English Linguistics 5: Language in Society (123221012Y)
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A Summary on 'What is Sociolinguistics'?
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English Linguistics 5: Language in Society (123221012Y)
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
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Linguistics in the World - What Is Sociolinguistics?
A summary on 'What is Sociolinguistics?' for the course English Linguistics 5 Language in Society at the University of Amsterdam. I received a 7,8 for the computer-based exam. Make sure to check out my other Ling 5 summary since the exam also includes the articles.
1. introduction; 2. language and society; 3. place; 4. social status; 5. time; 6. ethnicity; 7. gend
May 26, 2023
32
2022/2023
Summary
Subjects
speech community
community of practice
crossing
social networks
difference and dominance
prescriptivism
sociolinguistic interview
labov
style axiom
semiotics
discourse analysis
face wants
matched guis
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Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
English Language and Culture
English Linguistics 5: Language in Society (123221012Y)
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English Linguistics 5: Language in Society
Summary on What is Sociolinguistics?
1. Introduction
Speech community: being able to distinguish someone’s background from their
pronunciation of words.
Social categories: class and status, ethnicity, and gender and sexuality.
Social relationships: people adapt their language to suit the situation and audience.
The History of Sociolinguistics
Free variation: choice between forms is completely arbitrary and unpredictable as opposed
to structured variation, in which the choice between forms is linked to other factors. Labov,
who pioneered sociolinguistic as a subdiscipline, used recordings of natural (or natural-like)
speech, correlated with sociologically-derived speaker characteristics, to examine in detail the
relationship between how people spoke and how they fit into their sociolinguistic community.
Variationist researchers look at the correlations between language variation and social and
linguistic characteristics.
The dividing lines between sociolinguistics and sociology of language are blurry. Rather
than looking at how social forces can shape language, the sociology of language considers
how society and language interact at a strictly social level. A change in a social situation (e.g.
economic improvements in a region) will lead to changes in the sociolinguistic situation (e.g.
the status of the dialect of that region).
,2. Language and Society
Sociolinguists think about language use as language within any group, shared experiences or
understandings of the world lead us to use language in a particular way, and to define or
reinforce our place in the group by drawing on those possible ways of using language. When
sociolinguists think about ‘language’, they see it as language that is actually used. It sets us
apart from normal people and from some other branches of linguistics.
Sociolinguists versus Linguists
Mainstream linguists usually elicit translations (‘’How would you say this in your
language?’’) and grammaticality judgements (‘’Can you say this in your language?) from
native speakers of a language. Then they develop a set of rules or constraints that make up the
grammar of that language. Mentalist approach: linguists are interested in describing how
language is represented in the mind. The producer of language in this framework is the ideal
speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community. It also involves a
distinction between competence (what speakers know about language) and performance
(what they actually come out with). In this theoretical framework, it wouldn’t make sense to
just record people talking and use that to explain linguistic structure. You’d need to filter out
all the ‘noise’ to get at people’s underlying competence or some linguistic constructions that
would let you decide between theoretical models are so infrequent in daily speech that you’d
need to record forever.
The sociolinguistic approach is empirist: we only trust evidence we find out there in the real
world. It’s our job to describe and explain what we hear people saying (ideally, by recording
them). Many sociolinguists undertake detailed analysis of relatively short stretches of
interaction to investigate how participants are constructing their places in the relationship.
Sociolinguists versus Normal People
Non-linguists use the term language for what linguists see as a standard variety: the
language taught in school, used in formal writing, and often heard from newscasters and other
media figures who trying to project authority or ability. Non-standard varieties: described by
non-linguists as ‘dialects’. Sociolinguistics is descriptive (how people actually talk), rather
than prescriptive (how people ‘should’ talk).
Language versus Dialect
Linguists use the criterion of mutual intelligibility to determine whether people are speaking
the ‘same language’ or not. A second problem with using mutual intelligibility to decide
whether something is a language or dialect is that this is simply not how things work. A way
of speaking is seen as a separate language when various subgroups of speakers have the
political power to convince people that they’re distinct, e.g. people see Swedish, Norwegian
and Danish as separate languages even though its speakers can understand each other. The
same happens where speakers of similar varieties see themselves as distinct for social
,reasons, e.g. Serbian and Croatian. Political and social forces can also encourage more
similarities than differences, e.g. Cantonese and Mandarin. Sometimes, languages are
invisible, e.g. a local variety in India is not considered a language, instead they refer to it as
Hindi.
Dialects: (regional) subsets of the same language. Although dialects include distinct accent
features, dialect and accent boundaries don’t have to match. Many people speak Standard
English (grammar or lexicon), but with an accent reflecting their social or regional
background. Interlocutor: person you’re speaking with. Social distance: not being able to
understand someone of a different age, sex, ethnicity, and nationality. Slang: refers to words,
either words that are new to the language, or old words or phrases with new meanings. Most
slang is short-lived. Unlike slang, a dialect is usually distinct in multiple linguistic domains:
lexicon (word choice), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), and
phonology/phonetics (pronunciation). Accent: description of pronunciation. Variety: value-
neutral term for any subset of a language. They’ll talk about the standard variety, as well as
regional, class, or ethnic differences.
Sociolinguists differ from linguists because they think of language as existing at the level of
the group. Our language gets its meaning through interaction with others. There’s no such
thing as the individual, the way we talk comes from our membership in a group of groups.
What is Society?
Do two people sound the same because they’re, for example, both Canadian, male, native
English speakers, professors?
A researcher studying specific interactions, maybe from ethnographic (qualitative research
on a group of people and their behaviours and social interactions within their own, native
environment) viewpoint, would say that all those variables can be considered in a single
framework – they’re all things that could affect the form of the conversation, and we can
investigate the relative influence of each component. A scholar of language variation would
probably assume that a lot of the language that the two people used is fairly consistent,
reflecting their cumulative past linguistic experiences.
1. Both speakers are from the same speech community, e.g. speakers are Canadian
English and their manner of speech reflects this. A speech community is a group of
people who share social conventions, or sociolinguistic norms, about language use.
These norms (combination of expressed attitudes and variable linguistic behaviour)
are shared by all members of a speech community.
2. You could also say that the different groups of people that each of us has interacted
with over the years (social networks) have reinforced particular sociolinguistic
norms.
3. Locally seen, you could say that, for example, because all people in our lab get
together regularly to talk about sociolinguistic methods, our language ends up taking
on particular social meanings related to that group (community of practice). These
, are three different models to talk about in which social surroundings influence our
linguistic choices.
What if you don’t have a consensus – if different subgroups in a community (e.g. different
classes) have different ideas about what counts as a prestigious form? What’s the actual
mechanism by which language features (especially innovative ones) spread through a
community?
1. Social networks address these issues. We build networks (personal communities) to
deal with life, and as our everyday problems change, so do our personal networks.
Social network theory is used to investigate why people who might share some social
characteristic (e.g. class or region) nevertheless behave differently linguistically. New
language features are much slower to take root in dense (few people interact with
each other) and multiplex (multiple ways of interacting) ways. Change is brought into
the community by people with looser ties, those who work, go to school, etc. It is used
to investigate how language changes within a single language (and speech
community), but also how and why people shift from one language to another, or
when a local minority language is in decline. Compared to the speech community
model, which privileges shared knowledge and norms, the social network model
allows a larger role for interaction and speaker agency: the ability of speakers to
control what they do and to make conscious choices.
2. The third model, community of practice (CofP) looks at a smaller analytical domain,
and is defined as a group with mutual engagement in a jointly negotiated enterprise,
involving (or leading to) a shared repertoire. The CofP framework is especially
appropriate for research on adolescents and gender, in situations where participants
are actively and collaboratively negotiating their identity and group membership, e.g.
goths. It assumes, more than a speech community model, that group members do a lot
of conscious work to build and maintain linguistic identities.
These models are useful to explain local language behaviours within small groups. Large-
scale developments result from large linguistic or social forces that are not related to speaker
agency, and that get social meaning only after they hit a certain level of public awareness. As
the social meaning of some variants disperses through a community, and as
sociolinguistically aware young people age and disperse, the variants become associated with
broader social categories like region or class.
Innovations between communities may spread through brokers: people who participate in
multiple communities of practice and bring ideas from one into the other. However, you need
to have enough clout in your multiple communities or networks that allows diffusion of an
innovation.
These three models of linguistically relevant social groupings are heuristics: guidelines for
approaching a research problem. The linguistic factor you want to study affects your choice
of how to conceptualise the ‘society’ end of things.
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