SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Lessons we are going to deal with:
L1: What is sociolinguistics? Language and society
L2: The sociology of language
L3: The speech community
L4: Dialects
L5: Diglossia
L6: Bilingualism/Borrowing/Code-switching
L7: Language & geography
L8: Language & social class
L9: Standardization
L10: Language, culture & thought
Main References:
R. A. HUDSON: Sociolinguistics.
Peter Trudgill: Sociolinguistics.
David Crystal: A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics.
L1: What is Sociolinguistics?
Sociolinguistics is the study of how language serves and is shaped by the social nature of human beings. In its broadest conception, sociolinguistics analyzes the many and diverse ways in which language and society entwine. This vast field of inquiry requires and combines insights from a number of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology.
David Crystal’s says on language: “The everyday use of this term involves several different senses, which linguistics is careful to distinguish.” At its most specific level, it may refer to the concrete act of speaking, writing or signing in a given situation – the notion of PAROLE, or PERFORMANCE.
The linguistic system underlying an individual's use of language in a given time and place is identified by the term IDIOLECT (distinguish between speakers) and this is often extended to the synchronic analysis of the whole of a person's language. A particular variety, or level, of speech/writing may also be referred to as language, and this is related to the sociolinguistic or stylistic restrictiveness involved in such terms.
In contrast with these instances if individual languages, DIALECTS, VARIETIES, etc., this is also the abstract sense of "language", referring to the biological faculty which enables individuals to learn and use their language.
Linguistics according to Crystal is the scientific study of LANGUAGE; also called linguistic science. ... This reflects partly an increased popular and specialist interest in the study of language and communication in relation to human believes and behaviour.
Sociolinguistics examines the interplay of language and society, with language as the starting point. Variation is the key concept, applied to language itself and to its use. In other terms, it is the study of relationship between changes in society and changes in language over a period of time.
According to Hudson, sociolinguistics is partly empirical and partly theoretical – partly a matter of going out an amassing bodies of fact and partly sitting back and thinking. It is important to recognize that much of interest has come from people who have a practical concern of language rather than a desire simply to understand better how this small area of this universe works.
According to Crystal, sociolinguistics is the branch of linguistics which studies the relation between language and society. Sociolinguists study such matters as the linguistic identity of social groups, social attitudes to language, standard and non-standard forms of language, the patterns and needs of national language use, social varieties and levels of language, the social basis of bilingualism and multilingualism, and so on.
The term overlaps to some degree with ethno linguistics and anthropological linguistics, reflecting the overlapping interests of the correlative disciplines involved—sociology, ethnology and anthropology. The study of dialects is sometimes seen as a branch of sociolinguistics, and sometimes differentiated from it, under the heading of dialectology, especially when regional dialects are the focus of study.
Sociological linguistics is sometimes differentiated from sociolinguistics, particularly in Europe, where the term reflects a concern to see language as an integral part of sociological theory.
L2: The sociology of language
There are three reasons to include for the difference between Sociolinguistics and Sociology of language. “Firstly, it is relevant to the discussion of the second meaning of language (standard language). Secondly, it is interesting to see that language can be deliberately manipulated by society. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it brings out the unusual character of standard languages, which are perhaps the least interesting kind of language for anyone interested in the nature of human language (as most linguists are).
The sociology of language is the study of relationship between language and society. It focuses upon the entire set of topics related to the social organization of language behaviour, including not only language usage per se but also language attitudes and overt behaviours toward language and toward language users’ [Fishman 1971].
The field begins from the assumption that language is a social value, and pursues research on language in contact among social groups, especially phenomena such as language conflict and multilingualism. While Fishman tends to characterize the study at two levels: descriptive sociology of language, describing ‘who speaks what language to whom and when’, and dynamic sociology of language, explaining the different rates of change of language behaviour in different groups, his definition is far from clear in terms of levels of analysis. This gap was bridged by McKay & Hornberger (1996), who have established a distinctive four-level model for approaching the study of language and society.
Sociology of language is an interdisciplinary social science approach to language in society, which means the sociolinguists investigate everything concerned with language from the stand point of social function rather than from other more traditional linguistic perspectives.
The sociology of language studies how the use of certain types of language affects society. In fact, if sociologist can understand the different styles of language in a culture, they often have a better chance of understanding how it functions. Many times, sociology of language looks at different classes in societies to discover what kind of language they use. Sociolinguistics is a descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context on the way language is used and the effect of language on the society, while sociolinguistics focuses on the society’s effect on language.
L3: Speech Community
This lesson started by a successful and interesting presentation made by one of our thankfully mates, giving a clear image of what Speech Community means and I hope he shares his presentation with us.
Despite that, our professor made also his own presentation using his was (referring to some linguists), and here is what was said:
A SPEECH COMMUNITY refers to any regionally or socially definable human group identified by a shared linguistic system.
*According to Hudson “If speech communities can be delimited, then they can be studied, and it may be possible to find interesting differences between communities which correlate with differences in their language.” So for Hudson, a speech community refers to a community based on language.
*According to Lyons (1970) “All the people who use a given language or dialect.”
*According to Hocket (1958) “Each language defines a speech community: the whole set of people who communicate with each other, either directly or indirectly, via the common language.”
*According to Bloomfield (1933) “Group of people who interact by means of speech.”
*According to Gumperz (1962) “We’ll define a linguistic community as a social group which may either monolingual or multilingual, held together by frequency of social interaction patterns and set off from the surrounding areas by weaknesses in the line of communicating.”, “Any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregate by significant differences in language use.”
Even a child may identify groups on the basis of sex, geography, age, and colour.
Community implies more than the existence of some common property.
A community is a set of people that presumably have needs to be distinguished from the rest of the world by more than one property, and some of these properties have to be important from the point of view of the members’ social lives.
*Speech was identified by Fradgill (1974) “Our accent and our speech generally show what part of the country we come from, and what sort of background we have.”
These two aspects of language behaviour are very important from a social POV; first, the function of language in establishing social relationships, and second, the role played by language in conveying information about the speaker.
L4: Dialects
(Crystal 1980) “Dialect is a regionally or socially distinctive variety of a language, identified by a particular set of words and grammatical structures. Spoken dialects are usually also associated with a distinctive pronunciation or accent. Any language with a reasonably large number of speakers will develop dialect, especially if there are geographical barriers separating groups of people from each other, or if there are divisions of social class. One dialect may predominate as the official or standard form of the language, and this is the variety which may come to be written down.” So dialects are subdivisions of language.
Dialects which identify where a person is from are called regional dialect. It is sometimes thought that dialects of this type are dying out but this is happening only in some rural areas. Urban dialects are becoming more in evidence, especially with the growth of major conurbations.
Dialects which identify a person is in terms of social scale are called social dialects or class dialects. More recently; the term Sociolect has been used. Some languages are highly stratified in terms of social divisions, such as class, professional status, age and sex, and here major differences in social dialect are apparent.
Dialect is a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
Encyclopedia Britannica “Dialect is a variety of a language that signals where a person comes from. The notion is usually interpreted geographically (regional dialect) but it also has some application in relation to persons social background (class dialect) or occupation (occupational dialect).
A dialect is briefly distinguished from other dialects of the same language by features of linguistics structure such as grammar and vocabulary.
L5: Diglossia
*According to CRYSTAL “A term used in sociolinguistics to refer to situation where 2 very different varieties of a language co-occur throughout speech community, each with a distinct range of social function.”
Both varieties are standardized to some degree, are felt to be alternatives by native speakers and usually have special names. Sociolinguists usually talk in terms of a high variety and low variety corresponding broadly to a difference in formality; the high variety is learnt in school, tends to be used in church, or radio programs, in serious literatures, etc; and as a consequence has a greater prestige; the low variety in family conversations and other relatively informal settings.
Diglossia is a situation in which 2 languages or 2 varieties of the same language are used under the same conditions within a community often by the same speakers.
The term is usually applied to languages with distinct high and low colloquial varieties such as Arabic. Diglossia is in fact the coexistence of 2 varieties of the same language throughout a speech community, often one for the literary or prestige context and the other is common dialect spoken by most of the population.
*According to Hudson “Diglossia is a situation in which at least one type of social restriction or items can be expressed in terms of large scrape varieties, rather than item by item. The term Diglossia was introduced into the English language literature on sociolinguistics by Charles Ferguson in 1959 in order to describe the situation found in some places.”
In all these societies, there are distinct varieties sufficiently distinct for the layman to call them separate languages, and one is used only on formal and public occasions while the other is used by everybody under normal, everyday circumstances. Fergusson’s definition if Diglossia is as follows; “Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialect of the language, (which may include standard or regional dialect) there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either for an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learnt largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation.”
L6: Bilingualism / Borrowing / Code Switching
*According to David Crystal, Multilingualism is a term used in sociolinguistics to refer, in the first instance, to a speech community which makes use of two or more languages, and then to the individual speakers who have multilingual ability.
*Multilingualism (or plurilingualism) in this sense may subsume bilingualism, but it is often contrasted with it (A community or individual in command of more but it is often contrasted with it (i.e. a community or individual in command of more than two languages). A further distinction is sometimes made between a multilingualism which is internal to a speech community, and one which is external to it. Sociolinguistic studies have emphasized both the frequency and complexity of the phenomenon: on the one hand, there are very few speech communities which are totally monolingual; on the other hand, the multilingual abilities demonstrated are of several levels of proficiency, and raise different kinds of political, educational and social problems, depending on the numbers, social standing and national feeling of the groups concerned.
*Borrowing (loan words) is when languages borrow words freely from one another. Usually this happens when some new objects or institution is developed for which the borrowing language has no word of its own. For example, the large number of words denoting financial institutions and operations borrowed from Italian by the other western European languages at the time of the Renaissance testifies to the importance of the Italian bankers in that period. (The word “bank” itself, in this sense, comes through French from the Italian banca).
*According to David Crystal, this term is used in comparative and historical linguistics to refer to a linguistic form taken over by one language or dialect from another; such borrowings are usually known as ‘loan words’ (e.g. restaurant, bonhomie, chagrin, which have come into English from French), and several types have been recognized. Less commonly, sounds and grammatical structures may be borrowed.
*loan is a linguistic unit (usually a lexical item) which has come to be used in a language or dialect other than the one where it originated. Several types of loan process have been recognized, such as loan words (where both form and meaning are borrowed, or ‘assimilated’, with some adaptation to the phonological system of the new language, e.g. sputnik); loan blends (where the meaning is borrowed, but only part of the form, e.g. restaurant with a simulated French ending); loan shifts (where the meaning is borrowed, and the form is native); and loan translations (where the morphemes in the borrowed word are translated item by item.
*Code-Switching: is the practice of moving back and forth between two languages or between two dialects or registers of the same register, also called mixing and style shifting. Code-Switching occurs far more often in conversation than in writing. In sociolinguistics, code switching is defined as the use of more than one language simultaneously in conversation. Code-switching performs several functions (Zentella, 1985). First, people may use code-switching to hide fluency or memory problems in the second language (but this accounts for about only 10 percent of code switches). Second, code-switching is used to mark switching from informal situations (using native languages) to formal situations (using second language). Third, code-switching is used to exert control, especially between parents and children. Fourth, code-switching is used to align speakers with others in specific situations (e.g., defining oneself as a member of an ethnic group). Code-switching also 'functions to announce specific identities, create certain meanings, and facilitate particular interpersonal relationships.
L7: Language & Geography
According to David Crystal (about geographical linguistics): The study of languages and dialects in terms of their regional distribution is sometimes collectively referred to by this level, though the terms dialectology and areal linguistics are more commonly used. Geographical dialect is an alternative term for regional dialect.
According to Trudgill: Distance is clearly an important factor in the spread of linguistics forms, although in many cases, social distance maybe as important as geographical distance.
There may be difference in accent and word choice.
Ex: the word tough is prounounced in London as /t^f/ but in Manchester as /tof/
There is also a third type of barrier which surprisingly enough doesn’t necessarily have a significant a significant slowing down effect, mainly the language. The linguistics innovations appears spread not only from one regional of social variety of the same language tp another; they may also spread from one language to another.
Linguafranca is language used for trade
When a language is used as a linguafranca, it normally undergoes a certain amount of simplification, under redaction, from the native language of the speaker, or though imperfect learning.
How does geography affect language?
It seems that high altitudes influence the phonology of language.
In fact, here all languages are affected.
A linguistic area refers to the observation that languages that are geographically near to each other tend to resemble each other beyond the effect of genetic relatedness. (Spanish, Italian, French -> Latin)
Obviously, French, Italian, and Spanish are all going to resemble each other because they are all roman languages, descendant from Latin. However, Romanian, Bulgarian (Slavic) and Alberian and even Modern Greek also share a number of similarities by virtual of being all packed in closely together on the Balkan Peninsula. This happens because languages near each other share and borrow lots of linguistic features from each other.
L8: Language and Social Class
According to Berustein (1970): “I am required to consider the relationship between language and socialization. It should be clear that I’m not concerned with language but with speech, and concerned more specifically with the contextual constraints (restrictions) upon speech. Now what about socialization? I shall take the term to refer to the process whereby a child acquires a specific cultural identity, and to his responses to such identity. Socialization refers to the process whereby the biological is transformed into a specific cultural being. It follows from this at the process of socialization is a complex process of control, whereby a particular moral, cognitive, and affective awareness is evoked in the child and given a specific form and context. Socialization sensitizes the child to various order rate of society as they make substantive in the various roles he is expected to play. The basic agencies of socialization in contemporary societies are the family, the peer group, school and work.”
The relationship between language and social class has been a major concern in Applied Linguistics and in sociolinguistics.
Focusing on language variation, it charts (designs) the progression from early survey studies, which assume that class hierarchies determine linguistic behavior, to move recent approaches, which emphasize social practice and speaker agency. An adequate sociolinguistic theory of language and social class has to engage with language in use, and thus with a pragmatic perspective.
Labov (1966) large-scale survey of the pronunciation patterns residence of the lower east-side of NY city established that language use correlate with social factors just as social class, age and gender. The sociolinguistics surveys inspired by label were based on the assumption that these social categories to some extent controlled individual’s linguistic behavior (i.e. language use reflect existing social structure). These studies assigned participants to objective class categories (for example, working class, middle class) using indices of socio-economic status (occupation, income, housing and educational level).
L9 Standardization & L10 Language, Culture and Thought are not incuded.