Peter Trudgill - Norwich study (1974)

Peter Trudgill – 1974 Norwich Study – how gender affects dialect in each social class

–       Looking at “walking”& “talking” as the standard form and “walkin’,” “talkin’” as the non-standard form peculiar to the local accent. Also considering at the presence or absence of the third person –s ending, as in “he go to the shop” or “he goes to the shop”.
–       differentiated between relaxed and careful speech in order to assess participants awareness of their own accents as well as how they wished to sound – which saw the non-standard pronunciation quickly decline
–       Found that class is more of a determiner of non-standard usage than gender, though women in all social classes are more likely to use the overt prestige or RP form
–       Men over-reported their non-standard usage – implying that men wished to sound more non-standard, assuming that they used more of the covert prestige forms
–       Women over-reported their standard usage – implying that women wished to sound more standard, assuming that they used more of the overt prestige forms
–       Concluded that women are more susceptible to overt prestige than men (and men more susceptible to covert prestige)
–       In the “lower middle class” and the “upper working class” the differences between men’s and women’s usage of the standard forms were greatest in formal speech, thereby identifying these classes as most susceptible to the prestige of the RP form, with women leading the way on this front
(-ng) in Norwich by social class and sex for Formal Style (Trudgill. 1974a)

	Male	Female
middle middle class	96	100
lower middle class	73	97
upper working class	19	32
middle working class	9	19
lower working class	0	3