Labov's 1966 New York department store research

Labov studied people in department stores in New York it showed that speech patterns were something of a highly systematic structure of social/stylistic stratification. Labov studied how the letter 'r' is pronounced with a word and where it was placed in the word.The letter 'r' had only been reintroduced into the new york accent in 1960. He studied the language of employees in 3 different stores which were all different class. This was because he found that the pronunciation of 'r' occurred and its "frequent of use depended on the speakers’ membership to particular socioeconomic status"

The three locations he used were:

• Saks Fifth Avenue (Expensive upper middle-class store)
• Macy's (Less expensive middle-class store)
• S.Klein ( Discount store used mainly by working-class store)

He made each employee say 'r' four times by getting them to answer questions which lead them to say 'fourth floor'.

Findings: New York was found to be stratified in class, pronounciaion of the 'r' depended on their social status within the employees. People pronounced their 'r's more frequently if they were higher within their social class. 

• Does not work in this day an age as there has been a change within accents (accents merging due to the increase of technology and a change in time - language gradually changing as the years go on)
• Hard to generalise his results (multiple accents)

Bibliography:
http://www.ello.uos.de/field.php/Sociolinguistics/Exemplarystudylabov

http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/labovny.html