Methodology

Data for this study have been drawn from Version Two of the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview (BSI-2). The interview follows standard Labovian procedures (see Labov 1984): a minimum of 30 minutes of guided conversational modules are interspersed with more formal elicitation of minimal pairs, word groups, reading passages, various listening and judgment tests etc. BSI-2 was a pilot study conducted with a quota sample comprising ten teachers of over 50 years of age, ten university students, ten blue-collar workers, ten sales clerks, and ten vocational trainees aged 15-16.

During the interview, seven passages were read by the informants; each passage was read twice - once at normal speed, and once at fast rate. Passage No. 1 and passage No. 5 were created to test the typewriter effect: the first was typed with the old keyboard without í, ú, and û, and the second with the long high vowels. The first reading passage was read after about the first hour of the interview, and the fifth one a good half hour later. Following Dressler and Wodak (1982), after the first reading informants were asked to read the passage as fast as they could. For this study, 38 tokens (19 at each speed) were used for each of 17 speakers: one teacher, two university students, six sales clerks, four blue-collar workers, and four vocational trainees. Seven of the speakers were female, and ten were male.