Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

134 Anna-Brita Stenström

4.2 The sociolinguistic aspect

As mentioned in Section 1.2, age has not been considered in the following due

to the under-representation of 13 and 17 year-old boys and girls in COLAm. The

sociolinguistic aspect is therefore restricted to data representing gender and social

class, as demonstrated in Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2. Frequency of vale according to gender and social class

Boys Girls

H M L Total H M L Total

Total 92 189 110 391 238 165 130 533

% 26 48 26 41 46 33 21 59

Table 2 shows that the girls were the more frequent users of vale, with 59% of

the total number of occurrences, compared to the boys’ 41%. With regard to the

speakers’ socioeconomic background, upper class dominated among the girls as

opposed to middle class among the boys.

Table 3 shows the corresponding figures for okay in COLT. This table is prob-

lematic, however, since it does not tell the whole truth. This is due to the fact that

some of the students who recorded the COLT conversations were not consistent

when annotating the socioeconomic background of the students who took part

in the conversations. Consequently, the contribution of a number of speakers had

to be ignored, to the effect that the actual figures behind the percentages are very

low. In other words, only those students whose socioeconomic background has

been properly annotated are represented. This means that a mere 326 of the 804

instances of okay have been included. But the results may still give a hint of the

actual situation.

Table 3. The frequency of okay according to gender and social class

Boys Girls

H M L Total H M L Total

Total 119 70 13 202 49 37 38 124

% 59 35 6 62 40 30 30 38

In contrast to the results in COLAm (Table 2), the figures in Table 3 show that the

boys were the most frequent users of okay with 62% compared to the girls’ 38%

of the total number of occurrences. With respect to social class, the upper-class

boys were the most frequent users, while the contribution of the lower-class boys

is scarce. Among the girls, too, those with an upper-class background dominated,

with an equal distribution among girls with a middle and lower-class background.