Class and the sound changes in "Pre-Perestroika" Russia

Katya Zubritskaya

Sat. 4-5:40 A

While the link between social class and linguistic change has been long recognized, the link between the two in urban speech communities has largely been based on research in Western capitalist societies. In this paper I will examine the interaction of social class and linguistic change to understand the social conditioning of sound changes in a socialist country. The data was gathered by linguists at the Russian Language Institute (Moscow) in 1974. It involves the statistical examination of the variable speech patterns (in word lists) of approximately 3,000 speakers of various ages and social positions. I examine the correlation between social indexes (occupation and education) with linguistic variables in urban Russian, and compare these statistical correlations with similar patterns observed in the U.S. I proceed from the assumption that such a comparison of patterns of linguistic change in different societies provides the data needed to point out what sociolinguistics must take into account if its ultimate goal is to understand the relations between social and linguistic patterns in general. I will start with a brief examination of the linguistic conditioning in the operation of two on-going sound changes in urban Russian: the loss of palatalization assimilation in consonant clusters and the loss of the "underlying" palatalization contrast in the realization of palato-alveolar segments. While both of these changes involve the loss of the same phonological feature (secondary palatalization), they differ markedly with respect to the effects of internal linguistic factors. I will demonstrate that the loss of positional palatalization assimilation shows major characteristics of a regular Neo-grammarian sound change, while the loss of the palatalization opposition in the palato-alveolar series shows no regular phonological conditioning and significant lexical stratification. I will examine the implications of this finding for the taxonomy of regular vs. lexical diffusion sound changes suggested recently by Labov (1994), and argue that this taxonomy must include the distinction with respect to the overall effect a particular type of a sound change has on the overall organization of a grammar (such as the loss of the underlying contrast).

The major part of this paper will be devoted to an examination of the social stratification of these sound changes. I will demonstrate that these changes differ drastically with respect to their social conditioning: the loss of palatalization assimilation operates as a regular sound change from below, where the working class is in advance, while the palato-alveolar series operates as a change from above, where the working class lags behind. I will argue that the social setting of these two types of linguistic changes shows both striking similarities and significant differences from the patterns of urban linguistic innovation in the United States. In particular, the linguistically innovative role of the working class suggests itself as a main point of convergence between the two social formations. On the other hand, the most obvious difference between Russian sound changes and Western sound changes is discrete rather than gradient social stratification. I will show that linguistic stratification in Russia is related to two major socio-economic classes: the working class opposed to a second group with white collar workers and bureaucrats linguistically affiliated with the upper class. I will attempt to integrate my findings into a general discussion of social relations in Russia and I will argue that a conflict model of the linguistic market, such as the one suggested by Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1991), provides the best framework for the examination of social and linguistic stratification in Russia and sheds light on the similarities of linguistic changes operating in radically different social formations, such as Soviet Russia and the USA.