Accent & Dialect Research Task - 'Trudgill's 1974 Norwich study of the effect of class on accent'

What is it?
This study was carried out by sociolinguist academic Peter Trudgill in 1974.
The study involved Trudgill studying speech in Norwich in order to find out how and why people's way of speaking varied. He based his study on the independent variables of the gender and class of the subjects.

Who was studied?
Trudgill used zone sampling when conducting this study. He took ten speakers from the five electoral wards of Norwich, as well as ten children from two different schools. He focused on age and class sampling, with sixty subjects in total.

Results
The most commonly cited result of Trudgill's study is in probably his findings in relation to the usage of the suffix -ng.
In standard English, words ending in the consonant '-ng' such as: walking and talking, end with a 'Velar nasal' (the common -ng sound) However, Trudgill found that in Norwich these words are often pronounced as if there was just an '-n' on the end. For example: "walkin' and talkin'"

Trudgill notes that this feature is by no means exclusive to Norwich:
"Nearly everywhere in the Eng-speaking world we find this alternation between higher-class/formal ng and lower class/informal n. It goes back to the fact that in Old English (and later) there were two forms, a gerund ending in -ing (walking is good for you) and a present participle ending in -end (he was walking). The -end form was the ancestor of -n' and -ing(obviously) of -ing."

Trudgill then goes on to talk about how the two variations merged, 'fairly recently' he says, within the last 300 years.

Trudgill made several notable conclusions from his research. These include:

1. In all social classes, people were more likely to say walking when they were speaking carefully.
2. Walkin' type forms had a higher proportion in the lower classes.
3. the non-standard -in forms appeared much more often in men than in women, a trend that stayed true through all of the social classes.
4. When asked, women tended to say that they thought they had been using the standard -ing more often than they actually did.
5. Conversely, when asked, men said the opposite.

 

Trudgill's figures for social class and sex differences in the use of the standard -ing form in Norwich when people used a formal style of speaking are as follows:

Bibliography
Peter Trudgill's 1974 The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich
http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/norwich.html
https://prezi.com/qfd-eiu5zf51/peter-trudgill-and-the-norwich-study-1974/
https://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/4-4-%E2%80%93-the-basic-variation-theorists-%E2%80%93-labov-trudgill-cheshire-millroy-bernstein/