degree that these correlate with class).
• A phoneme doesn’t change all at once; some words are leaders, some laggards.  For some reason, the tensing of short a in Philadelphia strongly affected the word planet, while Janet remained lax.  (This is reminiscent of the effect of Trojan horse words in gender change.)

WOW.

Beyond this, Labov was able to identify individuals who were in the forefront of sound changes in Philadelphia.  Interestingly, they shared several characteristics.  They were upper working class women, with a strong nonconformist streak.  Perhaps most interestingly, they were what Malcolm Gladwell calls Connectors, people who were not only intensely involved with their neighborhoods, but had strong connections to other areas as well– the perfect people to spread ideas.

WOW.

Faaaaaaascinating.