Lingüística Resumen Final

COPY 2: The relationship of language and culture:

CHAPTER 1:
Language is the principal means whereby we conduct our social lives. When its used in
contexts of communications, it is bound up with culture in multiple ways:

● Language express cultural reality: The words people utter refer to common
experience, they express fact, ideas and events that are communicable because
they refer to a stock of knowledge about the world that other people share. Words
also reflects their author’s attitudes and belief, their point of view, etc.

● Language embodies cultural reality: the way in which people use the spoken, written
or visual medium itself creates meanings that are understandable to the group they
belong to. ‘i.e: conversational style, gestures, and facial expression.

● Language symbolizes a cultural reality: language is a system of sign that is seem as

having itself a cultural value. Speaker identify themselves through their use of
language , they view their language as a symbol of social identity.

Nature, Culture and Language

Nature: refers to what is born and grows organically (from Latin nascere: be born)
Culture: refers to what has been grown and groomed (from Latin colere: to cultivate)
We can say that nature and culture both need each other. Culture is always the result of
human intervention in the biological process of nature.

Collective expectations can be liberating as they endow a particular meaning by imposing by

imposing a structure on nature.
They can be constraining as particular meanings are adopted by the speech community and
imposed in turn on its members.
For example: once a bouquet of roses has become codified as a society’s way of expressing
love, it becomes controversial, if not risky, for lovers to express their own particular love
without resorting to the symbols the society imposes upon them.
Both oral cultures and literate cultures have their own ways of emancipating and
constraining their members.
These impositions that language and culture impose on nature correspond to various forms
of socialization or acculturation: etiquettes, expressions of politeness, social dos and
don’ts. All of these shape people’s behavior through child rearing, behavioral upbringing,
schooling, and professional training. The use of proper writing is also shaped and socialized
through culture.

Communities of language users:

Social conventions, norms of social appropriateness, are the product of communities of

language users. Culture both liberates people from the oblivion, anonymity, and the
randomness of nature, and constrains them by imposing a structure and principles of
selection.
For example: people who identify themselves as members of a social group ( familiy,
neighborhood, nation, professional or ethnic affilitiation)acquire common ways of viewing the
world through interaction with other members of the same group.
These views are reinforced through institutions like the school, the workplace, the church
and the government, for example.
Common attitudes, beliefs and values are reflected in the way members of the group use
language- for example, what they choose to say or not to say and how they say it.

Speech community: it is composed of people who use the same linguistic code (by code it
can be also the traffic lights, the bathroom signals).
Discourse community: it refers to the common ways in which members of a social group use
language to meet their social needs. (For example, here, we as students of ‘Profesorado’
may understand each other using different structures and words, or doctors when they talk
to each other use a language that is different from that they use when they talk to their
patients).
Discourse accent: it also refers to the topics they choose to talk about, the way they present
information and the style with which they interact. For example: Americans have been
socialized into responding ‘thank you’ to any compliment they receive (‘I like your sweater’
‘thank you’). The French, who tend to perceive such a compliment as an intrusion into their
privacy would rather say ‘oh really? It’s quite old’. The reactions of both groups are based on
the different values given to compliments in both cultures.

But there is another way of viewing culture which takes a HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE,
the culture of everyday practices draws on the culture of shared history and traditions.
People identify themselves as members of a society to the extent that they can have a place
in that society’s history and that they can identify with the way it remembers its past. Culture
consists of precisely that historical dimension in a group’s identity. This diachronic view of
culture focuses on the way in which a social group represents itself and others through its
material productions over time- its technological achievements, its monuments, and its works
of art. The material culture is preserved through institutional mechanisms that are also part
of the culture, like museums, schools and private libraries. Language is not a culture-free
code but it plays a major role in the perpetuations of culture, particularly in its printed form.

Imagined communities:
The social ( synchronic) and the historical ( diachronic) have often been called the
sociocultural context of language study. There is a third to culture, the imagination.
Discourse communities: are characterized not only by facts and artifacts but, by common
dreams, fulfilled and unfulfilled imaginings.
These imaginings are mediated through the languages, that over the life of the communities
reflects, shapes, and is a metaphor for its cultural reality.
For example: the city of London is inseparable, in the cultural imagination of its citizens from
Shakespeare and Dickens.

INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS:

To identify themselves as members of a community, people have to define themselves as

insiders against others defined as outsiders. Culture is a process that both includes and
excludes. Cultures, especially national cultures resonate with the voice of the powerful, and
are filled with the silences of the powerless. Both words and their silences contribute to
shaping one’s own and the other’s culture.

For example: the French constructed for themselves a view of the culture of ‘the Orient’ that
came directly from writers such as Flaubert that only served to reinforce a sense of
superiority of the European culture. The Orient itself was not given a voice.

Similarly, scholars in Gender Studies, Ethnic studies and Gay Studies have shown the
hegemonic effects of dominants cultures and the authority they have in representing and in
speaking for the other.
In the social, the historic and the imagined dimension, culture is heterogeneous. Members of
the same discourse community all have different biographies and life experiences; they may
differ in age, gender or ethnicity. Moreover, cultures change over time. In summary, culture
can be defined as membership in a discourse community that shares a common social
space and history, and common imaginings.

LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY:
Herder and Wilhem von Humbodt created the idea that different people speak differently
because they think differently, and that they think differently because their language offers
them different ways of expressing the world around them.

The sapir- Whorf hypothesis:

It makes the claim that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the
manner in which one thinks and behaves (language shapes the way we think). It would be
difficult for and English and a Hopi physicist to understand each other’s thinking, given the
major differences between their languages. On the other hand, Navajo children speak a
language that encodes differently through different verbs the action of ‘picking up a round
object’ like a rope. When presented with a blue rope, a yellow rope and a blue stick, and
asked to choose which object goes best with the blue rope, most monolingual Navajo
children chose the yellow rope, thus associating the objects on the basis of their physical
form, whereas monolingual English speaking children almost always chose the blue stick
associating the objects on the basis of their color.

CHAPTER 6: Language and cultural identity.

It is widely believed that there is a natural connection between the language spoken by
members of a social group and that group´s identity. By their accent, their vocabulary, their
discourse patterns, speakers identify themselves and are identified as members of this or
that speech and discourse community. It is difficult to define the boundaries of any particular
social group and the linguistic and cultural identities of its members only based on race
because there is no necessary correlation between a given racial characteristic and the use
of a given language or variety of language. Regional identity is equally contestable. One
would think that national identity is a clear cut, but it is not the same to actually live in Turkey
and have a Turkish passport than having been born, raised, educated and be a native
speaker of German and ascribe yourself as Turkish because you have Turkish parents

Cultural stereotypes:
Group identity is not a natural fact but a cultural perception. Our perception of someone’s
social identity is very much culturally determined. What we perceive about a person’s culture
and language is what we have been conditioned by our own culture to see. Group identity is
a question of focusing and diffusion of ethnic, racial, national concepts or stereotypes. It has
to be noted that societies impose racial and ethnic categories only on certain groups.

LANGUAGE CROSSING AS ACT OF IDENTITY:

One way of surviving culturally in immigration settings is to exploit, rather than stifle, the
endless variety of meanings afforded by participation in several discourse communities at
once. People choose one way of talking over another depending on the topic, the
interlocutor and the situationa by others. Cultural identity, is a question of both indenture to a
language spoken or imposed by others, and personal, emotional investment in that language
through the apprenticeship thatl context. Such language crossings include the switching of
codes like the insertion of elements from one language into another. Language crossing
enables speakers to change footing within the same conversation, and also to show
solidarity or distance towards the discourse communities whose languages they are using.
By crossing languages speakers perform cultural acts of identity. Not infrequently speakers
who belong to several cultures insert the intonation of one language into the prosody of
another, or use phrases from one language into the other to distance themselves from
alternative identities. When speaking of cultural identity then, we have to distinguish between
the limited range of categories used by societies to classify their populations, and the
identities that individuals ascribe to themselves under various circumstances and in the
presence of various interlocutors. The ascription of cultural identity is particularly sensitive to
the perception and acceptance of an individual went into acquiring it.

LINGUISTIC NATIONISM: The association of one language variety with the membership in
one national community has been referred to as linguistic nationism.
STANDARD LANGUAGE, CULTURAL TOTEM:
This national identity is expressed through an artificially created standard language. When
one variety of a language is selected as an indicator of difference between insiders and
outsiders, it can be shielded from variations through official grammars and dictionaries and
can be taught through the national educational system. The term barbarism is used to
denote any use of language that offends contemporary standards of correctness or purity.
Standard language is always a written form of the language, preserved through a distinct
print culture serving a variety of political, economic and ideological interests. Language
acquires a symbolic value beyond its pragmatic use and becomes a totem of a cultural
group.
LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM: The case of linguistic rights has been made
particularly strong with the hegemonic spread of English around the world. Linguicism is
based in the promulgation of global ideologies through the worldwide expansion of one
language, and it has been defined as ‘ideologies, structures and practices which are used to
legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources between
groups which are defined on the basis of language’. Linguistic imperialism is seen as a type
of linguicism which consists on the imposition of one language on speakers of other
languages. It is when people feel economically and ideologically disempowered that a
language becomes a major symbol of cultural identity. This is why linguistic rights have to be
upheld, because each language provides a uniquely communal, and uniquely individual,
means by which human beings apprehend the world and one another. Finally, language is
the most sensitive indicator of the relationship between an individual and a social group, also
it is an integral part of ourselves because it permeates our very thinking and way of viewing
the world, and the only way to preserve human communication is not by making sure that
everyone speaks the same language, but by making sure that languages remain as rich and
diversified as possible.

Chapter 7: Current Issues:

Who is a native speaker?
Linguistics have relied on native speakers natural intuitions of grammatical accuracy and
their sure sense of what is proper language use to establish a norm against which the
performance of non- native speaker is measured. Native speaker have traditionally enjoyed
a natural prestige as language teachers, because they are seen as not only embodying the “
the authentic” use of the language, but as representing its original cultural context as well.
The native speaker is a monolingual, mono cultural abstraction, he/ she is one who speaks
only his/ her ( standardized) native tongue and lives by one ( standardized) national cultural.
It is not clear whether one is a native speaker by birth, or by education, or by virtue or being
recognized and accepted as a member of a like- minded cultural group. If the last seems to
be the case, ideal nativeness and claims to a certain ownerships of a language must give
way to multifarious combinations of language use and membership in various discourse
communities.

Cultural authenticity:
Much of the discussion surrounding the native speaker has been focused around two
concepts: authenticity and appropriateness.
First the diversity of authenticity within one national society, depending on such contextual
variables as age, social status, gender, ethnicity, race, what it is authentic in one context
might be inauthentic in another.
Second, the undesirably of imposing on learners a concept of authenticity that might
devalue their own authentic selves as learners. Cultural appropriateness need to be
replaced by the concept of appropriation, whereby learners learners make a FL and culture
their own by adopting and adapting it to their need and interesting.

CROSS- CULTURAL, INTERCULTURAL, MULTICULTURAL:

The ability to acquire another person’s language and understand someone else’s culture
while retaining one’s own is one aspect of more general ability to mediate between several
languages and cultures, called CROSS- CULTURAL, INTERCULTURAL OR
MULTICULTURAL COMMUNICATION.
The term “ cross cultural” or intercultural usually refers to the meeting of two cultures or
two languages across the political boundaries of nation-states.
The term intercultural also refers to communication between people from different ethnic,
social, gendered cultures within the boundaries of the same national language. Also refers to
the dialogue between minority cultures and dominant cultures, and are associated with
issues of bilingualism and biculturalism.

Example: Communication btw Chinese- Americans. American and afro-americans, btw

working class and upper class people, btw gays and heterosexual, btw men and women.

The term multicultural is used in two ways: In a societal sense , it indicates the
coexistence of people from many different background and ethnicities, as in a multicultural
societies.
In an individual sense, it characterizes persons who belong to various discourse
communities , and who therefore have the linguistic resources and social strategies to
affiliate and identify with many different cultures and ways of using the language.

The politics of recognition:

Copy 3:
Chapter 1: the social study of language:

The scope of enquiry:

Sociolinguistics is the field that studies the relation between language and society, between
the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live. It is a field
of study that assumes that human society is made up of many related patterns and
behaviours, some of which are linguistics.
One of the principal uses of language is to communicate meaning, but it is also used to
establish and maintain social relationships.
When you meet strangers, the way they talk informs you about their social and geographical
backgrounds, and the way you talk sends subtle or signals about what you think of them. It is
these aspects of language use that sociolinguistics study.
It has been recognized as a branch of the scientific study of language, sociolinguistics has
grown into one of the most important of the “ hyphenated” field of linguistics.
This term distinguishes the core fields of historical and descriptive linguistics ( phonology,
morphology,and syntax) from the newer interdisciplinary fields like psycholinguistics, applied
linguistics, neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics or the sociology of language.

For the SL the most important verity is the language- any language- is full of systematic
variation, variation that an only be accounted for by appealing, outside language to socially
relevant forces and facts.
SL takes as its primary task to map linguistics variation on to social condition. This mapping
helps to understand not just synchronic variation ( variation at a single point of time), but
also diachronic variation ( variation over time) or language change.

The relation between linguistic and social facts is crucial to a sociolinguistics approach. As
we grow up, we acquire small variations in language associated with recognizable styles
that identify us, or the person we are talking. There is no single-style or single-variety
speaker; a speech community does have a choice of varieties.

The existence of patterned variation in language makes it possible to identify ourselves and
others as belonging to certain groups.
Complementary approaches:
The formal linguist pursues an autonomous universal system. The psycholinguist asks how
such system works, and how can be learnt or lost. The sociolinguist asks how it is used in a
living and complex speech community. The latter looks at the complex connections between
variations within a language and the matching variations in the social groups that use it. A
sociolinguist is interested in the way that members of a speech community can identify and
respond to fine differences in language that are associated with social, political, economic,
religious, cultural, or other division of the society.
The micro end of sociolinguistics is about showing how specific differences in pronunciation
and grammar lead members of a speech community to make judgements about the
education and economic status of a speaker.
The form of speech and the selection among available socially marked variants
communicate important information about the speaker and the listeners, and about their
relationship.
The macro end, sometimes labelled the sociology of language, focus on the whole of a
language or variety, treating it alongside other human cultural phenomena. They investigate
about the close bonds between language choice and social identity, the significance of a
group of immigrants shifting to a new language or maintaining theirs, why some variates are
powerful, and why others are discriminated against. All that concern language as a whole.

Scholars divide the field into two, as they want to distinguish between sociolinguistics,
which emphasizes the social influences on language, and the sociology of language,
which emphasizes the role of langue in society.
A common theme that emerges is that the complex interplay of language structure with
social structure means that any user of language is constantly responding to and signalling
information. My identity is recognizable from my choice among all the varieties of language.

The method of enquiry:

Noam Chomsky initiated a revolution in linguistics by asking how to account for the fact that
everyone who learns a language shows evidence of control of rules. Sociolinguists ask how
to account for the variation that exists in every language.
Labov came with the term the observer’s paradox, as sociolinguists need to observe the
way people speak but, at the same time, individuals ought not to be aware of them being
observed. This arises since sociolinguists believe that language use is sensitive to social
relations among the participants in a speech event. We speak differently to superiors, to
colleagues, to friends, and to children; we develop different styles. How, then, can a linguist
witness and record the vernacular and unmonitored speech patterns that close friends use
among themselves? Labov’s answer to this problem was the Rapid and Anonymous
Interview in which informants did not know they were being interviewed by a linguist. The
essence of this technique can be seen by considering how Labov collected data on English
in New York City. To begin with, one should say that he was interested in the presence or
absence of syllable-final /r/, the pronunciation of the fricatives / θ/ and / ð/, and the quality of
various vowels. He chose two words: fourth floor, and then went around to a number of
department stores in New York. Each of these was typical of a certain social class, and
going on the assumption that employees use the pronunciation, which holds for their typical
customers, he could then examine the kind of English used. To get samples without people
knowing that they were acting as informants for a linguist, Labov checked in advance what
items were for sale on the fourth floor and then asked a store employee where he could find
these items. After the individual responded ‘on the fourth floor’, he asked again, pretending
that he did not hear the first time. This supplied him with a more careful pronunciation of the
two words. Labov saw in this technique a means of gaining genuine pronunciations that
were not spoiled by speakers’ awareness of providing data for an investigating linguist.

What are the Data?

In any disciple, the interpretable data is a key one. In sociolinguistics, there is tension
between the observers and the quantifiers. Sociolinguists seek their evidence in the patterns
underlying the answers of a large number of people to many designed questions. The social
forces that control individual behaviour are expressed in the statistically determinable
tendencies that can be extracted by analysing large quantities of data.
Sociolinguists look for evidence of socially accepted rules accounting for variations in
speech. The evidence is in part the speech variation, in part the characteristics of the
speaker, and in part the nature of the speech encounter. Some of these can be collected by
observation, some by elicitation

The sociolinguistic at work:

Workable solutions have been found to the ‘observer’s paradox’ of collecting natural speech
samples. Sociolinguists studying microlinguistics variation obtain samples by recording on
tape the natural speech. Nevertheless, are the data collected in this way natural?
Clandestine recording has been tried and abandoned. The sociolinguistics interview,
modelled on the format developed by William Labov, is one of the most common techniques
for gathering samples of language. In the interview, the sociolinguist talks to the subject,
attempting to elicit examples of various kind of speech. The normal stylistic is formal, for the
two people speaking are strangers. Interviews are invaluable in studying in depth the
language variation of the subjects.
For studying larger population, one technique is the cover collection of non-intrusive
responses. Labov, fourth floor.
Once a natural speech sample has been collected, it must be analysed. The linguist chooses
a significant variable ( a specific feature that previous observation suggest likely to prove of
social significant)
End each occasion where the feature could occur is counted, and the percentage of each
variant under specific conditions provides statistical data, which can be compared with other
factors.

Chapter 3: Location variation in Speech

Speech communities and repertoires:

For general linguistics, a Speech community is all the people who speak a single language.
This includes any group of people with the possibility of being able to communicate with
each other, using the same language. Such groups can be villages, countries, political or
professional communities, communities which shared lifestyles, hobbies or even just group
of friends. The study of speech communities is central to the understanding of human
language and meaning. An example of speech community is the group of English language
speakers thought-out the world. A group of people is not necessarily a community unless
they share a common view, activity, belief etc. Speech is not simply a sound that comes
from a person’s mouth. Social actors recognize the significance of innate human sounds
such as screams cries etc. without learning and being socialized into a system of meaning.
In contrast, the act of turning human sound into symbols that are recognizable as speech
and particular to a group of people requires an agreement of some sort regarding the system
of symbols in circulation. That agreement can vary within a language and among various
languages. Members must be socialized to learn the language symbols of that community
and how and when to use them.
Sociolinguistics focused in the language practiced by a group of people who have the
opportunity to interact and who share a repertoire of language or varieties. There is no
limitation on the location and size of a speech community, which is in practice defined by its
sharing a set of language varieties (its repertoire) and a set of norms from using them. For
example: Londoners recognize Cockney and Mayfair varieties of English though they may
themselves use neither.
Language repertoire is Group of language varieties (first language, regional language,
languages learned at school or in visits abroad), mastered by the same speaker, to different
degrees of proficiency and for different uses. This individual repertoire changes over the
course of an individual’s lifespan (acquisition of new languages, “forgetting” languages
learned). The notion of speech repertoire and community is also useful in looking a variation
within a single language.
For example in a Palestinian village that was divided in half, half in Israel and half in the
Jordanian West Bank, there is still evidence of the existence of two quite distinct varieties of
spoken Arabic..
A small social network forms a speech community, and so does a large metropolis or a
country, a region, or a communication network (like the internet). Speech communities show
not just regional variation but also social variation.
Smaller NETWORKS or SOCIAL NETWORKS – group of people who communicate with
each other regularly- also contain consistent patterns. SOCIAL NETWORK: Any way of
describing a particular speech community in terms of relation among its individual members.

DIALECT:

The study of regional dialects played a major role in the historical linguistics (the study of
language change over time) that flourished in the late 18th centuries, until the interest in
diachronic changes (over time) was challenged by the concern for synchronic description of
a language system at any one time.
But… what is a dialect? It is variety of a language that signals where a person comes from.
The notion is usually interpreted geographically: (regional dialect, that refers to language
variety used in a geographical region), but it also has some application in relation to a
person’s social background (class dialect) or occupation (occupational dialect). Although
some linguists include phonological features (such as vowels, consonants, and intonation)
among the dimensions of dialect, the standard practice is to treat such features as aspects
of accent. Dialect is much more broad and far reaching that accent. Most dialects will include
with them their own accents, but they are more than mere pronunciation differences

LANGUAGE VS DIALECT
A Language is a body of words and the systems for their use common to people who are of
the same community or nation, the same geographical area, or the same cultural tradition.
On the other hand a dialect can be defined as different varieties of the same language that
have evolved over time and in different geographical locations. American English, British
English, Canadian English, and Australian English, respectively can be quite different from
one another, but they are not officially considered four separate languages. Instead, they are
considered four separate dialects of the same language. The decision of what language a
dialect belongs to is therefore social and political rather than purely linguistic.

DIALECT VS ACCENT
Dialect and accent are two different aspects of language. However, there are some overlaps.
An accent is also specific to a region. In English, there might be an American, British, or
Australian accent. An accent is an inflection that occurs with word pronunciation and refers
to how people pronounce words. A dialect is entirely different words or ways of
communicating altogether. Dialect goes beyond mere pronunciation. It refers to the
distinctive vocabulary and A dialect includes the pronunciations, grammar and vocabulary
that people use within a group.
Examples of Accent:
● An American might pronounce the word, “hello,” by speaking the “h” sound.
● A Brit might pronounce the word, “hello,” without speaking the “h” sound.
- This is still the same word, just spoken with a different accent.

Examples of Dialect:
● A Northern American might say, “hello.”
● A Southern American might say, “howdy.”
- This is an example of the differences in dialect.

There are two principles underlying social accounts of dialect variation. The first is that all
languages change over time, as new words are added to deal with new concepts or as
contact with other languages and phonetic ‘drift’ leads to modifications in phonology. The
second is that people who communicate with each other tent to speak similarly. Assume a
group of people all setting off from one place where they lived together and spoke the same
language, with sub-groups stopping off and forming communities isolated by distance or
geographical boundaries from other speakers o the language. Over time, the language
spoken in each place will change. With the breakdown of isolation in the modern world,
dialectal variation tends to diminish and languages become more and more homogenized.
DIALECTOLOGY: is the search for spatially and geographically determined differences in
various aspects of the language. For each village or region that they study, dialectologists
want to know the typical local vocabulary or pronunciation, their subjects of choice are
usually older people who have lived all their lives in one location and who had a minimum of
education.
STEREOTYPES: fixed and prejudicial patterns of thought about people that may be
mistaken, but they are focus on the most obvious feature of the local accent. Here in the
following pictures we can see how BREAD is called in different parts of the world. These
different variants permit dialectologists to recognize major regional differences

CHAPTER 4: SPOKEN, GENDER AND SOCIAL CLASS.

Chapter 5: Bilingual and Bilingualism:

Language socialization: Children acquire language and social skills together. Even while
they are still in the babbling stage, the stage of language development during children
produce speech sounds arranged in nonsensical combinations, many children have a
different way of addressing small objects from the way they address adults. If they do this,
they are showing that they have learned that babies are talked to using a different variety.
This register that is used to speak to babies is called baby talk. From an early age, children
learn that there is more than one variety of language, because that occurs in many
languages. There are a vast set of social rules about language that a child must acquire to
be successfully socialized. One is the rule for conversational organization: knowing when to
speak and when to be silent, how to enter a conversation, when to speak quietly and when
clearly. Equally confusing at first are the pragmatic rules, such as comprehending that a
question may be a request. One of the most revealing opportunities for studying language
socialization is in the case of children growing up bilingually, for they manage not just keep
the two languages separate, but to learn quickly which language to use to which people.
They also realize which people can be addressed in a mixture of the two languages. In this
way, Bilingual children develop control over three distinct varieties of languages

BILINGUAL: a person who has some functional ability in a second language. This may vary
from a limited ability in one or more domains, to very strong command of both languages.
What is needed to describe the nature of an individual’s bilingualism is, first of all identify
each of the languages. We will often need to clarify which variety is involved: for instance, to
distinguish between High German and Swiss German (Swiss German is not an official
language, is the collective term for German dialects in Switzerland.) A second important
feature is the way each language was acquired, that is from mother or native tongue
learning, second language learning or foreign language learning. Each of these suggest
different possible kinds of proficiency. Also is useful to note the age of learning and the time
spent using the language.
. Another set of distinctions is that of skill, reading, writing, speaking, understanding speech.
It is common for people to speak one language and read and write another. The receptive
skills of reading and understanding speech are often stronger in a learned language than are
the productive skills of speaking and writing. Another way to describe bilinguals is by
describing the external functions they can perform in each language, for instance one
special ability is the skill of translation from one language to the other, and also is by
domains rather than function. A domain is a typical social situation with three different
characteristics: a location, a set of role-relationships, and a set of topics. Bilinguals have a
repertoire of domain-related rules of language choice. The home school or the homework
switch is probably the most common, with one language learned at home from parents and
the second learned at school and used at work. For instance, the bilingualism I mentioned
earlier in Swiss adults is domain-related, with High German Used in the work domain and
Swiss German in the home and neigbourhood. Because domains are composite concepts,
there is the possibility of conflict and therefore marked choice between languages. Thus, two
people who normally speak the standard language at work (English) might use their home
language (Spanish) there to signal either a change of relationship or topic while still being in
the same location. The important notion is that a bilingual’s use of his or her two languages
is likely to vary considerably according to domain. It is rare to find equal ability in both
languages, so the question is how the two languages are organized in the bilingual brain.
Bilingual competence:
For years, there was an attempt to distinguish between compound bilinguals whose two
languages were assumed to be closely connected, because one language had been learned
after the other, and co-ordinate bilinguals who had learned each language in separate
contexts, and so kept them distinct. Over-simplifying, co-ordinate bilinguals were assumed to
have two meaning systems each with its own set of words, while compounds had a single
system with two sets of words. The phenomenon of bilingualism is the prime example of
language contact, for the two languages are in contact in the bilingual and this can led to
interference (a feature of one language appearing when speaking or writing another). A
compound bilingual who has learned the meaning of words in another language by attaching
them to the words of his or her first language demonstrates semantic interference. This
phenomenon, especially when it involves using the two languages together, had led to the
study of code switching.

Code switching and code mixing:

Code switching (changing from language to language in the most of an utterance). It is

when bilinguals switch between their two languages in the middle of a conversation. The
switching of words is the beginning of borrowing (the integration of a word from one
language into another) which occurs when the new word becomes more or less integrated
into the second language. There are various kinds of code switching; for instance,
immigrants often use many words from their new language in their old language, because
many people they speak to know both languages. In these situations, bilinguals often
develop a mixed code (a variety with extensive code switching used by bilinguals to talk
each other). In such a case, we might want to distinguish between code switching of the two
languages and the mixed variety. The history of English shows many such mixed codes, as
first Danish and later Norman words were added by bilinguals. The various contemporary
Englishes, such as Jamaican English or New Zealand English, can be seen as mixed codes,
with the addition of local lexicon as their most obvious feature.
For a bilingual, choosing the available word or phrase on the basis of easy availability is
commonly related to topic. Showing the effect of domain differences, a speaker’s vocabulary
will develop differentially for different topics in the two languages. It is important to note that
each of a bilingual’s language is likely to be associated not just with topics and places, but
also with identities and roles associated with them. This kind of shift, called metaphorical
switching, is a powerful mechanism for changing from one language to another to signal a
change in role-relationship. On the whole, a full understanding of bilingualism, however,
depends on a deeper understanding of the nature of the speech communities in which they
operate

CHAPTER 6: MULTILINGUALISM:

Sociolinguistics takes in bilingual and multilingual societies. Bilingualism and

multilingualism, whether in an individual speaker or in a social group, are the most
obvious and salient case of variation to observe. With stylistic or dialectal variation,
identifying each variety is harder; there is generally agreement on the varieties and their
names. We can study how two or more languages intertwine and separate without first
being forced, to establish the criteria for difference. It is both the salience and the
commonness of multilingualism that has led to its being so well studied. Multilingual
communities evolve in a number of ways.
One is a result of migration, the voluntary or involuntary movements of people speaking one
language into the territory of people speaking another. ( For instance, when the Hopi Indians
permitted or encouraged a group of Tewa Indians to move from the Rio Grande area to the
Arizona mesas, they produced a bilingual village: Hano. Later, the bilingual villagers of Hano
added Spanish and Navajo to their language repertories, and afterwards joined the rest of
the Hopi in shifting towards English use.
Involuntary migration or forced movement of population was common in the ancient
Middle East and has continued to be a significant force accounting for multilingual
communities. For example, in the twentieth century, the Soviet policy of forced movement
of populations assured that many of the newly independent post-Soviet countries are
saddled with a challenging multilingual problem.
Voluntary migration has produced major changes in the linguistic make-up of many
countries in the world. By way of illustration, the United States, as the world’s foremost
receiver of voluntary immigration, grew quickly into a multilingual society, constantly
assimilating large numbers of the immigrants through a melting pot policy. United States
absorbed large communities of speakers such as German, Italian, and Spanish etc.
Migration from the countryside or from small towns to the large metropolitan cities is
another major cause of multilingual communities. For example, in the Third World, this
movement to the cities has created huge megalopolises, conurbations with populations in
the millions, attracting complex patterns of multilingualism, and producing major problems
for social, economic and political development.
Multilingualism has also historically been created by conquest and subsequent
incorporation of speakers of different languages into a single political unit. For
instance,the conquest of Central and South America by the Spaniards and Portuguese
eventually
produced countries with language indigenous minorities, some still speaking many Indian
languages.
Colonial policies also led to multilingual states. When Spanish conquered Latin America, it
created countries where Spanish dominated a mixture of marginalized indigenous
varieties.
Many of these former colonies might be considered cases of forced federation. There has
been voluntary federation. One case is Switzerland where speakers of French, German,
Italian, and Romansch formed a multilingual state. These diverse historical circumstances
have produced many different kinds of multilingual mixes.

The most common result of this language contact has been language conflict, producing
pressure from one language on speakers of other languages to adopt it. This pressure has
produced challenges to social structure that many people have begun to worry about. The
study of language maintenance and of language shift has become a central concern of
sociolinguists interested in multilingual societies.

Language loyalty and reserving language shift:

Linguists have noticed that languages are in danger of dying, and for some time have been
studyinglanguage loyalty , the ability (or lack of it) of speakers of a language to stand up to
the pressure of more powerful languages. They have expressed distress at the threatened
fate ofendangered languages , languages that are not longer being passed on to children
as native languages, but are spoken by group of adults.
Inevitable language shift occurs when small weak languages, or languages of marginalized
groups, comes into contact with large powerful languages used and favored by the
majority or dominant group. There have been many attempts to correct this loss of
linguistic diversity. A commonly cited case is the national effort to revive the use of Irish in
Ireland, in order to preserve Irish in the western areas where it was still spoken, and to
teach it through the schools in the other areas where there were few speakers left.
Language and Ethnic identity:
One of the most common ways of identifying a person is by his o her language. Because
language is inherently involved in socialization, the social group whose language you speak
is and important identity group for you. There are other markers of ethnic identity, such as,
food or clothing or religion. But language has a special role because it organizes thought and
in part because it establishes social relationships.

Ethnic groups use language as one of their most significant identifying features. Ethnic
groups believe that their language is the best medium for preserving and expressing their
traditions. This connection of language and ethnicity may be understood by looking at the
case of post-Franco Spain: Catalan and Basque have been recognized as official languages
in their own autonomous regions.

Language rights:
The issue of language or linguistics Rights provides an opportunity to attempt to take an
ethical view of language contact and conflict. Possible approaches: One puts emphasis
on the right of language, to survive. Because every language incorporates some unique
features derived from the rich and varied experience of human beings.Language loss is
seen as serious as the loss of an animal or bird species.
The second approach is to focus on the rights of the speakers of the language. Here, we
may distinguish between the rights of the speaker of a language to use it, and their rights
to maintain it by teaching it to their children.
The First Right: is the right to learn the national language, to be assisted in dealing with
those situations where lack of control of it leads to serious handicaps.
The Second Right: is not to be discriminated against, in access to work, education, justice,
or health service, on the basis of being identified as a member of a group speaking
another language or variety. This refers to the way in which a linguistic minority are often
classified as “bilinguals” and afforded lower status.
The Third Right : is the right of a group of speakers of a language to preserve and maintain
their own favored language or variety and to work to reverse any language shift to the
status or prestige variety.

Pidgins and Creoles:

Pidgin is a language that is a mixture of two other languages, which people who do not
speak each other’s language well use to talk to each other.
Creole is a language that is a combination of a European Language with one or more other
language. Apidgin language evolves in circumstances where there are limited relations
between the speakers of different languages. It is a variety of language that is marked by the
fact that it is not a native language of anyone, is learned only in contact by people who
normally continue to speak their own language inside their own community.
A pidgin is a social rather than an individual solution. A pidgin involves the mixture of two
or more languages. Sometimes, the grammatical system is based more or less on one
language and the vocabulary is largely taken from another. In all cases, the grammar is
simplified, certain features of the base language are dropped, and this is the case of the
Nigerian Pidgin English. The pidgin is spoken only as a second language, and functioning in
limited domains as languages of wider communication, they are learned informally in contact
and used especially as trade language groups.
In multilingual areas where each of the existing language groups maintains their
distinctiveness and do not intermarry, the pidgin continues. In many cases, there is a
further development. This occurs when; as a result of intermarriage of a couple whose
native languages are different but who both speak pidgin is spoken at home and learned
by children as a first or mother tongue.
Children acquiring the language do so in the same way that children acquire any other
language. New features emerge as a result both of this and of the growing complexity of
the social circumstances in which the language is used. The process is called creolization ,
as the language expands and develops, displaying greater phonological and grammatical
complexity. Some of the better-described creoles are Haitian Creole, Tok Pisin (a creolized
version of a New Guinea Pidgin English).
A third stage of development can occur when speakers of a creole or pidgin are
introduced, usually by education, to the standard language on which the creole or pidgin
was originally based. There can ensue what has been labeled apost-creole continuum,in
which the various levels of social and stylistic variation may be filled by various of the
standard language at the upper end and of the creole or pidgin at the lower end. A
Jamaica may, in various social situations, choose the creole called Jamaica Talk.
Because of their lack of formal recognition, pidgins and creoles are often treated just as a
local jargon and linguistic aberration.

Diglossia:

A third aspect of language contact relates to the issue of functional allocation. Two
distinct varieties of the same language are used, side by side, for two different sets of
functions. The term diglossia was coined originally to label this phenomenon. In the
Arabic-speaking world, there is the contrast between the Classical language and regional
dialect.
The notion of diglossia can also be applied to the way in which two (or more) distinct
languages come to divide up the domains in the linguistic repertoire of a speech
community.
Diglossia thus refers to a society that has divided up its domains into two distinct clusters,
using linguistic differences to demarcate the boundaries, and offering two clear identities
to the members of the community. It is important also to note the political situations in
which diglossia often occurs, with the language associated with power. Educational
pressure is in the direction of the variety, and those who cannot master it are usually
socially marginalized. The variety maintains value as a marker of membership of a peer
or ethnic group.
In many countries, the globalization of English has introduced a third significant language,
so that triglossia or polyglossia is starting to emerge. This tendency confirms our central
theme, the close intertwining of social and linguistic structure, so that changes in one are
reflected in changes in the other.
( revisar copia a la hora de estudiar)

CHAPTER 7: APPLIED SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Language policy and language planning:

When sociolinguistics started to be involved in the 1950 and 1960s, they preferred the term
language planning as the term for any effort to modify language from or use. In the late
1980s, the regular failure of national planning activities seems to have encouraged the more
neutral seem term language policy.
For instance, in a situation where there are seen to be two or more languages available, any
attempt to set up norms or rules for when to use is called status planning. A decision to
make one language official, or to ban another from use in school, or to conduct church
services in a third, are cases of status planning.
Once a language has been fixed as appropriate for use in a specific situation ( i.e as the official
language, or in printing books, or in schools) any efforts to fix or modify its structure is called
corpus planning.

One aspect of corpus planning is the process of language standardization,which

consists of attempting to standardize grammar and pronunciation towards some norm that is
discovered or invented by some officially appointed or self- proclaimed group of language
guardians. This process may be called normativism or prescriptivism by linguistics who
study it, or” keeping the language pure” by those who carry it out.

Sometimes called language acquisition planning, this process of language education

policy is also involved when a government decided which foreign languages are to be taught
in school or through other means. Similarly, a national policy to develop literacy in a language
might be considered kind of language acquisition policy.
For many reasons, a country or a social group may wish to encourage other people to learn
their language. Language diffusion policy is sometimes associated with religious missionary
work, as Islam spread Arabic.

Status planning:
Status planning becomes an important activity when country becomes independent, but it has
probably already been a central concern of the nationalistic activities that preceded the actual
independence.
The status decision determines which language or languages are to be used in various public
functions, by government, by legal system, the media, and the educational system
Questions of language status are determined by national, regional, or local law, or are left to
local practice.
Another example is India, in where there are 22 regional languages, but only 2 are official.
Hindi and English. In this case, English is used in official purposes such as parliamentary
proceedings, judiciary, communications between the Central Government and a State
Government. States within India have the liberty and powers to specify their own official
language(s) through legislation.
A language whose status has changed needs to be modified in some way, and often it will
need to be taught to people who do not speak it. This happened in India too, due to the Britain
conquest. People there speak in Hindi, and they had to learn English in order to survive. After
India revolution, the official language was English. The same happen nowadays, migrant
people. When they arrive at a country in where the language is different from their mother
tongue, they have to learn the language that is used there as to survive.
Also religious bodies often have significant language status policies.
For instance: The decision of the Roman catholic church to change the language of the mass
from latin to the local vernacular echoed a decision made four centuries earlier in the
Reformation by the Protestant Church.

CORPUS PLANNING:
corpus planning can be defined as those aspects of language planning which are primarily
linguistic and hence internal to language. Some of these aspects related to language are: 1)
orthographic innovation, spelling reform; 2) pronunciation; 3) changes in language structure;
4) vocabulary expansion; for instance, in south America people say hello but in north America
people say howdy.

A political decision on the status of a language, if it is in fact to be implemented, usually leads

to other activities. Often, a language whose status has changed needs to be modified in some
way. This is corpus planning.

When it has been determined that the status of language is to be moved to a more elaborated
level of standardization, the task of corpus planning begins. One of the most common process
is the need for modernization and elaboration of vocabulary. Such as “computer” and now
“laptop” The problem facing any language that wishes to deal with the modern world is that it
must keep up with the new development. A language can simply take an old word and give it
a new meaning. Another technique is to coin a new term, by combining existing words or
morphemes into more or less transparent forms. For many languages, the simplest technique
would seem to be borrowing from another language where the term is in use because the
concept of object has already been invented.

Prescriptivism and Normativism.

Prescriptivism is an understandable development in a mass education system where
successful learning of prestige speech style is a first step in social upward mobility, it is
unfortunately accompanied by a mistaken belief that speakers of non-standard varieties of a
language are less intelligent, or less inherently capable than standard speakers. All languages
are equally good.
At the same time, the normal association of the standard language with literacy amd with
formal education means that a key goal of many systems is to provide access to the standard
language to the largest possible section of the population.

The spread of English-imperialism or hegemony?

Is it the result of conscious planning by the governments an experts of English speaking
countries, or is it the result of a large array of factors connected with modernization and
globalization? A closer look at the process by which English has in this century developed into
a global language suggests that in fact the demand has continually exceeded the supply.
Language diffusion efforts of English-speaking countries have tended to be attempts to
exploits world-wide desires to learn the language. The demand is not new.
From the point of view of many observers, this growing linguistic hegemony of English is
dangerous and harmful, and it is not unnatural to seek someone to blame. But whatever the
cause, the spread of English is producing a new sociolinguistic reality, by threatening to take
over important functions from other major languages, and by furthering language shift. It is an
important task of sociolinguistics to understand this process

Language acquisition planning or language education policy:

Teaching the stand language to all is one of the first tasks of most educational systems. The
task is regularly complicated by the fact that the spoken language of the home is commonly
not the standard written language of school.
The first task of a formal educational system is usually, therefore, the teaching of the national
standard language, with the emphasis on literacy in it. Depending on social and political
pressures the system aims at students acquiring other varieties too.
Especially in countries which recognize more than one language as part of the national
tradition, there may be a programme to teach the other official language or languages.
For example, in Quebec, all English speakers learn French and all French speakers learn
English and in Israel, Arab children learn Hebrew and Arabic in turn compulsory for Hebrew
speakers.

Language diffusion policy or linguistic imperialism:

Political and military conquest have been major causes of language spread. Similarly, when a
language has been spread by trade, the diffusion has been more less unplanned.
It is important to distinguish between this kind of unplanned language intervention, where
altered circumstances encourage conquered or converted or commercialized populations to
learn the language of their conquerors, missionaries and traders, from a planned language
diffusion policy.
In the first we are dealing with the kinds of language shift we have talked about earlier, in the
second we have a deliberate policy of government or other institution to change language
acquisition and use.
Language diffusion policy may be internal or external. When a country decides that all its
inhabitants, whatever their home language, should learn and use the national language, we
have a case of internal diffusion. When New Zealand started teaching all it Maori pupils in
English in 1970 .
There have been and continue to be, policies of language diffusion beyond national and even
imperial boundaries.
Teaching the national language, as well as teaching about the national culture, is sometimes
seen as an effective way of spreading influence and developing international interest in trade
and tourism