A seasonal song for Bill Labov
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At the end of Paul Krugman's latest substack post ("This Is Not a Serious Post", 12/24/2024), he gives us a link to a seasonal song, with the note "Some relatives from my parents' generation really did sound like that". The song is "Winter Wonderland", from The Roches' X-mas Show in 1990.
Jonathan Bernstein, who posted the video, adds that "The Re-oches, they went to chalm school…"
This song, and Krugman's reaction to it, brings to mind Bill Labov's 1964 Columbia dissertation, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, and the 11,710 publications that cite it. From the preface:
The work presented in this dissertation is a study of the linguistic structure of a speech community. Its purpose is the same as that of all linguistic analysis: to discover the systematic set of contrastive relations in which the communicative function of language is accomplished. In the particular community studied here, such a coherent system does not exist for the individual speaker, but rather for the speech community as a whole. The speech of the individual New Yorker, studied in itself, shows so much unaccountable variation that it has been characterized as "haphazard," an example of massive "free variation." But when his behavior is studied in the larger context of the speech community as a whole, it is seen to be highly systematic, participating in a comprehensive structure of stylistic and social variation. It has therefore been necessary to extend the study of linguistic structure to include a wide rarge of stylistic and social variation, as well as subjective reactions, which had previously been considered inaccessible to formal linguistic analysis.
One of the essential steps required for the procedure followed here is a socially realistic description of linguistic behavior. Many of the techniques of empirical sociology have been utilized here for this purpose, not only in survey methodology, but also in conceptual analysis. It is hoped that this debt may be repaid by the utility of some of the results and procedures, for the social scientist. The phonological indexes used in this study provide a reliable quantitative indicator of social processes, sensitive enough to reflect the influence of many independent variables. The analysis of the correlations of social class indicators with linguistic behavior may serve to clarify questions of social structure as well as linguistic structure. Thus from the point of view of the social scientist, language may be considered as the most sensitive indicator of other social processes, rather than simply another strand in the texture of social stratification.
The song "Winter Wonderland" was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and and Richard Smith, and has been recorded hundreds of times, in many styles, some of which are linguistically as well as musically marked.
And of course the extreme local accent presented by The Roches in this performance is mostly put on for fun. The other songs on their 1990 We Three Kings album are not at all so dialectal, though the studio version of "Winter Wonderland" on that album presents similar pronunciations (which the album's Wikipedia entry calls "stereotypical New Jersey accents" — how that fits Paul Krugman's background is easy to imagine, though the details are not clear).
Andrew Usher said,
December 24, 2024 @ 12:53 pm
It would perhaps have been useful to state that this (out of context) performance was not intended seriously, unless you wanted it to be a surprise. It took me almost til the end to figure that out (it would have been terrible, even ignoring the accent, otherwise).
Ebenezer Scrooge said,
December 24, 2024 @ 4:38 pm
I live in Juhsey (*NOT* Joisey!!!) in the great city of N'ork, and never heard such an accent here. It sounds more to me like a bastard hybrid of Lawn Guyland and Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley. But the Roches are always fun.