MC LINGUISTICS 2-

LANGUAGE,
CULTURE, AND
SOCIETY
2ND SEMESTER | A.Y. 2021-2022

Arnel M. Bonganay, LPT, MEd

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR II
 ABOUT THE COURSE
Course Code: MC LINGUISTICS 2
Course Title: Language, Culture, and Society

Course Credit: 3 units, 3 hrs/wk (18 weeks, 54 hrs total)

Course Description:

This course allows the pre-service English teachers to explore the inextricable link between
and among language, culture, and society and its implications to the development of English as
a global language and the ways by which it is learned and taught. With this, they must
demonstrate content knowledge and application of the lingua franca to cultural, societal, and
even pedagogical development through a study of research-based principles in language and
language teaching. Also, they must be able to gain insights of responsive learning environments
in terms of language and community/society needs.

Course Learning Outcomes:

At the end of the course, the pre-service teachers should be able to:

a. demonstrate content knowledge and application of the relationship of language, culture

and society in the perspective of English language teaching;
b. apply research-based knowledge and principles of English language teaching and learning
through case presentations and journal reviews; and
c. demonstrate an understanding of knowledge of language learning environments that
respond to community contexts.

Course Requirements:

1. Review of Studies/Literature
2. Case Study or Portfolio

COURSE OUTLINE
UNIT 1: Review on Linguistic Components of Language

A. Review on Definitions of Language, Macro Skills, Communicative Competence, Views on

Language, and Components of Grammar
B. First Language (L1) vs. Second Language (L2), Native Language vs. Mother Tongue vs.
Foreign Language
C. Pidgins and Creoles
D. Macro and Micro Linguistic Studies
E. Prescriptive vs. Descriptive
F. Diachronic vs. Synchronic
G. Oral vs. Written Language
H. Plurality of English

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 1. Linguistic Universals and Universal Grammar
2. English vs. Englishes
3. Standard English
4. Common Language vs. Multilingualism
5. World Englishes
6. Kachru’s Concentric Circles (Inner, Outer, Expanding Circles)
7. Philippine English

UNIT 2: Language and Humans

A. Features of Human Language by Hockett

B. Halliday’s Language Functions
C. Non-Human Communication
D. Transmission in Animal Language
E. Animal Consciousness
F. Experiments on Languages and Animals (Viki, Kanzi, Gua, Koko, etc.)

UNIT 3: Language and Culture

A. Accounts on the Origin of Language

B. Biblical, Mythological, Historical and Scientific Accounts
C. Otto Jesperson’s Language Origin Hypotheses
D. Semiotics or Sign Language
E. Icon, Index, Symptom, Signal, and Symbol
F. Sign Languages (Finger Spelling, Filipino Sign Language, other means of SL, etc.)
G. Theories in Language and Culture
1. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
2. Ethnopoetics
3. Oral Gesture Theory by Paget

UNIT 4: Language and History

A. Historical Timeline of Noteworthy Linguists (from Aristotle to Lowth, Jones, de Saussure,

Chomsky)
B. Historical Development of Language (Evolutionary or Darwinian)
C. Historical Development of English (from Anglo-Saxon to Global English)
D. The English Language Family Tree
E. Proto Indo-European
F. Proto-Germanic
G. Old English, Middle English, and Modern English
H. Changes in the English Language
1. Grimm’s Law
2. Great Vowel Shift

UNIT 5: Language and Society

A. Language vs. Dialect

B. The Speech Community

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 C. Linguistic Borrowing and Language Contact
D. Language Variations
E. Language Registers
F. Language Shift and Death
G. Language and Gender
H. Language and Social Class or Ethnicity
I. Language and Power (Politeness)
J. Sample Studies in Sociolinguistics
K. Philippine Sociolinguistics
L. Varieties of Philippine English with Studies (Yaya English by Bautista, Colehiala English by
Perez)
M. Sociolinguistic Varieties of Philippine English by Llamzon (Acrolect, Mesolect, Basilect)
N. ‘Slanguages’ in the Philippines (Jologs or Salitang Kalye, Beki Language/ Swardspeak,
Jejemon)

UNIT 6: Introduction to Ethnography and Ethnolinguistic Research

A. Linguistic Borrowing
B. Code Switching
C. Discourses of Language in Cultural and Social Relevance (i.e. Speeches, Meetings, Policy
Making, Journalism, etc.)

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 MODULE 1

REVIEW ON
LINGUISTIC
COMPONENTS OF
LANGUAGE
WEEK 1-3 | 9 HRS

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 WEEK 1

OBJECTIVES
At the end of this module, the students should be able to:

a. Review concepts in linguistics in reference to culture and society;

ABSTRACTION

Linguistics as a Science

The simplest definition of Linguistics is that it’s the science of language.

This is a simple definition but it contains some very important words. First, when
we say that linguistics is a science, that doesn’t mean you need a lab coat and safety
goggles to do linguistics. Instead, what it means is that the way we ask questions to learn
about language uses a scientific approach.

The scientific way of thinking about language involves making systematic,

empirical observations. There’s another important word: empirical means that we
observe data to find the evidence for our theories.

All scientists make empirical observations: botanists observe how plants grow and
reproduce. Chemists observe how substances interact with other. Linguists observe how
people use their language.

A crucial thing to keep in mind is that the observations we make about language
use are NOT value judgments. Lots of people in the world — like your high school English
teacher, various newspaper columnists, maybe your grandparents, and maybe even some
of your friends — make judgments about how people use language. But linguists don’t.

A short-hand way of saying this is that linguists have a descriptive approach to

language, not a prescriptive approach.

We describe what people do with their language, but we don’t prescribe how they
should or shouldn’t do it.

This descriptive approach is consistent with a scientific way of thinking. Think about
an entomologist who studies beetles. Imagine that scientist observes that a species of

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beetle eats leaves. She’s not going to judge that the beetles are eating wrong, and tell
them that they’d be more successful in life if only they eat the same thing as ants. No —
she observes what the beetle eats and tries to figure out why: she develops a theory of
why the beetle eats this plant and not that one.

In the same way, linguists observe what people say and how they say it, and come
up with theories of why people say certain things or make certain sounds but not others.

In our simple definition of linguistics, there’s another important word we need to

focus on: linguistics is the science of human language.

There are plenty of species that communicate with each other in an impressive
variety of ways, but in linguistics, our job is to focus on the unique system that humans
use.

It turns out that humans have some important differences to all other species that
make our language unique.

First, what we call the articulatory system: our lungs, larynx & vocal folds, and the
shape of our tongue, teeth, lips, nose, all enable us to produce speech. No other species
can do this in the way we can, not even our closest genetic relatives the chimpanzees,
bonobos, and orangutans.

Second, our auditory system is special: our ears are sensitive to exactly the
frequencies that are most common in human speech. There are other species that have
similar patterns of auditory sensitivity, but human newborns pay special attention to
human speech, even more so than synthetic speech that is matched for acoustic
characteristics.

And most important of all, our neural system is special: no other species has a brain
as complex and densely connected as ours with so many connections dedicated to
producing and understanding language.

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 Humans’ language ability is different from all other species’ communication
systems, and linguistics is the science that studies this unique ability.

https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/animal-communication-is-not-the-
same-as-human-language/

Fundamental Truths about Human Langauge

 All languages have a grammar.

 All languages & grammars are equally valid, in linguistic terms.
 All languages have some universal properties in common.
 Every language changes over time.
 Most of our knowledge of the mental grammar of our language is unconscious.

Because everybody speaks a language, just about everybody has opinions about
language. But there are lots of things that are commonly believed about language that
just aren’t true.

You might have heard someone say that a given language has no grammar. I’ve
heard people try to argue that Chinese has no grammar, that English has no grammar,
that the languages spoken by Indigenous people who live in what is currently Canada
have no grammar, even that Swiss German has no grammar.

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 When people say this, they might mean a few different things. Sometimes they
just mean that there’s not much variation in the forms of words, which is true of Chinese,
but the grammar of Chinese has lots of complexity in its sound system.

But sometimes people who argue that a language has no grammar are actually
trying to claim that that language is inferior in some way.

 The truth is that all languages have grammar. All languages have a sound system,
a system for forming words, a way of organizing words into sentences, a systematic
way of assigning meanings. Even languages that don’t have writing systems or
dictionaries or published books of rules still have speakers who understand each
other; that means they have a shared system, a shared mental grammar.

When we’re investigating mental grammar, it doesn’t matter whether a language has
a prestigious literature or is spoken by powerful people. Using linguists’ techniques for
making scientific observations about language, we can study the phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax and semantics of any language.

Another opinion that you might have heard about language is that some languages
are better than others. Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I don’t speak real Italian,
just a dialect,” implying that the dialect is not as good as so-called real Italian. Or maybe
you’ve heard someone say that Québec French is just sloppy; it’s not as good as the French
they speak in France. Or maybe you’ve heard someone say that nobody in Newfoundland
can speak proper English, or nobody in Texas speaks proper English, or maybe even
nobody in North America speaks proper English and the only good English is the Queen’s
English that they speak in England.

 The truth is that all languages are equally valid. Just as we said that all languages
have grammar, it’s also the case that there’s no way to say that one grammar is
better or worse than another grammar. Remember that linguistics takes a scientific
approach to language, and scientists don’t rate or rank the things they study.
Ichthyologists don’t rank fish to say which species is more correct at being a fish,
and astronomers don’t argue over which galaxy is more posh. In the same way,
linguists don’t assign a value to any language or variety or dialect.

It is the case, though, that plenty of people do attribute value to particular dialects or
varieties, and sociolinguistic research tells us that there can be negative or positive social
consequences for people who speak certain varieties. When people say that British English
is better than American English, for example, they’re making a social judgment, based on

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politics, history, economics, or snobbery. But there is no linguistic basis for making that
value judgment.

One of the common misconceptions about language arose when scholars first started
doing linguistics. At first, they focused on the languages that they knew, which were
mostly the languages that were spoken in Europe. The grammars of those languages had
a lot in common because they all evolved from a common ancestor, which we now call
Proto-Indo-European. When linguists started learning about the languages spoken in
other parts of the world, they thought at first that these languages were so unfamiliar, so
unusual, so weird, that they speculated that these languages had nothing at all in common
with the languages of Europe.

Linguists have now studied enough languages to know that in spite of the many
differences between languages, there are some universal properties that are common to
all human languages. The field of linguistic typology studies the properties that languages
have in common even across languages that they aren’t related to. Some of these
universal properties are at the level of phonology, for example, all languages have
consonants and vowels. Some of these universals are at the level of morphology and
syntax. All languages make a distinction between nouns and verbs. In nearly all
languages, the subject of a sentence comes before the verb and before the object of the
sentence. We’ll discover more of these universals as we proceed through the chapters.

A very common belief that people have about language is something you might have
heard from your grandparents or your teachers. Have you heard them say, “Kids these
days are ruining English! They should learn to speak properly!” Or if you grew up speaking
Mandarin, maybe you heard the same thing, “Those teenagers are ruining Mandarin! They
should learn to speak properly!” For as long as there has been language, there have been
people complaining that young people are ruining it, and trying to force them to speak
in a more old-fashioned way. Some countries like France and Germany even have official
institutes that make prescriptive rules about what words and sentence structures are
allowed in the language and which ones aren’t allowed.

 The truth is that every language changes over time. Languages are spoken by
humans, and as humans grow and change, and as our society changes, our
language changes along with it. Some language change is as simple as in the
vocabulary of a language: we need to introduce new words to talk about new
concepts and new inventions. For example, the verb google didn’t exist when I was
an undergraduate student, but now googling is something I do every day.
Language also changes in they we pronounce things and in the way we use words

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 and form sentences. In a later chapter, we’ll talk about some of the things that are
changing in Canadian English.

Another common belief about language is the idea that you can’t learn a language
unless someone teaches you the rules, either in a language class or with a textbook or a
software package. This might be partially true for learning a language as an adult: it might
be hard to do it on your own without a teacher. But think about yourself as a kid.
Whatever language you grew up speaking, whether it’s English or French or Mandarin or
Arabic or Tamil or Serbian, you didn’t have to wait until kindergarten to start speaking.
You learned the language from infancy by interacting with the people around you who
spoke that language. Some of those people around you might have taught you particular
words for things, but they probably weren’t teaching you, “make the [f] sound by putting
your top teeth on your bottom lip” or “make sure you put the subject of the sentence
before the verb”. And by the time you started school you were perfectly fluent in your
language. In some parts of the world, people never go to school and never have any
formal instruction, but they still speak their languages fluently.

 That’s because almost everything we know about our language — our mental
grammar — is unconscious knowledge that’s acquired implicitly as children. Much
of your knowledge of your mental grammar is not accessible to your conscious
awareness. This is kind of a strange idea: how can you know something if you’re
not conscious of knowing it? Many things that we know are indeed conscious
knowledge. For example, if I asked you, you could explain to me how to get to your
house, or what the capital of Canada is, or what the difference is between a cow
and a horse. But our mind also has lots of knowledge that is not fully conscious.
You probably can’t explain very clearly how to control your muscles to climb stairs,
or how to recognize the face of someone you know, or how to form complex
sentences in your native language, and yet you can do all of these things easily and
fluently, and unconsciously. A lot of our job when we study Linguistics is to make
explicit the things that you already know implicitly. This is exactly what makes
linguistics challenging at first, but it’s also what makes it fun!

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Communicative Competence

The term communicative competence

refers to both the tacit knowledge of a language
and the ability to use it effectively. It's also
called communication competence, and it's the
key to social acceptance.

The concept of communicative

competence (a term coined by linguist Dell
Hymes in 1972) grew out of resistance to the
concept of linguistic competence introduced by
Noam Chomsky. Most scholars now consider
linguistic competence to be a part of
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/C
communicative competence.
ommunicative-
Competence_fig1_316916918

Canale and Swain's Model of Communicative Competence

In "Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching

and Testing" (Applied Linguistics, 1980), Michael Canale and Merrill Swain identified these
four components of communicative competence:

(i) Grammatical competence includes knowledge of phonology, orthography,

vocabulary, word formation and sentence formation.

(ii) Sociolinguistic competence includes knowledge of sociocultural rules of use. It

is concerned with the learners' ability to handle for example settings, topics and
communicative functions in different sociolinguistic contexts. In addition, it deals with the
use of appropriate grammatical forms for different communicative functions in different
sociolinguistic contexts.

(iii) Discourse competence is related to the learners' mastery of understanding and

producing texts in the modes of listening, speaking, reading and writing. It deals with
cohesion and coherence in different types of texts.

(iv) Strategic competence refers to compensatory strategies in case of grammatical

or sociolinguistic or discourse difficulties, such as the use of reference sources,
grammatical and lexical paraphrase, requests for repetition, clarification, slower speech,
or problems in addressing strangers when unsure of their social status or in finding the

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right cohesion devices. It is also concerned with such performance factors as coping with
the nuisance of background noise or using gap fillers.

Components of Grammar

Grammar - rules of a language governing the sounds, words, sentences, and other
elements, as well as their combination and interpretation. The word grammar also denotes
the study of these abstract features or a book presenting these rules. In a restricted sense,
the term refers only to the study of sentence and word structure (syntax and morphology),
excluding vocabulary and pronunciation.

The systematic description

of the features of a language is
also a grammar. These features
are the phonology (sound),
morphology (system of word
formation), syntax (patterns of
word arrangement), and
semantics (meaning). Depending
on the grammarian’s approach, a
grammar can be prescriptive (i.e.,
provide rules for correct usage),
descriptive (i.e., describe how a
https://www.englishcollege.com/what-5-elements-
grammar
language is actually used), or
generative (i.e., provide
instructions for the production of
an infinite number of sentences in a language). The traditional focus of inquiry has been
on morphology and syntax, and for some contemporary linguists (and many traditional
grammarians) this is the only proper domain of the subject.

Diachronic Studies of Language vs. Synchronic Studies

"Diachronic linguistics is the historical study of language, whereas synchronic

linguistics is the geographic study of language. Diachronic linguistics refers to the study
of how a language evolves over a period of time. Tracing the development of English from
the Old English period to the twentieth century is a diachronic study. A synchronic study
of language is a comparison of languages or dialects—various spoken differences of the

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same language—used within some defined spatial region and during the same period of
time. Determining the regions of the United States in which people currently say 'pop'
rather than 'soda' and 'idea' rather than 'idear' are examples of the types of inquiries
pertinent to a synchronic study." (Colleen Elaine Donnelly, Linguistics for Writers. State
University of New York Press, 1994)

__________________________

REFERENCES
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2020). Grammar. Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/grammar

Nordquist, Richard. (2020). Communicative competence definition, examples, and

glossary. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-communicative-
competence-1689768

Nordquist, Richard. (2020, August 26). Definition and Examples of Diachronic Linguistics.
Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/diachronic-linguistics-term-1690385

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NAME:_________________________________COURSE/BLOCK:__________________DATE:___________

ACTIVITY
Give at 5 statements on how you personally describe human language. (Do not copy. It
should be your own idea.)

1. ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
________________________________________
2. ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
________________________________________
3. ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
________________________________________
4. ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
________________________________________
5. ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
________________________________________

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