Language and Society

Sociolinguistics lane 422
Language and society
• Language has a social function: it helps us to
establish and maintain relationships.
• Convey information about the speaker.
•
•
•
•
Language vs. dialect  regional vs. social
Dialect vs. accent
no clear-cut boundaries: dialect continuum
Language continuum, eg. German and dutch
spoken along the Netherlands-Germany
frontier
Criteria to Language
• Linguistic criteria  Mutual intellegibility &
language, e.g Dutch and German
• Political and cultural criteria
1. autonomy and heteronomy (German and Dutch:
non-standard dialects in Germany, Austria and Switzerland)
• Discreteness and continuity
• Dialect: grammar, vocabulary and
pronuciation
• Language is closely tied p with the social
structure and value systems of society;
therefore different dialects and accents are
evaluated in different ways.
• e.g. non pre-vocalic /r/: car, cart England, not
prestigious
New York, prestigious
• Value judgments are arbitrary, and based on social connotations
• Subjective attitudes towards language are important for the study
of language change, explain why dialects change and how, e.g. /r/ in
New York (Labov)
• The use of non pre-vocalic /r/ by upper middle class in New York
• Labov’s study of Marth’s Vineyard, house , mouth
/∂u/ ,/au/
subjective attitudes towards the native linguistic form: favorable or
unvavorable
Linguistic change is not always in the direction of a prestigious form.
• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• The effect of society on language: how
physical environment is reflected in language
• the social environment, kinship terms.
• The values of society affect language, e.g
taboo words, the word but not the concept.
• Language is variable, is not used in the same
manner by all people in all situations.
Key sociolinguistic concepts
• Variety: a neutral term to refer to any form of language
(languages & dialects)
• Speech community: controversial concept:
a community of people who share a linguistic variety as their
own and share social norms.
•
shared linguistic norms , shared communicative
competence and shared social norms. (can be a city,
neighborhood, region, nation)
• Communicative (Sociolinguistic) competence:
speaker’s underlying knowledge of rules of grammar and
rules for their use in socially appropriate circumstances.
(learned through socialization), e.g. please, thank you.
Greeting formally, informally.
• Social knowledge is essential for membership in speech
• boundaries between speech communities are
social rather than linguistic. speech
community  language community: e.g Papua
New Guinea mutual intelligibility
• Gaelic\English communities in Scotland (rely
on their communicative: the shared norms of
interactions in the community.
• Can we claim the existence of a homogenous
speech community with the attested
heterogeneity in cities and countries?
Variation and Language
• The variable : an abstract representation of
the source of variation, realised by two or
more variants, e.g ‘think’ // : [], [f].
• the variants are the actual realization of a
variable
• Constraints on variation: linguistic & social
factors determine the use of variants.
• Free variation
• Variation is predicable but not with 100 % certainty
Fischer’s 1958 study of the use of (ng) in New
England.
(ng)
singing vs. singin’
(ng)
[]
[n]
Variation Studies
Fischer’s 1958 study of the use of (ng) in New
England.
• 12 boys, 12 girls aged 3-10.
• Interview
Concusions:
• Boys used more [in] than girls.
• The use of [in] increases with the formality of
situations. The use of [in] increased when relaxed.
• [in] is used more with verbs that describe everyday
activities ,e.g ‘hit’ ; [ing] is used with formal verbs,
e.g ‘criticize’.
2. Labov (1966) study of (r) in New
York:
To investigate the incidence of final and post-vocalic •
/r/
While most American accents are rhotic, New York (and Boston)
have distinctive non-rhotic accent
Post-Depression, such urban accents lost prestige, and –
rhotic midwest accent emerged as standard
Labov showed that rhotic use of /r/ reflected social •
class and aspiration, and was more widespread in
younger speakers
Labov (1966) study of (r) in New
York:
Method: •
He needed to quickly elicit possible /r/ pronunciations in both •
spontaneous and careful speech
Walked around 3 NYC department stores, asking the location of –
departments he knew were on the fourth floor
By pretending not to hear, he got each informant to pronounce the –
two words twice, once spontaneously, and once carefully
3 stores catering for distinct social groups:
•
Saks (upper), Macy’s (middle), S. Klein (lower) –
Informants were shop workers at different grades, giving a
further possible stratification
•
Results
Use of [r]
100
%
80
never
60
sometimes
40
always
20
0
Saks
Macy's
S Klein
store
•Use of [r] corresponded to higher class of store
Results
%
first and second utterances
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
fourth I
fourth 2
floor I
floor 2
Saks
Macy's
store
• use of [r] increases in careful speech
S Klein
Pronunciation and style
[r] pronunciation by class and style
100
90
80
0
1
70
60
%
Adoption of prestige
form increases with
formality of style, in
each case with a
higher usage by
higher classes
EXCEPT in one case
2,3
50
40
4,5
6,8
30
9
20
10
0
casual
careful reading word list minimal
pairs
style
[r] pronunciation by class and style
100
90
80
70
60
%
middle class
outperform upper
middle class on word
lists and minimal pairs
this cross-over due to
hypercorrection
(according to Labov)
not sure whether
results are statistically
significant
6,8
50
9
40
30
20
10
0
casual
careful reading word list minimal
pairs
style
Multilingulaism
• Multilingualism: the use of more than two languages, e.g.
Nigeria, India, and Philippines have hundreds of languages.
• Canada, USA.
• How multilingual nations develop? migration, imperialism,
federation
• Diglossia: A situation in which two forms of the same
language co-exist in a complementary relationship in a society.
High variety, low variety. Both forms are grammatically
distinct, don’t overlap.
Classical Arabic
• Each variety has its domains, e.g Arabic
vernaculars
(dialects)
• The term is extended to refer to any two languages, even
related ones, that has this kind of social and functional
distribution.
• Triglossia ,Tunisia
• Polyglossia: several H and L languages co-exist in a complex
multilingual society, e.g. Singapore L,H, M varieties,e.g.
Mandarin, Tamil and Malay are official languages.
• Which languages will be officially or nationally
recognized in a multilingual society?
• Vitality: demographic, social and institutional
strength of a language and its speakers.
• Language planning, language policies, in
multilingual communities.
• Deliberate, Official government policies in
relation to language
• Singapore (Hokkeien)
Code switching\mixing
• The alternation between two varieties across
sentences or clause boundaries.
• It implies some degree of competence in the two
varieties even if bilingual fluency is not yet stable.
• What determines code switching?
• Domain-based or situational code switching.
Domain (social and physical setting), addressee
(interlocutor),
• Constraints : switching takes place between
languages with similar structure?
Spanish/Englishbetween determiners and nouns,
Subjects and verbs, but not nouns and adjectives.
•Code mixing: alternations within a clause or
phrase, e.g. Spanglish, Franglais, ‘arabizi?
•Motivations \functions for a switch between
codes?
•Attitudes towards code switching\ mixing.
Stigmitaized or favorable (ethnic identity)
Sociolinguistic research
• An hypothesis is a specific statement of prediction. It describes in concrete
(rather than theoretical) terms what you expect will happen in your study.
• Your prediction is that variable A and variable B will be related (you don't
care whether it's a positive or negative relationship). Then the only other
possible outcome would be that variable A and variable B are not related.
Usually, we call the hypothesis that you support (your prediction) the
alternative hypothesis, and we call the hypothesis that describes the
remaining possible outcomes the null hypothesis.
• hypothesis formation: one might formulate a hypothesis before beginning
the research project, based on available literature, or one’s observations in
the course of collecting, processing, and/or analyzing data might lead to
an interesting, testable hypothesis.
• Not all studies have hypotheses. Sometimes a study is designed to be
exploratory
Sociolinguistic research
• Empirical research
• Sampling: target population: define the sampling
universe, determine the sample size
• Stratified sample by age, sex, region, etc.
• random, judgment sampling (snowball sampling)
• Methods of data collection
• Questionnaire
• Face-to-face interview, telephone interviews
population, tape recorded, agreement to participate.
Sociolinguistic research
• The analysis of variation: The quantitative
method
• Define your linguistic variables and social
variables
• Transcription, coding, counting tokens,
percentages
• Excel or word for tables and graphs
Sociolinguistic research
• Interpretation of data, Look for pattern,
correlation between linguistic variable and
social variable.
Sociolinguistic research
•
Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism
•
Linguistic Constraints on Codeswitching and Codemixing
of Bilingual Moroccan Arabic-French Speakers in Canada
www.cascadilla.com/isb4.html
•
Code Switching Between English and Arabic : An Empirical study on Saudi Female
Students
Sociolinguistics project
• DESCRIPTIVE STUDY. If you choose to do a descriptive study,
it will have the following components:
• (1) A description of the speech community, giving enough
information to contextualize the sociolinguistic variables.
• (2) A description of the sociolinguistic variables embodied in
this speech community, and an indication of how they have
been identified (e.g. personal observation, previous studies,
general community knowledge, jokes and stereotypes, etc.).
• (3) A review of relevant literature concerning this particular
speech community or sociolinguistic configuration. At least 5
sources must be cited.
Sociolinguistics project
• An analysis of the chosen sociolinguistic situation within a
broader context. How does this fit in with the general study
of sociolinguistics? Do the data from your study offer
anything new to sociolinguistics? Would a thorough and
complete analysis of the chosen community require resources
or models not currently contemplated in sociolinguistics?
• (5) Suggestions for future research. This can be brief and can
be appended to the analysis in point (4). Every linguistic study
should suggest new directions, unanswered questions, and
future research. Mention the most promising possibilities.
QUANTITATIVE STUDY
• 1) A description of the speech community, giving enough
information to contextualize the sociolinguistic variables.
• (2) A description of the sociolinguistic variables embodied in
this speech community, and an account of how the data have
been obtained (data collection, number of speakers, coding of
tokens).
• (3) A review of relevant literature concerning this particular
speech community or sociolinguistic configuration. At least 5
sources must be cited.
• (4) A working hypothesis about the sociolinguistic importance
of the chosen variables, that will be tested against the data.
• (5). A brief interpretation of the quantitative results with
respect to the working hypothesis. Do the quantitative results
support or disconfirm the hypothesis?
• (6) Suggestions for future research. Be sure to add any
suggestions for improvement of the study (data collection,
quantitative analysis, interpretation of results).
Style, context and register
• Style, in the most general sense, refers to the
distinctive way of speaking or writing. People adopt
different styles in different contexts.
• The influence of the addressee on the speaker’s
language: solidarity (social closeness) between
participants is an important influence on speech style.
• Casual, relaxed, vernacular forms with friends
• Standard forms with strangers
• Many factors affect social distance\solidarity between
people
Factors affecting speaker’s style
• Age of addressee: child, elderly vs. adult: simpler vocabulary
and less complex sentences, ‘we’ vs. ‘you’ example 4, p.225
• Social background of the addressee, example 6 p. 228
• Peter Trudgill interviewing people in Norwich, use of [t] in
better, bet. Glottal stop used up to 98% with lower class
interviewees (100%). With higher class (25%), Trudgill’s use
dropped to 30%. He was accommodating to his interviewees.
• Relative status and solidarity between speaker and addressee
• Colloquial style: vernacular
• social dialect survey in New York Labov elicited the
vernacular: the style in which minimum attention is given to
the monitoring of speech
• Observer’s paradox can be overcome by manipulating the
topic of interview
Register
• Occupational style: a jargon which a group of
specialists develop to talk about their
specialty, eg. Journalese, legalese, sport
commentators.
• Example 23
Speech accommodation theory
• The notion of accommodation developed from the work of
Howard Giles and his associates.
• Speakers tend to change the way they are speaking depending
on who they are talking to.
• Speakers may Converge (modify their speech to sound
similar)or diverge (maintain linguistic distinctiveness to
distinguish themselves from interlocutor e.g. some minority
ethnic groups).
• Motivation: in the case of convergence to express solidarity or
reduce social distance, polite speech strategy, sarcastic effect.
• Upward convergence, downward convergence
• Short-term accommodation vs. long term accommodation
which may lead to permanent linguistic changes.
• Dialect contact zones.
• Reactions to speech convergence and
divergence depend on the reasons people
attribute for the convergence or divergence.
• Deliberate divergence will be heard as
antagonistic or uncooperative.
Language contact and dialect levelling
• Reduction of differences distinguishing regional
dialects or accents.
• The result of mobility, in the 20th century social
changes affected the local dialect diversity which
characterised regions for hundred of years.
• Immigration, urbanization, new towns.
• The outcome of close daily contact: levelling out of
differences
Outcomes of Language contact
• All variation and change can be viewed as the
outcome of some form of contact between
different individuals or members of different
groups: bilingualism, bidialectlism, code
switching, dialect levelling (e.g. the use of
London variants (ay) PRICE, MOUTH (aw)
by young children in Milton Keynes; stops [t]
and glottal [] in Reading (close to London)
and Hull (far from London, no immigration or
contact with London or south east speakers.
The Fens).
Contact-induced change: pidgins and creoles
• pidgins and creoles are languages that emerge out of
the contact between speakers of more than two
different languages.
• Social conditions associated with the contact
• Limited social contact: speakers may only be in
contact in a reduced set of social interactions, such
as trading or work. Limited access to native speaker’s
model of each other’s languages.
• Lack of motivation to acquire native-speaker like
skills in the other language.
• How they are learnt.
• Pidgin: a contact language that is not nobody’s
first language, no native speakers. Arise in the
conditions of trade and labor related contexts.
• Restricted social functions
• A creole a contact language which has native
speakers, may be added the community
repertoire resulting in bilingualism.
• A creole serves most of the or all of the functions that
any natural human language must serve; everyday
interaction, telling stories, jokes, games, etc.
Functional definition of pidgins and creoles
• Any variety used for business or limited to work place may be
considered a pidgin.
• Russenorsk used between Russian and Norwegian sailors in
The Bering Sea during fishing season of the northern summer.
• Francais tiraillou ‘torn French’ used in the military parts of the
French colonies in Africa.
• Once a variety is used a as vehicle for all types of
communication, it has become a creole.
• Once it acquires its native speakers, it becomes a creole
(nativization).
• Creolisation: the process by which a pidgin becomes the first
language of group of speakers. Exansion of a pidgin into a
wider range of social functions.
• Vernacularisation: the process by which a contact variety
becomes used with the full range of social functions of the
Characteristics of Pidgins
• Ps have structural norms & must be learned
• Pidgins distinct from Input languages by:
– Structural reduction, typically in morphology
– Lack many semantic and grammatical distinctions
– Few stylistic resources (=conventional variation]
– Lexical reduction, derivation from dominant groups
– 00
• 1. Simplification of superstrate (dominant language)
grammatical structure
2. Retention of substrate (less dominant) grammatical
structures
Tok Pisin (talk pidgin)
• Orait yu yet
killim bikinini bilong me
• Alright 2s focus kill
child
poss 1st
• ‘all right you’re the one who killed my child’
Gulf Pidgin Arabic (Næss, Unn Gyda (2008)
• Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) used as a
communication tool between local citizens
and the large Asian immigrant population in
the area for at least 30 years.
• Example Asian immigrants in the Omani
border town of Buraimia developed separate
language variety rather than as a collection of
individual attempts of mastering Gulf Arabic.
• three grammatical features of this variety,
possession, negation and the verbal system. to
document systematic reductions and greater
regularity in the grammar of GPA compared to that
of Gulf Arabic, as well as the development of a light
verb system unparalleled in Arabic, but similar to
several of the main substrate languages of GPA such
as Urdu.
• GPA grammar and phonology also display several of
the characteristic features of other well-documented
Arabic-based pidgins and creoles such as Juba Arabic,
Nubi and Turku in Arabic-speaking Afr
Language shift
• Language (dialect) shift: when a community who
share a native language abandon it, and collectively
shift to speaking another one instead.
• Language shift is always preceded by multilingualism
• What effects does language shift have on the
structures of the languages involved?
• Language shift can happen raidly or slowly.
• Caribbean Creole languages developed within a
century, even less, from African and European
languages. Most African languages were lost in 1-2
generations under the catastrophic conditions of
slavery
• Language shift is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on
for all of recorded history. Whenever two cultures/populations
with different languages come in intense contact, shift is a
possibility.
• Typically those who shift are the weaker group, but
• sometimes it is the more powerful one who shifts.
• Vikings who speak Old Norse invaded in the British isles in
787 kept their language for centuries, then shifted to the
evolving English language. Vikings went to Northern France
became bilingual then shifted to French.
• Historical: Language shift to Arabic by Berber population in
North Africa (Morocco) following the Muslim conquest
• Language shift to Arabic by Armenians in Jordan.
Language death (attrition)
• Language death is the complete disappearance of a
language. (Latin is not a dead language)
• An old phenomenon as old as the recorded history of the
languages of the world.
• Often death comes by in a situation of dialect contact and
shifting bilingualism.
• Most commonly a gradual process spanning several
generations.
• Sudden death: when the last speaker of a language spoken by a
very small and isolated group dies, the death of Ishi the last
wild Indian in North America.
• Radical language death: Sometimes a result of
genocide, the sudden elimination of an entire
population.
• Example of language death by genocide: Australian
Aboriginal languages
• Over 350 languages were spoken when Capt. Cook
landed in 1770. 200 years later, only 90 survived as
viable languages.
• Only 10% of Aboriginal people still speak native
languages.
• Bottom-to-top death: sometimes death affects first the
lower registers of the language leaving for last the
most formal register (Latinate pattern).
• Speakers typical of language death situations:
1.Semi-speakers: imperfect speakers with partial
command of the productive skills, but perfect
command of receptive skills.
2. remembers: speakers who may have been at an
early stage fluent speakers, but have lost most of their
earlier linguistic ability. Typical of advanced stage of
language death, found in conditions of isolation.
The effects of language death on language structure
• Loss of registers and language forms
associated with them: the most widespread
case is the loss of higher registers
• Lexical Loss
• Loss in phonologt
• Loss in morphology
• Loss in syntax
Language and gender
• ‘Gender’ has replaced ‘sex’ in sociolinguistics.
• Sex: biologically or physiologically based
distinction between males and females.
• Gender: a social and cultural notion. It
indicates the social identity that emerges or is
constructed through social action, and
adherence to certain cultural norms and
proscriptions.
Gender exclusive and gender preferential
features
• Gender exclusive features:
• Some linguistic features are used exclusively
by (or to) speakers of a particular sex. e.g.
kinship terms
“My Auntie Kath”, grandson, niece, cousin,
• Cultural differences. You in English vs. Arabic
• Such (gender exclusive) linguistic features that
directly index sex, or exclusively used by one
sex rather than another are rare.
Gender preferential features
• Some social dialect studies showed that some
linguistic forms are more used by men or the
opposite.
• Generalizations made about preferential
gender differences in relation to the use of
standard variants.
Principles of Gender and Variation
(Labov 1990,2001)
• Principle I. : In stable sociolinguistic variation,
women use the standard more than men
• Stable variation vs. change in progress
• Examples of sociolinguistic variation
• (ing) variable: [in], [I]
• (dh) variable : fricative or stop [d] ‘this’
• (th) variable: fricative or stop [t] ‘thin’
• Negative concord: ‘didn’t do nothing 
anything’
Men’s and women’s use of the alveolar variant [In] in three speech styles and
two socio-economic classes in Norwich, England. (source Trudgill 1972)
120
100
80
working-class women
working-class men
60
middle-class women
40
middle-class men
20
0
casual speech
formal speech
reading passage
Explanations for gender differences
• Trudgill: in Western society, men are
evaluated more on what they do, and women
on how they appear.
• Eckert: women rely on symbolic resources, eg.
Speech, dress, make-up, to establish their
position in their social groups.
• Women are aware of what is proscribed
(prohibited) and therefore avoid it more than
men.
• Principle I a. In change in progress above the level of
awareness, women use the standard more than men.
• Women use innovative and positively evaluated
variants more then men.
• Example: the use of (r) in final pre-consonantal
position in New York city. Used more by higher class,
within each class women used it more than men. Some
exceptions.
• New Yorkers talked about [r] presence and absence and
preferred or valued r-full speech than r-less pronunciation.
• Example: the use of glottal stop [] in place of
/t/ is one of the phonological changes in
progress in British English. It is gaining
ground in the cities.
• Attitudes towards the glottal stop:
Teen agers show overt awareness of this
feature: “my parents don’t like me missing
letters out, like if I say w’er”
Teen agers are aware of the spread of the glottal
stop and that it is not a non-standard form.
• Principle I and Ia are not always applicable. Figure
10.4. many factors interact in any variation.
Principle II:
• Women use more of the incoming variant form
in changes in progress above the level of
conscious awareness.
• Women lead in the use of incoming nonstandard variants if people are not aware of the
variation involved and therefore do not talk
about them.
• Example: changes in the vowel system in English,e.g
central vowel [] in ‘bus’, is pronounced as ‘boss’.
Eckert (2000): this change is restricted to the speech
of a group known as burnouts, and within the group
the use was advanced among the girls than it was
among the boys.
• Figure 10.6
• Figure 10.8
• In the Arabic speaking world, men use more
standard Arabic than women.
Language and social class
• Sociolect (or social dialect): a socially distinct
variety.
• Speaker A
speaker B
‘I done it yesterday’
‘I did it yesterday’
‘He ain’t got it‘
‘He hasn’t got it’
• Grammatical, phonetic, phonological
differences give us clues about their social
background.
• Social class accents
• Why do we have these differences?
• Physical barriers and distance
• Regional dialect boundaries coincide with
geographical barriers, mountains, swamps, rivers, e.g.
‘house’ [hu:s] north of the river Humber vs. [haus]
(diphthong) south of the river.
• Social barriers and distance
• The diffusion of a linguistic feature through a society
may be halted by social factors including social class.
• A linguistic innovation that begins in upper class may
reach the lower class last, if at all.
Social stratification
• Any hierarchical (ranking) ordering of groups
within a society in terms of power, wealth and
status.
• In the industrialized societies of the West,
social stratification takes the form of
stratification into social classes and gives rise
linguistically to social-class dialects.
• Social class is a controversial concept, no
general agreement as to the exact nature or
definition or existence of social classes.
• Social class stratification is not universal, e.g. India
caste system (hereditary). Rigid separation into
distinct groups, therefore, social distance is more
differentiating than the geographical distance in India.
• Unlike the situation in India, in the class societies of
the English speaking world, the linguistic situation is
more complex.
• Social classes are not clearly defined,
• aggregates of people with similar social and
economic characteristics.
• Social mobility is possible, the movement up or
down the social hierarchy.
• In the beginning linguistic complexity was ignored by
focusing on idiolect, or speakers in rural areas
(dialectologists, dialect surveys).
• It is only after the Second World War, linguistic
realized that confining dialect studies to rural areas,
they missed important information about the majority
of people who live in towns.
• Urban dialectologist faced the problem of describing
fully and accurately the speech of large towns and
cities with heterogeneous populations.
• In 1966 the American linguist William Labov
published The Social Stratification of English in New
York city, a large scale survey, tape-recorded
• Representative sample therefore accurate description
of all the varieties in the area.
• Labov also developed techniques to elicit normal
speech from people in spite of the recorder.
• Developed methods for quantitative measurements of
linguistic data.
• Labov showed that variation is not free in the speech
of New Yorkers, e.g ‘guard’, ‘beard’, and ‘bad’.
• Variation is not random, but determined by extralinguistic factors in a predictable way.
Social and regional dialect variation
Social variation
highest class: standard dialect
lowest class: most localized non standard
regional variation
Standard English:
• He’ a man who likes his dog
• He’ a man who likes his dog
• Regional non-standard variation is greater than social
variation.
He’ a man who likes his dog
He’ a man who likes his dog
He’ a man at likes his dog
He’ a man as likes his dog
He’ a man what likes his dog
He’ a man he likes his dog
He’ a man likes his dog
Social and regional accent variation
social variation
higest class :RP
lowest class: most localized variant
Table 3
‘Home’ 27 variants, three accent forms, in 7 cities
London
RP
houm
Inermediate
hum
um
Most locaized
aum
• Sociolinguistic studies showed how RP, and
the intermediate and the most localized
accents are related to social class.
• To measure linguistic and social phenomena.
• Assign individuals a numerical index score on
the basis of income, education, other factors,
then group them with others who have similar
indexes.
• In east Anglia and in AA Detroit the 3rd p.suffix –s is
not present in the speech of some people:
• She like him very much
• He don’t know a lot, do he?
• It go ever so fast
• Since –s is standard, and since standard English is
associated with higher classe, we may suspect that
there is a correlation between the usage of –s and
social class
• Tape record, listen, transcribe, count , Table 4.
• Norwich (%)
• MMC
0
LMC
2
UWC
70
MWC 87
LWC
97
Detroit (%)
UMC
1
LMC
10
UWC
57
LWC
71
• Correlational sociolinguistics
• Like regional dialects, social-class dialects are
not distinct entities, they merge into each other
• Popular stereotypes of social dialects are
misleading. The Detroit African American
dialect has no third person marker. Detroit
African Americans of all classes use both
forms, it is only proportions that differ.
Language and ethnicity
• Ethnic-group differentiation in a mixed
community is a particular type of social
differentiation and has linguistic
differentiation associated with it.
• Experiment carried out in the USA, tape
recordings of two different sets of speakers.
• Two types:
• Language as a defining characteristic of the
ethnic group membership, common world
wide,e.g. multilingual Africa, Canada. People
will identify themselves as belonging to a
particular ethnic group on the basis of their
language.
• Separate identity of ethnic groups is signalled
by distinct varieties of the same
language,e.g.Jewish, Italians in New York.
• Ethnic groups are fluid entities whose
boundaries change through history.
• Example: Yugoslavia, in the centre of the
country the language was Sebo-croat.
Different ethnic groups who speak the same
dialects. With the breakup of Yugoslavia, the
government in Zagreb calls its national
language Croation, Latin alphabet, the
government in Belgrade calls its language
Serbian, Cyrillic alphabet. Moslims of Bosnia
calls their language Bosnian
• They stress their separate nationhoods and
• Ethnic groups in New York. Jewish, Italian.
• Ethnic groups tend to form separate
communities within the city.
• Differences are due to the influence of
substratum varieties, languages spoken before
they become speakers of New York English.
Yiddish or Italia accent accent of the first
generation would lead to hypercorrection of
foreign features by the second generation. The
use of high vowels in ‘bad’, ‘bag’ by Italians
because their fathers used more open vowel
than the English sound.
AAVE
Language and social networks
• Linguistic variation can be analyzed in terms of
social networks: the grouping of people based
on the frequency and quality of interaction.
• James and Lesley Milroy’s 1985 study of
Belfast.
• The relationships individuals contract with
others--- through social and geographical
space linking many individuals.
• Social networks are defined by who your
friends are, who live near, who you work with.
• Network analyses ask how often the members
of these groups are the same and how often
they are completely different.
• The diffusion of Linguistic change happens fast
and efficiently along horizontal channles (
within one age and a social cohort). On the
other hand vertical channels (across
generation, social classes) are comparatively
slow and inefficient with regard to the
transmission of a linguistic innovation.
• How can you identify a social network?
• Observe who interacts with who in a community
• Note how they are interacting with each other.
• Patterns of interaction constitute individuals’s social
networks.
• Let the people define their own social networks. Ask
‘who are your best friends?’
• ‘Name all the people you had conversation with
yesterday”
• A researcher can build a network from all the
answers.
Dense and Loose social networks
• A dense social network is one where all
members know each other. If you ask five
people, each one should mention the other
four.
• Loose social network: not all members know
each other
• Dense networks slow down or inhibit change.
Members police each other’s behaviour
(consciously or unconsciously) because of the
intensity of their contact
• Because in dense networks contacts with
outside the network are comparatively
superficial, there is less chance of being
exposed to innovation from outside.
• Loose networks make people more open to
change. The ties that individual members have
to other networks provide an opportunity for
them to be exposed to and pick innovations
from outside their network.
Multiplex and uniplex ties within
networks
• Net works can be distinguished in terms of the
quality of the ties between individuals.
• Uniplex tie: if the network tie between two
individuals is based on one relationship, e.g.
the two people work together, or are family
members, or have children in the same club.
• Multiplex tie: if two people know each other
in several different roles, e.g best friends, and
thy take the same courses at niversity, work
together on weekends. (A three-way tie)
• A loose network based on uniplex ties is going
to be more open to the introduction and
transmission of innovations than dense
networks where members share multiplex
ties.
Language & power/ language & politeness
• The social relationship between the speaker and the
hearer is indicated by his/her linguistic choices.
• (T/V) distinction: the choice between Tu (familiar form)
and vous (the polite form) forms in languages, e.g.
Latin, French, Italian German, Greek, (English once had
thou/you distinction.
• According to Brown and Gilman (1960) it started as a
sing. And plural difference. By medieval times, the upper
classes began to use V with each other to show mutual
respect…
• The asymmetrical T/V usage came to
symbolize power relationship.
• Symmetrical V usage became polite usage,
spread downward but not to the lowest
classes.
• Symmetrical T usage to show intimiacy or
solidarity (strong common interest).
• This mutual T came to replace the mutual V of
politeness because solidarity is more
important in personal relationships.
Address terms
• How do you name or address another? By title
(T), first name (FN) by last name (LN),
nickname, by combination of these or by
nothing at all.
• What factors govern the choice you make?
• Is the address process asymmetrical? Mr.
Smith leads to John, or symmetrical?
• Family relationships
• Use of kinship terms for use as address terms
Politeness markers
• Politeness is prescribed, rules, norms.
• The concept of politeness is associated with Goffman
(1967) study on face.
• Brown and Levinson (1987) define face as “the public self
image that every member wants to claim for himself”
• They distinguished between Positive face vs. negative
face.
• Positive face the desire to get the approval of others.
• Negative face the desire to be unimpeded by others in
one’s actions. Freedom of actions and freedom form
impositions.

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