Social change and language change in a rural Russian community*

In this paper I analyze a sound change in progress in a small Northern Russian community. The process involves unrounding of the unstressed /ɔ/, a change in the direction of Standard Russian. The results, obtained during my fieldtrip to the Western Urals, are based on speech samples of 32 residents who belong to various social groups. The analysis shows that the attested variation has a clear-cut pattern. It is determined primarily by the social factors of age, education, hometown, and secondarily by sex. The most conservative speakers are older poorly-educated subjects raised out of town, and the most progressive speakers are younger, well-educated women raised in town. It is found that the overall rate of the change is determined by the relative degree of social pressure on a given social group