SOCIOLINGUISTICS

(part of linguistics which is concerned with language as a social and cultural phenomenon)

LANGUAGE and SOCIETY

TWO ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE BEHAVIOUR:

1. The function of language in establishing social relationships

2. The role played by language in conveying information about the speaker

DIALECT – a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social

group (differences of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation).

REGIONAL DIALECT – the distinct form of a language spoken in a certain geographical

area. (e.g- New York English)

SOCIAL DIALECT/SOCIOLECT – a variety of speech associated with a particular social

class or occupational group within a society. ( women speech vs. men speech)

DIALECT CONTINUUM – a range of dialects that vary slightly by region, so that the
further apart two regions are, the more the language differs.

MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY – a relationship between languages or dialects in which

speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without
intentional study or special effort. (e.g. Dutch and German)

TWO MOST IMPORTANT CULTURAL AND POLITICAL FACTORS:

AUTONOMY – independence (e.g. Dutch and German)
HETERONOMY – dependence (e.g. the nonstandard dialects of Germany, Austria, and
German-speaking Switzerland)

THE PROBLEM OF DISCRETENESS AND CONTINUITY – the difficulty of using

purely linguistic criteria to divide up varieties of language into distinct languages or dialects. (
e.g. American English and Canadian English)

ACCENT – a distinctive way of pronouncing a language, especially one associated with a

particular country, area, or social class. ( Scottish Highlands, etc.)

STANDARD ENGLISH – variety of English which is usually used in print, and which is
normally taught in schools and to non-native speakers learning the language.

RECIEVED PRONUNCIATION (RP) – standard accent of Standard English in UK

(=Oxford or BBC English)

SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTESIS – the linguistic theory that the semantic structure of a

language shapes or limits the ways in which a speaker forms conceptions of the world. A
language can affect a society by influencing or even controlling the world-view of its
speakers.

TABOO – words and phrases that are generally considered inappropriate in certain contexts.
( e.g. nigger, cripple, etc.)

SLANG – an informal non-standard variety of speech characterized by newly coined and

rapidly changing words and phrases. (e.g. fam- a group of close friends; hang out; skint-
without money, broke- BE)

LANGUAGE and SOCIAL CLASS

SOCIAL CLASS – a status hierarchy in which individuals and groups are classified on the
basis of asteem and prestige acquired mainly through economic success an accumulation of
wealth.
(Upper class, Middle class, Working class, Lower class)

VARIABLES OF SOCIAL CLASS:

POWER – the degree to which a person can control other people
WEALTH – objects or symbols owned by people which have value attached to them
PRESTIGE – the degree of respect, favorable regard, or importance accorded to a person by
members of society.

SOCIAL MOBILITY – movement up and down the social hierarchy.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION – any hierarchical ordering of groups within a society

especially in terms of power, wealth, and status.

INDIA – traditional society is stratified into CASTES – relatively stable, clearly named
groups, rigidly separated from each other, with hereditary membership and little possibility of
movement from one cast to another. Caste-dialect differences tend to be relatively clear-cut,
and social differences in language are sometimes greater than regional differences.

WILLIAM LABOV'S RESEARCH – social stratification of English in New York City.

RANDOM SAMPLE – though not everybody could be interviewed, everybody had an equal
chance of selection for interwiev.
THE INFORMANTS – a representative sample.
In N.Y. the pronunciation of non-prevocalic /r/ in words like 'fourth' and 'floor' is variable.
Sales people in the highest ranked stores will have no/r/, those in the middle ranked store will
have an intermediate value, and those in the lowest ranked store will have the more. He
proved that the variations which he found in pronouncing the sound /r/ were not free.
Speakers of the highest social class employ the Standard English dialect.

INHERENT VARIABILITY – the variation is not due to the mixture of two or more
varieties but is an integral part of the variety itself. (e.g. Norwich and Detroit: speakers do not
use –s in third person singular)
LANGUAGE and ETHNIC GROUP
EXPERIMENT – people acting as judges were asked to listen to tape-recordings of two
different sets of speakers.
SET 1 – white people who sound like black – they had lived all their lives amongst Blacks, or
had been raised in areas where black cultural values were dominant.
SET 2 – black people who sound like white – people who had been brought up, with little
contact with other Blacks, in predominantly white areas.
people do not speak as they do because they are white or black. They acquire the linguistic
characteristics of those they live in close contact with.

LINGUISTIC PURITY – defending a language against 'contamination' by loan words from

other languages.

AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH (AAVE) – nonstandard English

spoken by lower-class blacks in the urban ghettoes of the northen USA and elswhere.
SOME OF THE MOST FREQUENTLY CITED CHARACTERISTICS OF AAVE:

1. Many black speakers do not have non-prevocalic /r/ in cart or car.

2. Many black speakers often do not have /θ/, as in thing, or /ð/, as in that. In initial
position they may be merged with /t/ and /d/.
3. Simplification can take place in all environments. Plurals of nouns ending in Standard
English in –st, -sp, and –sk are often formed on the pattern of class-classes rather than
of clasp-clasps (e.g. desk-desses).
4. Nasalization of vowels before nasal consonants and the subsequent loss of the
consonant; vocalization and loss of non-prevocalic /l/; told may be pronounced
identically with toe; devoicing of final /b/, /d/, /g/ and possible loss of final /d/.

GRAMMATICAL DIFFERENCES:

1. Many black speakers do not have –s in third person singular present tense.
2. The absence of the copula – the verb to be – in the present tense.
3. 'invariant be' – the use of the form be as a finite verb form.
4. AAVE question inversion; 'existential it'; 'negativized auxiliary pre-position'

LANGUAGE and SEX

GRAMMATICAL EXPRESSIONS:

1. May not occur at all (e.g. in sth written in 1st person singular we can not see if the
writer is male or female).
2. May occur through adjectival gender marking.
 3. In many Slavic and Romance languages, past participle forms also differ for the two
sexes (e.g. snimljen/snimljena)
4. May occur through the use of distinct first-person singular pronouns
5. May occur through the use of distinct gender-marked verb forms in the 1st person
singular (e.g. stigla sam(stigao sam)

SPEECH DIFFERENCES:

1. Using of taboo words (men use them more)

2. Women on average use forms which more closely approach those of the standard
variety or the prestige accent than those used by men.

Many societies seem to expect a higher level of adherance to social norms – better behaviour
– from women than from men.
Sociolinguist Elizabeth Gordon has pointed out that women may have a tendency to speak
in a more prestigious way so as not to be thought sexually promiscuous.

LANGUAGE and CONTEXT

VERBAL REPERTOIRE – totality of linguistic varieties used in different social contexts
(in different situations and for different purposes) by a particular community of speakers.

REGISTER – a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social

setting.

STYLES – linguistic varieties that are linked to the formality of the situation.

FORMAL SPEECH/CASUAL SPEECH

DIGLOSSIA – a particular kind of language standardization where two distinct varieties of a

language are spoken within the same speech community and where each of the two
varieties have a definite social function. (e.g. German Switzerland)

LANGUAGE SWITCHING – takes place in communities where verbal repertoire contains

more than one language (e.g. Luxemburg – switching between German and French).

CODE-SWITCHING – the practice of moving back and forth between two languages or
between two dialects or registers of the same language. Occurs far more often in conversation
than in writing.

LANGUAGE and SOCIAL INTERACTION

Speakers are not SOCIOLINGUISTIC AUTOMATA – do not respond automatically to
situations.
LANGUAGE SWITCHING – a speaker switches completely from one language to another.

CODE-SWITCHING – rapid switching form of language switching (e.g. English – Spanish

bilingual communities – Spanglish)

LANGUAGE – a means of communication information; a means of establishing and

maintaing relationship with other people.

CONVERSATION STRUCTURE – based on the principle of turn-taking and organized in

such a way to ensure that only one speaker speaks at a time; there are points where it is
possible to interrupt a speaker; there are rules about how and when one is allowed to
introduce a new topic of conversation; there are rules about silence.

CONVERSATIONS – structured, rule-governed, non-random sequences of utterances.

ETNOGRAPHY OF SPEAKING – the scientific description of the varieties and

characteristics of language use within a culture; it studies rules about the way in which
language should be used in social interaction in all societies all over the world; it also studies
cross-cultural differences in communicative norms.

DEBORAH TANNEN has suggested that in many respects communication between men and
women can be regarded as cross-cultural communication, at least in North America and
Europe. She has suggested that men and women often fail to understand one another properly,
and that such misunderstandings can lead to friction and tension in relationships. One aspect
of communication that may cause problems of this type is the relationship between directness
and indirectness.

JENNIFER COATES – suggests that men and women also differ conversationally in at least
one other way:
- men seem more inclined to prefer a more competitive kind of discourse, whereas women
seem to feel more comfortablewith a more cooperative style.
- men may interrupt each other more and take pleasure in argumentation and point-scoring.
- women may interrupt another speaker to agree with her, in a kind of supportive discourse
style.
- Coates's research shows not only that men interrupt more than women, but also that women
allow themselves to be interrupted more than men.

LANGUAGE and NATION

LINGUISTIC MINORITIES – groups of speakers who have as their native variety a
language other than that which is the official, dominant or major language in the country
where they live. (e.g. Belgium – Dutch and French are official languages).
Where the minority is smaller or less influential, the minority language or languages are
unlikely to have official status, and their speakers will tend to be bilingual (e.g. Welsh,
Gaelic, Catalan...)
LANGUAGE PLANNING – the activities of government regarding language.

STATUS PLANNING – the type of language planning which decides which role is to be
played by which language.

STATUS – the relative prestige a language has due to its place in society (i.e. which
languages to be used, and where)

The role of national government – to select a national language, establish, develop, and
standardize it.

CORPUS – the 'body' of language (which alphabet to use, correct usage, modern
terminologies, etc.)

ACQUISITION – how to get the population to learn (acquire) language.

LINGUA FRANCA – a language which is used as a means of communication among people

who have no native language in common.
In West Africa one of the most important lingua francas which is still used for predominantly
trading purposes is Hausa.

ABSTAND LANGUAGE – 'language by distance' (there is no close relative with which they
can be confused, or are mutually intelligible with) – languages which can be regarded as
languages in their own right on purely linguistic grounds (e.g. Basque).

STATE-NATIONS – conquering territory; claiming people within it a nation, seeking

homogenisation (e.g. linguistic) through centralization, education. ( Portugal conquering part
of South America and imposing their own language, culture,etc.)

NATION-STATE – homogenous population with common language and culture, seeking to

acquire territory. ( Romani-Gypsy people )

LANGUAGE and GEOGRAPHY

LINGUISTIC INOVATION – a new word, a new pronunciation, a new usage – occurs at a
particular place, and subsequently spreads to other areas. (e.g. the loss in English of non-
prevocalic /r/, as in farm, yard).

LINGUISTIC AREAS – areas where several languages are spoken which, although they are
not necessarily very closely related, have a number of features in common (e.g. situation in
Balkans).

Increased geographical mobility during the course of the 20th century led to the disappearance
of many dialects and dialect forms through a process called DIALECT LEVELLING (the
reduction or elimination of marked differences between dialects over a period of time).
DIALECT MIXTURE – situation in the USA when settlers from different parts of Great
Britain came (England, Scotland..) bringing their different dialects. The dialect mixture
situation does not last more than a generation or possibly two.

KOINEIZATION – the process by which a new variety of a language emerges from the
mixing, levelling, and simplifying of different dialects. KOINE (Greek koine – general,
common)– a new variety of a language that develops as a result of koineization.

SIMPLIFICATION – refers most often to getting rid of irregularities, such as irregular verb
forms , and redundancies, such as grammatical gender, in the lingua franca.

REDUCTION – refers to the fact that, as a result of a reduction in social function, lingua
franca speakers may use the language for doing bussines, but not perhaps for playing football,
and means that, compared to the usage of a native speaker, parts of the language are missing:
vocabulary, grammatical structures, stylistic devices.

The technical term for the process by which languages may be subject to simplification,
reduction, and interference is PIDGINIZATION (the process when a language becomes
made up of elements of two or more other languages and used for contacts, esp trading
contacts, between the speakers of other languages).

PIDGIN LANGUAGE – a lingua franca which has no native speakers.

In the first stages of its development we can refer to it as pre-pidgin – it is used only in trading
or other limited-contact situations.
Tok Pisin – the most widely spoken pidgin derived from English. It has official status in
Papua New Guinea.

CREOLIZATION – the process whereby reduction is 'repaired' by expansion; the process of

becoming a creole.

CREOLE LANGUAGES – pidgins that have acquired native speakers; they are more
regular and less redundant (e.g. Jamaican creole).

DECREOLIZATION – a process which attacks the simplification and admixture which

occur during pidginization.

CREOLOID – a language which demonstrates a certain amount of simplification and

admixture, but which has never been a pidgin or a creole in the sense that it has always had
speakers who spoke a variety which was not subject to reduction. ( dialects of American Black
English; dialects of Brazilian Portuguese)

DUAL-SOURCE PIDGINS or CREOLES – they originate from two sources equaly (e.g.
Russenorsk – from Russian and Norwegian).

There are two alternative directions in which language contact can go, resulting in two distinct
linguistic processes:
- BORROWING – refers only to „the incorporation of foreign elements into the speakers'
native language“.
- SUBSTRATUM INTERFERENCE – when the influence goes the other way, and native
language structures influence the second language.

LEXIFIER – the language that has provided most of the vocabulary (i.e. lexicon) to a
pidgion or creole.

SUBSTRATE – the languages other than the lexifier that are present in pidgin or creole
formation.

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE – the one in which government business is transacted and printed,
as well as the language of publicly financed education.

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE – the one that is spoken by the people of a particular locality.

LINGUISTIC REFUGE – an area where a language is insulated against outside change by

virtue of remoteness, or the remains of a locale where a once widespread language continues
to be spoken.

TOPONYMY – the study of place names (toponyms).

LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE – the language in the environment, words and images

displayed and exposed in public places.

LANGUAGE and HUMANITY

LANGUAGE DEATH – the end or extinction of a language.

LANGUAGE SHIFT – a particular community gradually abandons its original native

language and goes over to speaking another one instead; in most cases it leads to language
death.

REVERSING LANGUAGE SHIFT – an activity which aim is to help small culturally

threatened communities to transmit their languages to next generation.

MORIBUND – a language which is declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of
the language has died.

3 MAIN CRITERIA FOR IDENTIFYING LANGUAGE AS ENDANGERED:

1. The number of speakers currently living

2. The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers
3. The percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in
question.

LANGUAGE REVIVAL – the revival, by governments, political authorities, or enthusiasts,

to recover the spoken use of a language that is no longer spoken or is endangered (e.g.
Hebrew language).