An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

by Ronald Wardaugh (2006)

Part One The Introduction

The main objective of this presentation is enable the participants to elaborate the answers to the questions as
follows:
 What is a society?
 What is a language?
 What is a dead language?
 What is sociolinguistics?
 What do sociolinguists study?
 What are varieties?

Knowledge of Language
 A society is a group of people who are drawn together for a certain purpose or purposes.
 A language is what the members of a particular society speak (p. 1); a code or a system of communication
employed when two or more people communicate with each other in speech (p. 2)
A language is essentially a set of linguistic items, such entities as sounds, words, grammatical structure,
and so on (Hudson, 1966 in Wardaugh p. 10)
Sometimes a society may be plurilingual (multilingual) which means many speakers may use more than
one language, however we define language.
Code-switching is a phenomenon when two (or multiple) speakers who are bilingual (having access to
two codes) for one reason or another shift back and forth between the two languages as they converse
Dead languages (e.g. Latin or Sanskrit)
Language universals concerns the learnability of all languages, the characteristics they share, and the
rules and principles that speakers apparently follow in constructing and interpreting sentences.
Competence and performance
Communicative competence


Variation
 Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers
may vary pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or grammar.
 The paradox: many linguists would like to view any language as a homogenous entity and each speaker
of that language as controlling only a single style, so that they can make the strongest possible
theoretical generalizations, in actual fact that language will exhibit considerable variation, and single-
style speakers will not be found (p. 5)
 The debate: theoretical linguists VS sociolinguists
 However, there is considerable variation in the speech of any one individual, but there are also definite
bounds to that variation: no individual is free to do just exactly what he or she pleases so far as language
is concerned. The variation you are permitted has limits.
Scientific Investigation
 The study of language is an empirical investigation (Chomsky: 1965 in Wardhaugh p. 3)
 The attempts to the general principles of language and the uses of language:
Saussure (1959) Langue vs parole
Bloomfield (1933) stress the importance of contrastive distribution (pin and bin are different words
in English, so /p/ and /b/ must be contrastive units in the structure of English.
Pike (1967) emic and unit
Sapir (1921) & Chomsky (1965) stress distinction between ‘surface’ characteristics of utterances and the ‘deep’
realities of linguistic form
Comrie, Cook and Newson language unversals (i.e. the essential properties and various typologies of
languages)
Pinker (1994) the factors that make languages learnable by humans but not by non-humans
Labov and McMahon (1994) conditions that govern such matters as linguistic change

Language and Society

 Linguistics and Sociolinguistics:
In pure linguistics, the object of the study is the language alone, independent of the speakers and other
social factors. It concerns about learning the grammar and how the language works.
Sociolinguistics is the study of the complex relationship between language and society. It explores why
individuals speak differently in different social contexts. It identifies the social functions of language and
the ways they are used to convey social meaning. It mainly studies how language varieties differ between
groups separated by certain social variables, e.g. ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education,
age, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or
socioeconomic classes. (Marxist).

 What is social factor?  what determine the choice of language (style, grammar, metaphors, etc.) to
speak in a certain social circumstance. What are social factors?
- The participants
- The setting
- The topic
- The function
 Possible relationships between language and society:
 Social structure may influence or determine linguistic structure and/or behavior (social structure:
age-grading phenomenon, regions, religion, occupation, physical location, social class, kinship,
race, ethnic, gender, education, leisure activity, etc.)
 Linguistic structure and/or behavior influence or determine social structure
 Bi-directional: social structure and speech behavior are in a state of constant interaction.
Language and society influence each other.
 There is no relationship at all between linguistic structure and social structure.
 language is an indicator of identity, more important that cultural artifacts (dress, food choices, and table
manners). Identity is very important. Although it may change, because it is quite malleable, it may also
stay fixed if change is not allowed.
 The role of ‘power’ in language
Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language
 Sociolinguistics investigates the relationships between language and society with the goal of better
understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in relation to society (Hudson, 1980)
 Sociology of language seeks to discover how social structure can be better understood through the study
of language, e.g. how certain linguistic features serve to characterize particular social arrangement.
Sociology of language is the study of society in relation to language (Hudson)
 Both require systematic study of language and society (Wardaugh, p. 13)

Methodological Concerns
 ‘Sociolinguistics should encompass everything from considering ‘who speaks (or writes) what language
(or what language variety) to whom and when and to what end’ (Fishman, 1972, in p. 17).
 It must be oriented toward both data and theory. Data must be collected for a purpose.
 Correlational studies  attempts to relate two or more variables
 Implicational studies  if X, then Y (if someone says tess for tests, does he/she also say bes’ for best?)
 Microlinguistics vs Macrolinguistics. Determine whether each description below is micro or
macro linguistic study!
 Focuses on very specific linguistic items or individual differences
and uses and seek possibly wide-ranging linguistic and/or social
implications.
 Examines large amounts of language data to draw broad
conclusions about group relationships
 Deals with phonetics, grammar, etc. on the individual level
 Deals with comparative studies among languages, language
families, large influences on language development
 Covers sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and other related
disciplines
 An example: studying the choices in language planning
 An example: studying the distribution of singing and singin’
 Other studies  seek to arrive at a general understanding about certain universal characteristics of
human communication, e.g. conversational structure
 Bell’s Eight Principles of Sociolinguistic Investigations:
1. The cumulative principle
2. The uninformative principle
3. The principle of convergence
4. The principle of subordinate shift
5. The principle of style-shifting
6. The principle of attention
7. The vernacular principle
8. The principle of formality

Overview
 ‘Sociolinguistics brings together linguists and sociologists to investigate matters of joint concern’ (p. 20)
 there are many interconnections between sociolinguistics and other disciplines, and between concerns
‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’