3/7/2021

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

 This presentation covers

1. Language

2. Definition of Sociolinguistics

3. Relation ship between language and

society
4. Socio-linguistic Development of the Child

5. Conformity and Individualism

6. Competence And Performance.

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What is language?

Language
A system of symbols with
standard meanings.
Allows humans to communicate
and is the main medium of
transmission of culture.
A socially shared code to express
thoughts and concepts

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Language
 A means of communicating
information
 Significant in establishing and

maintaining relationships with other

people
 Represents a man’s identity in the

society i.e. his personality, class,

nature, job etc.

Safest Small Talk Topics

 Traveling Weather
 Accommodation Hobbies
 Television Food and
drinks
 Education Shopping
 Topical events (in newspapers: earthquakes,
plane crashes, museum robberies, [sports?,]
but not politics)

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Unsafe Small Talk Topics

 Americans:  British:
 Religion Royal family
 Politics Race relations
 (Salary/income) Salary/income
Heal (cure)

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Other Communication
 Human:
 Direct
Body language , tone of voice, gesture
 Indirect
Writing, music, painting, signs
 Nonhuman:

 Sounds, odors a smell, whether pleasant or

unpleasant, body movements

 ASL – American Sign Language

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Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics
 Study of language in relation to
society (R.A. Hudson, 1980)
 A blend of sociology and

linguistics
 It is also referred to as sociology
of language
Study of society in
relation to language

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Defining sociolinguistics
 Sociolinguistics is the study of the
complex relationship between language
and society

 It is concerned with describing how

people use language in social contexts

 It is based on ‘real-life’ data of

language use

 A more precise definition:

“[Sociolinguists] are interested in
explaining why we speak differently in
different social contexts, and they are
concerned with identifying the social
functions of language and the ways it is
used to convey social meaning.”(Janet
Holmes)

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Linguistics Sociolinguistics: Regional and Social Varieties

A brief account on the history of SL

• Forerunners of SL: the founders of the study of lge, culture and cognition
• Franz Boas
• Leonard Bloomfield ethnographical approach to linguistics
• Edward Sapir
• Term first mentioned in 1952 by Haver Currie (poet and philosopher)
• “Sociolinguistics” became an independent area of research in the early 1960s
• SL chiefly influenced by:
• historical and comparative linguistics
 interest in dialects, because they could help explain/varify theories on
lge change previously based on written material
• anthropology(who studies humans and their customs, beliefs and
relationsips)
• dialectology
Seminar: Examenskolloquium Linguistik 13 Winter Term 05/06

14 What is Sociolinguistics?

Language Society

Attitudes

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RELATIONSIP
BETWEEN
LANGUAGE AND
SOCIETY

Relation between language and

society
 ‘Society’: a fuzzy(unclear)
concept in sociolinguistics.
 It can mean ‘the national
group’ but can also be more
loosely defined as
‘community’, ‘group’ or
‘network’.
 This collectivity may vary in
size and be formed by such
things as age, interest, family,
gender, ethnicity, occupation,
geography, social position,
etc.

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Knowledge of language use

 A major theme in
sociolinguistics is being able to
discover, and describe, what it
entails to use and understand
language appropriately - within
the group
 Appropriacy is centrally
concerned with the choices the
people make: of codes, topics,
turn-taking styles, ‘registers’,
jargon, politeness markers,
swear words, etc. (Holmes, p.
11)

Cultural knowledge
 Cultural knowledge is therefore all-important
 Cultural knowledge entails knowing how
groups (family, friends, colleagues, fellow
citizens, etc.) behave (or are likely to behave),
 what is ‘normal’ (and ‘abnormal’) behaviour
(remember that using language is a form of
behaviour!),
 what is ‘expected’ in a multiplicity of social
settings.

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 Norms, values, attitudes (which are

all cultural products and thus
culturally constructed in different
communities) are reflexively related
to language; that is, they are all
displayed through language, but also
continued, or changed, challenged
and modified through language.

 The human society will be lifeless without

language and so will be the language without
its users.
 This means that language and society are
inseparable from each other.
 This idea was developed by Ferdinand de
Saussure in his work The Course in General
Linguistics published posthumously in 1916
where he stated that ‘language is primarily a
social activity’ and ‘language is socialized at
every level, from the production of phonemes
to the interpretation of complex meaning.

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 Elaine Chaika (1989) states:

“Language and society are so
intertwined that it is impossible to
understand the one without the
other. There is no human society
that does not depend upon, is not
shaped by, and does not itself
shape language.”

 The use of language is not only linguistic behaviour

but also a social activity.
 Without a language understandable to all the
members of a group of people, the community could
by no means exist and not to speak of its
development.
 Therefore, language is very important to the survival
and development of a society.
 On the other hand, language would never earn into
existence without society which is the essential
conditions on which language relies for its existence.
It is clear that neither language nor society could
exist without the existence of the each other.

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The relation between language

and Society
1. While language is principally used to
communicate meaning, it is also used to
establish and maintain social
relationships.

 The most important thing about

conversation between two English men in a
railway compartment is not the words they
are using but the fact that they are talking

2. Users of the same language in a sense

all speak differently.
The kind of language each of them
chooses to use is in part determined by
his social background.
 Language, in its turn, reveals
information about its speaker (about his
personality, class, nature, job, position
in society etc.)

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 Whenever we speak we cannot avoid giving

our listeners clues about our origins and the sort
of person we are.
 Our accent and our speech generally show
what part of the country we come from, and
what sort of background we have.
 All this information can be used by the people
we are speaking with to help them formulate
an opinion about us.

3)To some extent, language, especially the

structure of its lexicon, reflects the
physical environments of a society.
 English, for example, has only one
word for snow ( or two if we include sleet),
Eskimo has several. The reasons for this
a r e o b v i o u s .
 It is essential for Eskimos to be able to
distinguish efficiently between different
t y p e s o f s n o w .

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 English, of course, is quite able to make the

same distinctions: fine snow, dry snow, soft
snow, and so on, but in Eskimos this sort of
distinction is lexicalized---made by means of
individual words.
 (There are approx 50 Eskimo words for
snow)
 In the same way English as one or two words
defining camel like one hump camel or two
hump camel but Arab countries has a
vocabulary of 50 words defining camel

4. Tosome extent, language,

especially the structure of its
lexicon reflects social
environments of a society.
 For example, a society's kinship
system is generally reflected in its
kinship vocabulary. (uncle in
English and Urdu

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 The important kinship relationships in English-

speaking societies are those that are signaled by
single vocabulary items:
son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter,
brother, sister, father, mother, husband, wife,
grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, cousins
 There are other relationships such as

eldest son, maternal aunt, great uncle second

cousin

 In Australian aborginal language

Najmal , the term Mama signifies
single kinship relationship
father, uncle male cousin of parent
 In other words the term is used for all
males of the same generation as
the father

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 E.g English employs the term UNCLE for

father’s brother and mother’s sister’s
husband as well as for mother’s brother
and father's sister husband.
 Whereas Najmal (Australian Aboriginal
language, Mama for the first pair and
another term Karna for the second

 Not only kinship terms reflect the structure

of society,
 In English or other languages, nouns like

persons for which sex is not specified is

used by the pronoun He ,not She
 Phrases like first person

to finish his dinner

can be refer to people of both sexes ,
 but the first person

to finish her dinner

could refer to only to females

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Sociolinguistic
Development of
the Child

Sociolinguistic Development
of the Child
 Although it may be assumed that each speaker
is unique in his experience of language
 and develops a unique grammar,

 a number of generalizations can be made

about the stages through which children may
be expected to pass in their sociolinguistic
development.
 These generalizations must be treated as
tentative hypotheses as they are not based on
any large body of data.

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Sociolinguistic Development of the Child

 The first generalization concerns the

linguistic model which a child follows
 For many children , the pattern is as
follows:
1. Parents
2. Peers
3. Adults

Four Life Phases

1. Babyhood
2. Childhood(peers)

3. Adolescence(peers)

4. Adulthood

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Sociolinguistic
Development of the Child
 There is a considerable disagreement
among the sociolinguists as to the time a
child takes in passing from one stage to
another.
 During this time, a child also gets busy

in constructing the multi-dimensional

model of his world, fitting into it all
sorts of different types of speech.

1. BABYHOOD
 The models are parents and other carers, who use baby
talk words like gee gee, catie, baby good night.
2. CHILDHOOD
 The models are other children of the same age or
somewhat older
 These children speak differently from their
parents
 They imitate teenagers as well
 This leads to what is called ‘Age Grading’, a
pattern of use in which linguistic items are used by
people of a particular age, who then stop using it
when they grow older.
 Language used by primary children-rhymes,
skipping, songs, so on.

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3) Adolescence
 (Children are influenced by their peers who
help them to develop their language, teenage
slang )
 This is the stage at which children prepare to
be the next generation of adults.
 May be teenage gangs and social types are
a preparation for the complexities of adult
life, but whatever their reasons they have a
profound effect on the speech of adolescents.

4) Adulthood
 Here models are other adults as a source
of inspiration .
 Work, parenthood and other social activities
bring us into contact with other adults who
offer competing models which we may either
avoid or copy.
 There is still scope for change, for learning to
use more or less standard speech for work
purposes under the pressure of the ‘linguistic
market-place’

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Individualism and
Conformity

 Some individuals reject the model of their parents

since this is because they are conforming to a
different model (that of their peers)rather than to no
model at all.
 There may also be individual differences in
willingness to create new vocabulary or to use
language metaphorically, in which case the
‘creative’ individual would be going beyond the
accepted norms and perhaps breaking them under
special circumstances(for example, in poetry)
 However, such creativity seems to takes place against
the background of a normal , conformist language
system.

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What is Conformity?
 Conformity--a change in behavior or belief as a
result of real or “imagined” group pressure (swear
words , shit, bloody) .
 We learn these same way as we learn the rest of the
language

 It is not simply acting like others, but also being

effected by how they act.

 You “consciously” act differently from the way

you would act alone.

Why do we conform?

 We conform to avoid rejection & to

stay in others’ good graces.

 Normative influence- “When in

Rome, do as the Romans would do.”

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Competence And
Performance.

 Chomsky has also distinguished between

what he has called competence and
performance.
 He claims that it is the linguist’s task to

characterize what speakers know about

their language, i.e., their competence,
 not what they do with their language,

i.e., their performance.

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 Knowing a language also means knowing how

to use that language since speakers know not
only how to form sentences but also how to
use them appropriately.
 There is therefore another kind of

competence, sometimes called communicative

competence, and the social aspects of that
competence will be our concern here.

THANK YOU

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