Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1 Anthony Kroch Dialect and Style ....

Abstract

Introduction This paper reports a study of the speech of a local prestige community, the upper class of metropolitan Philadelphia, that I carried out in 1977 and 1978 under an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship. My informants were primarily older speakers of the upper class community, who at that date retained a characteristic speech style distinct from that of other Philadelphians. The work was conducted to complement an extensive investigation of the Philadelphia speech community, the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation (LCV), that William Labov and his collaborators were then engaged in (Labov 1980, 1981, 1984, 1989, 1990). The results of my study were made available to the LCV project and have circulated informally in the years since it was completed, but they have never been published separately. I selected the upper class as a target for investigation in order to answer two questions. The first was whether there is a social class boundary beyond which the characteristi