Tugas: Intro to Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics has become an increasingly important and popular field of study, as certain cultures around the world expand their communication base and intergroup and interpersonal relations take on escalating significance.

The basic notion underlying socio-linguistics is quite simple: Language use symbolically represents fundamental dimensions of social behavior and human interaction. The notion is simple, but the ways in which language reflects behavior can often be complex and subtle. Furthermore, the relationship between language and society affects a wide range of encounters--from broadly based international relations to narrowly defined interpersonal relationships.

For example, socio-linguists might investigate language attitudes among large populations on a national level, such as those exhibited in the US with respect to the English-only amendment--the legislative proposal to make English the 'official' language of the US. Similarly, we might study the status of French and English in Canada or the status of national and vernacular languages in the developing nations of the world as symbols of fundamental social relations among cultures and nationalities. In considering language as a social institution, socio-linguists often use sociological techniques involving data from questionnaires and summary statistical data, along with information from direct observation.

A slightly different concern with language and society focuses more closely on the effect of particular kinds of social situations on language structure. For example, language contact studies focus on the origin and the linguistic composition of pidgin and creole languages. These special language varieties arise when speakers from mutually unintelligible language groups need a common language for communication. Throughout the world, there are many socio-historical situations that have resulted in these specialized language situations--in the Caribbean, Africa, South America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. In examining language contact situations, it is also possible to examine not only the details of a particular language but also the social and linguistic details that show how bilingual speakers use each language and switch between them.

A. LANGUAGE

Language is one of the most powerful emblems of social behavior. In the normal transfer of information through language, we use language to send vital social messages about who we are, where we come from, and who we associate with. It is often shocking to realize how extensively we may judge a person's background, character, and intentions based simply upon the person's language, dialect, or, in some instances, even the choice of a single word. Given the social role of language, it stands to reason that one strand of language study should concentrate on the role of language in society. 

• Knowledge of Language

When two or more people communicate with each other in speech, we can call the system of communication that they employ a code. In most cases that code will be something we may also want to call a language. In practice, linguists do not find it at all easy to write grammars because the knowledge that people have of the languages they speak is extremely hard to describe.

 It is certainly something different from, and is much more considerable Introduction than, the kinds of knowledge we see described in most of the grammars we find on library shelves, no matter how good those grammars may be. Anyone who knows a language knows much more about that language than is contained in any grammar book that attempts to describe the language.

Today, most linguists agree that the knowledge speakers have of the language or languages they speak is knowledge of something quite abstract. It is a knowledge of rules and principles and of the ways of saying and doing things with sounds, words, and sentences, rather than just knowledge of specific sounds, words, and sentences. It is knowing what is in the language and what is not; it is knowing the possibilities the language offers and what is impossible. This knowledge explains how it is we can understand sentences we have not heard before and reject others as being ungrammatical, in the sense of not being possible in the language. Communication among people who speak the same language is possible because they share such knowledge, although how it is shared – or even how it is acquired – is not well understood. Certainly, psychological and social factors are important, and genetic ones too.

Language is a communal possession, although admittedly an abstract one. Individuals have access to it and constantly show that they do so by using it properly. As we will see, a wide range of skills and activities is subsumed under this concept of ‘proper use.’

Another approach to language and society focuses on the situations and uses of language as an activity in its own right. The study of language in its social context tells us quite a bit about how we organize our social relationships within a particular community. Addressing a person as 'Mrs.', 'Ms.', or by a first name is not really about simple vocabulary choice but about the relationship and social position of the speaker and addressee. Similarly, the use of sentence alternatives such as Pass the salt, Would you mind passing the salt, or I think this food could use a little salt is not a matter of simple sentence structure; the choice involves cultural values and norms of politeness, deference, and status

In approaching language as a social activity, it is possible to focus on discovering the specific patterns or social rules for conducting conversation and discourse. We may, for example, describe the rules for opening and closing a conversation, how to take conversational turns, or how to tell a story or joke. 

It is also possible to examine how people manage their language in relation to their cultural backgrounds and their goals of interaction. Sociolinguists might investigate questions such as how mixed-gender conversations differ from single-gender conversations, how differential power relations manifest themselves in language forms, how caregivers let children know the ways in which language should be used, or how language change occurs and spreads to communities. To answer these questions related to language as social activity, sociolinguists often use ethnographic methods. That is, they attempt to gain an understanding of the values and viewpoints of a community in order to explain the behaviors and attitudes of its members.

Two trends have characterized the development of sociolinguistics over the past several decades. First, the rise of particular specializations within this field has coincided with the emergence of more broadly based social and political issues. Thus, the focus on themes such as language and nationalism, language and ethnicity, and language and gender has corresponded with the rise of related issues in society at large. Second, specialists who examine the role of language and society have become more and more interested in applying the results of their studies to the broadly based social, educational, and political problems that probably gave rise to their emergence as sociolinguistic themes to begin with. Sociolinguistics thus offers a unique opportunity to bring together theory, description, and application in the study of language.

B. Varieties

In sociolinguistics, language variety is a general term for any distinctive form of alanguage or linguistic expression.
Linguists commonly use language variety(or simply variety) as a cover term for any of the overlapping subcategories of a language, including dialect, idiolect,register, and social dialect. 

In The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), Tom McArthur identifies two broad types of language variety: "(1)user-related varieties, associated with particular people and often places, . . . [and] (2) use-related varieties, associated with function, such as legal English (the language of courts, contracts, etc.) and literary English (the typical usage of literary texts, conversations, etc.)."

Examples and Observations

 "[A] 'variety' can be regarded as a 'dialect' for some purposes and a 'language' for others, and casual ambivalence about such matters is common worldwide. . . .

 "[L]anguage scholars have in recent decades used the term variety to label a subdivision within a language. Varieties may relate to a place or community (as with Indian English and two of its subvarieties, Anglo-Indian English and Gujarati English), to uses (as with legal English and advertising English), and to combinations of the two (as with British legal English andAmerican advertising English). . . .

 "In recent years, variety has proved to be a fairly safe term, allowing language scholars to avoid being too specific about kinds of speech and usage on occasions when being specific is not necessary and/or when there is a risk of being charged with discrimination against a group by calling its usage 'a dialect.' The negative baggage that attaches to this term in English is greater than any occasional positive connotations it may have. . . .

 "Most importantly, however, the term dialect fails when discussing English as a world language. Although it has done sterling service in detailing, for example, regional variations in Old, Middle, and Modern English in Britain, and for regional varieties of English in the United States (notably Northern, Midland, and Southern), it is entirely inadequate in other situations, as for example two of the most vigorous US 'Englishes': African-American English(which has never neatly fitted the traditional dialect criterion of regionality) and the entity not quite covered by the term 'Spanglish': a hybrid of Spanish and English used by Spanish-speaking immigrants from Latin America in many parts of the country."

  

 Language Judgments

 "From a linguistic point of view, there is no basis for preferring the structure of one language variety over another. Judgments of 'illogical' and 'impure' are imported from outside the realm of language and represent attitudes to particular varieties or to forms of expression within particular varieties. Often they represent judgments of speaker groups rather than of speech itself."

  

 Language Varieties in the Classroom

 "[T]he topic of language variety needs to be explored in classrooms with the same intensity and focus as issues of class, race, culture and gender. In the same way as critically aware teachers tend to disdain school and classroom practices based on narrow class, racial, cultural, or gendered norms, the same teachers need to question policies and practices that privilege one language variety and its users ahead of other varieties and their users. At the same time, schools in local contexts still have to get on with the the job of teaching a language-based curriculum that uses some language variety as its main pedagogical vehicle."

C. Society and Language

In the following chapters we will look at many ways in which language and society are related. The possible relationships have long intrigued investigators. Indeed, if we look back at the history of linguistics it is rare to find investigations of any language which are entirely cut off from concurrent investigations of the history of that language, or of its regional and/or social distributions, or of its relationship to objects, ideas, events, and actual speakers and listeners in introduction the ‘real’ world. That is one of the reasons why a number of linguists have found Chomsky’s asocial view of linguistic theorizing to be a rather sterile type of activity, since it explicitly rejects any concern for the relationship between a language and those who use it.

We must acknowledge that a language is essentially a set of items, what Hudson (1996, p. 21) calls ‘linguistic items,’ such entities as sounds, words, grammatical structures, and so on. It is these items, their status, and their arrangements that language theorists such as Chomsky concern themselves with. On the other hand, social theorists, particularly sociologists, attempt to understand how societies are structured and how people manage to live together. To do so, they use such concepts as ‘identity,’ ‘power,’ ‘class,’ ‘status,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘accommodation,’ ‘face,’ ‘gender,’ ‘politeness,’ etc. A major concern of this book is to examine possible relationships between ‘linguistic items’ on the one hand and concepts such as ‘power,’ ‘solidarity,’ etc. on the other. We should note that in doing so we are trying to relate two different kinds of entities in order to see what light they throw on each other. That is not an easy task. Linguistic items are difficult to define. Try, for example, to define exactly what linguistic items such as sounds, syllables, words, and sentences are. Then try to define precisely what you understand by such concepts as ‘social class,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘identity,’ ‘face,’ and ‘politeness.’ Finally, try to relate the two sets of definitions within some kind of theory so as to draw conclusions about how items in these two very different classes relate to each other. Do all this while keeping in mind that languages and societies are constantly changing. The difficulties we confront are both legion and profound.

There are several possible relationships between language and society. One is that social structure may either influence or determine linguistic structure and/or behavior. Certain evidence may be adduced to support this view: the age-grading phenomenon whereby young children speak differently from older children and, in turn, children speak differently from mature adults; studies which show that the varieties of language that speakers use reflect such matters as their regional, social, or ethnic origin and possibly even their gender; and other studies which show that particular ways of speaking, choices of words, and even rules for conversing are in fact highly determined by certain social requirements.

Reference

Trudgill, Peter. 1995. Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society. London: Penguin Books.

Wardhaugh, Ronald. 1992. An introduction to sociolinguistics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Wolfram, Walt. 1991. Dialects and American English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall (to be reissued by Basil Blackwell in 1998 as American English: Dialects and variation).

 (Edward Finegan, Language: Its Structure and Use, 5th ed. Thomson, 2008)

 (Tom McArthur, The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford University Press, 2002)

(David Corson, Language Diversity and Education. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001)