ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a correlational model for connecting selected variables of the sociocultural context, namely, the residential situation of speakers and the occupational role of speakers' family head, with morphological and semantic variables of the spoken language as derived from elicited texts. It establishes a correlation between the occupational role of family-household head and the speech of the female respondent, and the implication of this, and of Bernstein's work as well, is that "argot" and "mother tongue" are to a degree overlapping categories. The chapter proceeds from analysis of texts that were tape-recorded in speakers' homes by two Indian interviewers, and of a supplementary questionnaire administered after the texts were elicited, there is no direct indication of the appearance of the tabulated linguistic variables in "natural" speech settings. The Department of Social Anthropology and Social Welfare of the Karnatak University, Dharwar, had completed a first sampling for its own census of Dharwar by April of 1963.
