Societal change and the construct of social class: The case of three sociophonetic variables in Caracas Venezuela Traditionally, sociolinguists incorporate a combination of factors such as occupation, education, income, and property value in their construction of a socioeconomic class index (Labov 2001, Bentivoglio and Sedano 1993). However, a major drawback of a static definition of social class is that it fails to account for changes across generations. One such change in Venezuelan society is that access to education has greatly expanded for recent generations, which has consequences for the range of occupations available to the population and their access to the educated language norm of the society. The present study focuses on these societal changes in order to account for changes in the linguistic behavior of different generations within the same socioeconomic class. To achieve this, we examine the variable phenomena of intervocalic /ɾ/ deletion, syllable-final /ɾ/ deletion, and intervocalic /d/ deletion in correlation with social class and age, relating these variables to education and occupation, from 72 sociolinguistic interviews. The findings reveal that, as access to education increases in younger generations, a sharp rise in the use of the educated variants is reflected in the lowest socioeconomic class, which contrasts with the more limited usage of the educated variants by older speakers of this same class. While upper- and middle-class speakers of all generations use educated variants of all three variables more than working-class speakers in the community, thus lending credence to the importance of the socioeconomic class variable, we argue for a deeper analysis of the independent variables used in typical socioeconomic indexing. In concluding, we argue that changes in participation in the linguistic market should be accounted for in a dynamic definition of social class in future sociolinguistic studies.

1. SOCIETAL CHANGE AND THE
CONSTRUCT OF SOCIAL CLASS:
THE CASE OF THREE
SOCIOPHONETIC VARIABLES IN
CARACAS SPANISH
Manuel Díaz-Campos, Stephen Fafulas, Michael
Gradoville
Indiana University
1
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS NOVEMBER 6,
2010
NWAV 39

2. Motivation for this study
2
 Several previous investigations (Díaz-Campos
2005, Díaz-Campos and Ruiz-Sánchez 2008)
found similar patterns regarding age and
socioeconomic class
 Using these previous analyses, we decided to
further look into the demographics of the
corpus in terms of education, occupation, and
social context of Venezuela

3. Overview
 Traditionally, sociolinguists incorporate a
combination of factors (e.g. occupation,
education, income, property value) in their
construction of a socioeconomic class index
 Static definitions fail to account for societal
change
 Flores-Ferrán (2010) calls for a revision of
traditional approaches to socioeconomic class,
emphasizing the importance of considering
speakers’ background and the dynamics of the
speech community under observation
3

4. Overview
 For example, from 1989 to 1999, many
countries saw an increase in college degrees
awarded to college-aged people (Snyder &
Hoffman 2002: 483)
 Socioeconomic class, even when properly
defined, may miss certain societal changes
which could add to the explanation of the
linguistic patterning of the speech community
4

5. Overview
 Examine the influence of increased access to
education on the linguistic behavior of different
generations of the same socioeconomic class
 Context: Spanish of Caracas, Venezuela
 Venezuela, like many other countries, saw an
increase in rates of education during the latter
half of the 20th
century
5

6. Overview
6
According to Haggerty (1990):
 Overall, Venezuela is among the most literate of Latin
American countries
 Literacy rate among Venezuelans fifteen years of age and
older was 88.4 percent in 1985
 Venezuela's education system, measured by number
of schools, teachers, and size of enrollment,
expanded rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s
 Enrollments at all levels increased substantially, as
did the numbers of schools and teachers at each level
 Primary enrollments rose by over 30 percent and
secondary by over 50 percent, while university-level
enrollments nearly doubled

7. Overview
7
The
improvement
of human
capital by
way of
education
has been
one of the
greatest
achievement
s of
Venezuela
(Velásquez
1979: 797)
Years Elementary High School University
Total
1950-51 503 91.9% 37 6.8% 7 1.3% 547
1960-61 1.244 85.7% 181 12.4% 26 1.9% 1.451
1970-71 1.824 75.8% 498 20.7% 84 3.5% 2.406
1975-76 2.511 69.8% 831 23.1% 255 7.1% 3.597
Source: Ministry of Education Venezuela
Number (in thousands) of students enrolled by level of education in
Venezuela

8. Phenomena
 Syllable-final /ɾ/ deletion
 (i.e. [kantáɾ] vs [kantá] ‘to sing’)
 Intervocalic /ɾ/ deletion in para ‘for’
 (i.e. [páɾa] vs. [pá])
 Intervocalic /d/ deletion
 (i.e. [kantáo] vs [kantáo] ‘sung’)
8

9. Phenomena: syllable-final /ɾ/
 (D’Introno, Rojas & Sosa 1979)
 External constraints that favor deletion in
Caracas:
 Lower class speakers
 Male speakers
9

10. Phenomena: Intervocalic /ɾ/ in
para
 Mention of para reduction appears in many
dialectal studies, although little empirical
investigation exists (Garcia 1979)
 Bentivoglio et al (2005)
 GoldVarb analysis of1599 tokens of pa(ra) alternation
 Both forms exist in all socioeconomic classes while pa
is mostly associated with informal speech
 Results: lower socioeconomic level and 60+ aged
speakers favor use of the reduced form pa
10

11. Phenomena: intervocalic /d/
 Descriptive literature:
 Henríquez Ureña (1921) , Navarro Tomás (1999),
Lapesa (1981), and Lipski (1994: 349)
 Sociolinguistic studies of intervocalic /d/
 Samper-Padilla 1996, Hernández-Campoy and
Jiménez-Cano 2003, and D’Introno and Sosa 1986
 D’Introno and Sosa 1986:
 In formal styles upper and middle class speakers
favored retention more so than the lower
socioeconomic group
11

12. Background
 Romaine (1984) emphasizes the differences
between the language spoken at home and at
school
 This observation reveals that at school students are
exposed to more formal registers and the normative
linguistic variants of the speech community
 In a study on the acquisition of sociolinguistic
variables by children, Díaz-Campos (2006)
shows that, as early as 4.5 years of age, children
begin to adopt the normative variants they are
exposed to after their first year of schooling
12

13. Background
 Although reference has been made to the effect of
education on use of linguistic variables, little
empirical evidence has been given (Bentivoglio &
Sedano in press)
 Sociolinguistic studies usually incorporate education
in their definition of socioeconomic class (Chambers
1995: 43-45)
 In this study we show empirically that changes in
education across generations directly impact the use
13

14. Research questions
 What are the effects of education on the use
of non-reduced variants for intervocalic /ɾ/,
syllable-final /ɾ/, and intervocalic /d/?
 How does education interact with
socioeconomic class?
14

15. Corpus
 Speech samples were analyzed from the
corpus Estudio Sociolingüístico del Habla de
Caracas (Bentivoglio & Sedano 1993) with
equal representation of:
 socioeconomic level (upper class, middle class,
and working class)
 age (14-29, 30-45, and 61 and older)
 sex (male and female)
15

16. Results
Syllable-final
/ɾ/, rates of
retention
organized by
socioecono
mic class
and age
group
N = 7200
16

17. Results
Intervocalic /
ɾ/ in para,
rates of
retention
organized by
socioecono
mic class
and age
group
N = 2891
17

18. Results
Intervocalic /
d/, rates of
retention
organized by
socioecono
mic class
and age
group
N = 7200
18

19. Corpus demographics: Access to
education
Education
level by age
and social
class
UpperMiddl
e
Lower
19

20. Corpus demographics: Occupational
Consequences
Occupation
by age and
social class
UpperMiddl
e
Lower
20

21. Discussion
 Increased access to education among the
lower socioeconomic class results in a higher
use of the non-reduced (normative) variants
 For all variables, the younger generation of the
lower class uses less of the reduced variants
than their older counterparts
21

22. Discussion
 In this way, increased access to education
appears to be pulling back changes that
existed in the speech community (final /ɾ/
deletion, intervocalic /ɾ/ deletion in para,
intervocalic /d/ deletion)
22

23. Conclusions
 The findings of this investigation reveal that
upper and middle class speakers are less
likely to use reduced variants than the lower
socioeconomic speakers in the community
 The linguistic behavior of the lower
socioeconomic class can in part be explained
by observing the demographic shift of the
Venezuelan speech community under
observation
 Level of education & occupation
23

24. Conclusions
 Increased access to education has also led to
a shift in occupations: the number of younger
people holding jobs in office and professional
settings where normative language is
expected has risen
 As access to education increases in younger
generations, a sharp rise in the use of the
normative variants is reflected in the lowest
socioeconomic class
24

25. Conclusions
 Despite the increase in education levels there
continues to be marked differences between
the lower socioeconomic class and the other
two
 It is important to consider the individual
contribution of each factor used in the
socioeconomic index
 This study reveals that in interpreting
sociolinguistic data, researchers need to
consider the impact of societal changes when
addressing social class
25

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