OUE COURSE IS CLOUSLY CONNECTED WITH Sociolinguistics?

What is Sociolinguistics?

· Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society.

1.2 Sociolinguistics studies:

• the social importance of language to groups of people, from small sociocultural groups to entire nations and commonwealths

• language as part of the character of a nation, a culture, a sub-culture

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• the development of national standard languages and their relation to regional and local dialects

• attitudes toward variants and choice of which to use where

• how individual ways of speaking reveal membership in social groups: working class versus middle class, urban versus rural, old versus young, female versus male

• how certain varieties and forms enjoy prestige, while others are stigmatized

• ongoing change in the forms and varieties of language, interrelationships between varieties

• language structures in relation to interaction

• how speakers construct identities through discourse in interaction with one another

• how speakers and listeners use language to define their relationship and establish the character and direction of their talk

• how talk conveys attitudes about the context, the participants and their relationship in terms of membership, power and solidarity

How the science developed?

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West until much later.

The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of a 1939 paper.Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK

2 THE CENTRAL ELEMENT IN A SOCIOLINGUIST STUDY IS THE LINGUISTIC VARIABLE -

The American sociolinguist, William Labov devised the notion of the linguistic variable to help capture this idea of difference between dialects.

A linguistic variable is a set of related dialect forms all of which mean the same thing and which correlate with some social grouping in the speech community. Variety, in a language, can be defined as a set of linguistic items, called VARIABLES, with a similar distribution. A VARIABLE is a linguistic item that has identifiable variants. That is, when certain ways of saying things or certain VARIABLES become a set way of expressing something, phonetically, grammatically, or with expressions, etc.

· The distinct differences between how the same thing is said are VARIANTS.

· The actual difference is a VARIABLE.

No let’s distinguish some terms

In sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard variety itself.

" Variety" avoids the terms language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and dialect, which is associated with non-standard varieties thought of as less prestigious or " correct" than the standard.

Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard varieties. " Lect" avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether or not two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.

Types of varieties (lects )

dialect (regional variety)

sociolect (social variety)

genderlect (gender-based variety)

idiolect (individual speaker variety)

Dialects (regional varieties

REGIONAL DIALECTS

A Regional dialect is a linguistic variation based upon membership in a long-standing regionally isolated group. The most common way sociolinguists look at regional dialects is to create dialect maps of various dialects of a single language within the boundaries of that language.

Sometimes maps are drawn to show actual boundaries around such features so as to distinguish an area in which a certain feature is found from areas in which it is not found, these boundaries are called isoglosses.

ISOGLOSSES

An isogloss—is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature.

SOCIAL DIALECT

Dialect differences of course are not only regional. They can also be within a society. Whereas regional dialects are geographically based, social dialects originate among social groups and are related to a variety of factors, but in particular: social class, religion and ethnicity

A social dialect is a linguistic variation based upon membership in a long-standing socially isolated group. That is people may be more similar in language to people from the same social group in a different area than to people from a different social group in the same area.

Sociolects involve both passive acquisition of particular communicative practices through association with a local community, as well as active learning and choice among speech or writing forms to demonstrate identification with particular groups.

Examples of social dialects might include:

· Black Vernacular English: uses a number of different phrases, word order changes and sound differences, some “rap” has these characteristics changes. We will talk more about BEV later it is a complex social dialect.

An Argot ( /ˈ ɑ rɡ oʊ /; French, Spanish, and Catalan for " slang" ) is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations.

The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job, sport, etc.

Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event.

In earlier times, the term jargon would refer to trade languages used by people who spoke different native tongues to communicate, such as the Chinook Jargon.

In other words, the term covers the language used by people who work in a particular area or who have a common interest.

IDIOLECT

In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of vocabulary or idiom selection (the individual's lexicon), grammar, or pronunciations that are unique to the individual. Every individual's language production is in some sense unique. Linguists disagree about exactly what is shared, in terms of the underlying knowledge of the language, among speakers of the same language or dialect.

ACCENT

In linguistics, an accent is a pronunciation characteristic of a particular group of people relative to another group.

Accent should not be confused with dialect (q.v.), which is a variety of language differing in vocabulary and grammar as well as pronunciation.

When a standard language and pronunciation are defined by a group, an accent may be any pronunciation that deviates from that standard. However, accent is a relative concept, and it is meaningful only with respect to a specified pronunciation reference. For example, people from New York City may speak with an accent in the perception of people from Los Angeles, but people from Los Angeles may also speak with an accent in the perception of New Yorkers. Americans hear British people speaking with an accent and vice versa. Thus the concept of a person having " no accent" is meaningless. The language or dialect may be the same they just sound differently.

PROBLEMS WITH ACCENT

In some societies, a “standard” accent is defined as that carries particular prestige in that society; it may or may not be an accent that is widely spoken within the society, and sometimes its prestige comes solely from its association with a specific real or theoretical group within the society.

Prestige

Certain accents are perceived to carry more prestige in a society than other accents. This is often due to their association with the elite part of society.

For example in the United Kingdom, Received Pronunciation of the English language is associated with the traditional upper class.

GENDERLECTS (variety based on gender) differences, especially in terms of pragmatics, between male and female speakers( more hedging, politeness on the part of females more aggression, non-cooperative behavior on the part of males

males also tend to " keep the floor" and switch topics more abruptly than females, who appear to be more sensitive to turn signaling)

REGISTER

The study of language variation is further complicated by the fact that speakers can adopt different registers of speaking.

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