Introduction

Modern quantitative sociolinguistic studies have devoted a great deal of attention to the effect of audiomonitoring on speech styles, as investigated and described in Labov (1966). In his investigation of contextual styles in Hebrew, Davis (1983: 18) summarizes Labov's reasoning for the use of various techniques to elicit different contextual styles as follows:

(1) the more formal the style, the more one pays attention to the way he speaks and, as formality increases, the number of stigmatized forms in his speech decreases; (2) the reading of short passages, word lists, and, finally, minimal pairs increasingly focuses an informant's attention on his language; (3) therefore, the reading of minimal pairs elicits an informant's most formal speech style and likewise the smallest number of stigmatized forms.

Contra Labov's (1966) study, which showed a decrease in the incidence of stigmatized forms from free conversation through the reading passage and word lists, Davis found that "the Hebrew stigmatized form increases in incidence as contextual style becomes supposedly more formal" (Davis 1983: 20). For instance, native speakers of Hebrew from Migdal Ha-Emek increased their use of nonstandard pharyngeal stops from free conversation through reading passage to minimal pairs as shown in Figure 1.1 (= Davis 1983: 21, his Figure 5):

  

Figure 1.1: (G) in Migdal Ha-Emek

Figure 1.1 also demonstrates that the incidence of nonstandard sounds dropped dramatically in the post-interview, a second section of free conversation about the Hebrew language, which was conducted after the reading of minimal pairs. In short, Davis claims that the Israeli informants were responding to the spellings of words rather than to the formality of the situation, and he suggests that Labov's informants may have done the same. In English the more standard forms are generally indicated by the spelling (e.g. guard vs. God in New York City) and ``for the most part the different pronunciations are also spelled differently'' (Davis 1983: 24). In Hebrew, on the other hand, the nonstandard forms, e.g. pharyngeal stops, are represented in the spelling system. As informants' attention was increasingly more focussed on the sounds in question, they pronounced more and more pharyngeal stops. Since the informants are also speakers of Jewish-Moroccan Arabic, they have no difficulty pronouncing pharyngeals, and "this, it appears, was the linguistic behavior they assumed was being asked of them" (Davis 1983: 23). On this evidence, Davis concludes that some American sociolinguists, instead of studying the effect of formality on linguistic behavior, may have been studying the effect of spelling on that behavior.

In English and Hebrew, the presence vs. absence of a segment is at issue. Hungarian offers a more subtle possibility to investigate the role of spelling in influencing reading style: the use vs. nonuse of acute diacritics, which represent the long vs. short phonemic opposition in Hungarian speech.

This paper will focus on two topics. First, we will discuss the effect of formality vs. the effect of spelling upon reading style in Hungarian. Second, we will discuss the possibility of spelling as a trigger of linguistic change.