Amateur Hour

This week, we looked at William Labov’s article “How I Got Into Linguistics, and What I Got Out of It." Labov explains how, on the basis of linguistics alone, he saved a man from a prison sentence. Paul Prinzivalli was thought to be behind bomb threats made to the LA airport. The police had tape recordings of calls made by the suspect, and they claimed that the voice on the recordings sounded like Prinzivalli. However, Prinzivalli had a New York City accent, and Labov recognized that the voice on the recording had a Boston accent. Labov presented linguistic evidence in court, and thereafter it was ruled that Prinzivalli was innocent.
I found this case study to be fascinating. Something as seemingly simple as an accent made the difference between this man keeping his freedom and being wrongfully imprisoned. I looked up videos on YouTube of people speaking in NYC and Boston accents. Having done this, I can vouch for the fact that, to the untrained ear, these two accents do sound somewhat similar. To a linguist, it's probably quite simple to distinguish between the two. Indeed, Labov said “the moment I heard the recordings I was sure that he was innocent.” Labov picked up on this immediately. However, I was much less certain, and apparently I am not alone in this. According to Labov, prior to his testimony, the judge heard "no difference" between NYC and Boston accents.
This case is definitely interesting, but it’s also thought-provoking. Do you pick up on any major differences between the two accents? What might account for the two sounding similar to "regular" people, yet being so distinct to Labov? Interested to hear your thoughts! :)

Good ol' Bill, linguistic royalty.

Image courtesy of Alchetron.

Socioeconomic Language

I found this chapter to be very interesting because I find sociolinguistics absolutely riveting. I spend a lot of my free, everyday time listening to the way people talk and, essentially, "reading between the lines" of their speech. While it may not be polite, I think you can learn a lot about someone just by the way they speak. I'm sure some people will consider it unfair profiling, but, for me, it's just second nature. You can learn a lot just by listening to people. For instance, this past summer I spent a week in Old Orchard Beach, Maine and the New England accent was striking. Of course, to us here in Pennsylvania that accent is always striking, but what really made me stop and take note was how different people working different jobs had different strengths of the accent. To help you visualize this, let me give you some examples. One day, I was walking back from the beach and there was a garbage truck in the alley between our hotel and the beach and the man that was tossing the trash into the track had one of the thickest New England accents I have ever heard in my life. It was the prototypical that you hear in movies and hear in your head when someone talks about the New England accent. Conversely, the guy who owned the parking lots near the pier and attractions didn't have a thick accent like the garbage man did. Now, I don't know if the owner of the parking lots was from Maine or even the New England region, he did have a New England hint to his speech. Despite not knowing the owner's birthplace or origins, I was confident that he was a man of higher intelligence. There were a lot of other factors that went into this prediction like dress, hygiene, etc. As my travel companion and I traveled through Massachusetts on our way to and from Maine, I noticed thick and less than thick accents. It seemed like a lot of the difference lied in where I saw this people and what they were dong.

So, for this post, I really want to hear your stories about your experiences with sociolinguistic and if you ever do what I do and try and pin-point someone's SES based on their speech.