Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 442
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cannot be certain that the informant will choose the desired
word in the desired form, unless the interviewer insists, with
the probable result that the informant grows suspicious and
minds his words. The difficulty with the second procedure is
well known; people are not conscious of their usage, they
‘perceive their own speech in terms of the norms’ (Labov
1966:480). In the choice between the two procedures just
described, I am in favor of the former, but there may be other
devices.
However, it is not enough to show that a certain pronuncia-
tion or word form is found only in speakers belonging to a
certain social group. It is also necessary to test people’s reac-
tions and attitudes to these forms. This can be done by (1)
an acceptability test, which establishes the local norm, and (2)
a test which determines the social significance of certain
dialectal and/or sociolectal speech forms. In the former,
recorded authentic phrases would be presented to the subjects,
who would be asked to decide whether what they hear is good
(or correct) Swedish and, if it is not, to state the unacceptable
feature. The norms could also be obtained by implication by
framing the test questions in some such way as: In such and
such a situation would you speak like that ? Do you think other
people would do so? Who?
In the latter, people would be asked to classify informants
socially, for example, by guessing their occupations, on the
basis of short extracts from the recordings. This test would
be of special interest if it were administered in cities other than
Eskilstuna as well, for example, Stockholm, Uppsala, Luleá,
Gothenburg, or Lund. A very simple, preliminary test of this
kind has been tried in Eskilstuna with a group of mostly non-
native professional and academic persons and in Uppsala with
a group of students of Swedish from central and northern
Sweden. The results of this trial suggest that, through such a
procedure, regionally and possibly socially conditioned varia-
tion in the ratings of the judges could be established, different
linguistic forms being stigmatized.