ELS 108 – INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Topic 1- Introduction

Why Study Language?

Language can be used as a way of finding out more about:

-how our brains work, investigating how children learn language, or how damage to our
brains results in certain kind of language disorders (psycholinguistics)

-how to learn and to teach different languages (applied linguistics)

the relationship between meaning, language and perception (philosophy)

the role of language in different cultures (anthropology)

●the styles of language used in literature (stylistics)

●the different varieties of language people use, and why there are linguistic differences
between different groups (sociolinguistics)

●how to make computers more sophisticated (artificial intelligence)

Language: A System

One of the obvious ways of thinking about language is as a systematic way of combining
smaller units into larger units for the purpose of communication.

Firstly, there would only be one signal (group of letters or sounds) for every meaning.

Secondly, there would be a limited number of meanings and signals available.

Language: The Potential to Create New Meanings

One of the reasons why language is actually a far more complicated entity than traffic
lights is that we can use it to create new meanings. Here are some expressions which illustrate
language being used creatively to express new meanings:

unleaving

McDonaldisation

being perved at

uptitling

Language: Multiple Functions

The referential function is the one associated with what objects and ideas are called and
how events are described (i.e. how we represent the world around us and the effects of those
representations on the way we think.

The affective function of language is concerned with who is ‘allowed’ to say what to whom,
which is deeply tied up with power and social status.
 Aesthetic– focuses on the message as well as the way the message is communicated. The
message might be embellished with rhetorical figures of speech or flower language.

Phatic – used to establish a social connection without really communicating any meaningful
information.

Language Diversity

• the aspect of who speaks what language

• what variety of that language they speak

Language and Power

Power is a complex and abstract concept, and an infinitely important influence on our lives.

It is ‘the ability of its holders to exact compliance or obedience of other individuals to

their will’. (The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought,1999)

The Dictionary then quotes the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
‘The strongest man is never strong enough always to be master unless he transforms his
power into right and obedience into duty’.

Language has a key role in transforming power into right and obedience into duty.

Topic 2-Language, Thought and Representation

Saussure and Language as a Representational System

• Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist who lived in the latter part of the 19th century
and whose views on language were published posthumously from the lecture notes of
his students.
• best known as the deviser of structuralism
• Father of Modern Linguistics
• Saussure theorized that speakers of different languages engage in an arbitrary division
of reality; that is, that ‘different languages cut up reality in different ways.

Sign and Symbol

• Sign is a physical marker which carries some information (direct, brief and precise) – meaning
only.
• Symbol which means more than an indication.
• It contains more information and stands in place of something as a means of pointing towards it
indirectly.
• Structuralism is a system in which element in a group can only be understood by its relation to
other elements as part of a larger structure.
• He was credited for founding Semiotics (Semiology)
• His notes were compiled into the book, Course in General Linguistics.

Linguistic Sign
Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign elucidates both of these principles. Firstly, the notion of
the linguistic sign formalizes what we have so far been calling ‘sound and meaning
correspondence’.

Mould Cloak Theories

With linguistic theory, two extreme positions concerning the relationship between language and thought
are commonly referred to as:

Mould theories represent language as “mould in terms of which thought categories are cast”.

Cloak theories represent the view that “language is a cloak conforming to the customary categories of
thought of its speakers”.

The Sapir-Whorf theory is a mould theory of language.

Sapir (1929)

Human beings do not live in the society alone. Language of the society predispose certain choices of
interpretation about how we view the world.

Whorf (1930)

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. We categorize objects in the scheme
laid by the language and if we do not subscribe to this classification we cannot talk or communicate.

Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir gave impetus to the theory that ‘culturally based “ways of
speaking” exist.

The hypothesis comprises two parts:

Linguistic relativity theorizes that the languages of different cultures comprise distinct systems of
representation which are not necessarily equivalent.
Linguistic determinism proposes that a language not only encodes certain ‘angles on reality’ but also
affects the thought processes of its speakers.

Topics 3 and 4-Linguistic Diversity and Speech Community

Language Universals

1. BSOLUTE UNIVERSAL

All languages have vowels and consonants. Absolute universals refer to properties found
in all languages.

2. STATISTICAL UNIVERSAL

Subjects tend strongly to precede objects. Statistical universals reflect important trends
that are found in a predominant part of the languages of the world, but not necessarily in all.

3. IMPLICATIONAL UNIVERSAL

If a language has voiced fricatives, it also has unvoiced fricatives, but not necessarily the
other way round. Language universals may also be generalizations about properties of just a
small selection of languages.

Language Differences

1. Structural Differences

According to Labov and Hudley (2009), the position held by most linguists and anthropologists is
that all dialects learned by children as their first language have equal capacity for logical expression; the
errors in reading and writing that those children make occur because of lack of alignment between a
perfectly acquired vernacular and imperfectly acquired knowledge of the standard language of the
classroom.

2. Symbolic (Social and Psychological) Influences

Anne Charity Hudley listed several areas of linguistic variation observed in African American
vernacular—differences in phonology and grammar, differences in vocabulary, differences in discourse
and cultural patterns, and differences in self-presentation through language.

3. Historical perspective

Historical perspective on how language has been studied in different disciplines, and emphasized
main points elaborated in Valdés, MacSwan, and Alvarez (2009).

Differences between cognitive and social interactionist views of language have implications for
designing second-language instruction.

Cognitively oriented researchers study differences in children’s usage and understanding of

linguistic structure at different stages of language development, and how children cognitively process
language, with a focus on the kinds of grammatical errors made at points in language acquisition.

Socially oriented researchers do not focus exclusively on the linguistic aspects of learning a
second language, but strive for a broader understanding of how speakers of one language become users
(speakers, writers, readers) of the second language.

Several dichotomies have dominated and polarized the field of second-language acquisition and
have led to labeling certain types of language as “good” or “bad”.

12 Types of language

1. Argot

An argot is a language primarily developed to disguise conversation, originally because of a criminal

enterprise, though the term is also used loosely to refer to informal jargon.

2. Cant

Cant is somewhat synonymous with argot and jargon and refers to the vocabulary of an in-group that
uses it to deceive or exclude non-users.

3. Colloquial Language

Anything not employed in formal writing or conversation, including terms that might fall under
one or more of most of the other categories in this list, is a colloquialism. Colloquial and colloquialism
may be perceived to be pejorative terms, but they merely refer to informal terminology.

4. Creole

A creole is a more sophisticated development of a pidgin, derived from two or more parent
languages and used by people all ages as a native language.
 5. Dialect

A dialect is a way of speaking based on geographical or social factors.

6. Jargon

Jargon is a body of words and phrases that apply to a specific activity or profession, such as a
particular art form or athletic or recreational endeavor, or a medical or scientific subject. Jargon is often
necessary for precision when referring to procedures and materials integral to a certain pursuit.

7. Lingo

This term vaguely refers to the speech of a particular community or group and is therefore
loosely synonymous with many of the other words in this list.

8. Lingua Franca

A lingua franca is a language often adopted as a common tongue to enable communication

between speakers of separate languages, though pidgins and creoles, both a mixture of two or more
languages, are also considered lingua franca.

9. Patois

Patois refers loosely to a nonstandard language such as a creole, a dialect, or a pidgin, with a
connotation of the speakers’ social inferiority to those who speak the standard language.

10. Pidgin

A simplified language arising from the efforts of people speaking different languages to
communicate is a pidgin. These languages generally develop to facilitate trade between people without a
common language. In time, pidgins often evolve into creoles.

11. Slang

A vocabulary of terms (at least initially) employed in a specific subculture is slang. Slang terms,
either invented words or those whose meanings are adapted to new senses, develop out of a
subculture’s desire to disguise — or exclude others from — their conversations.

12. Vernacular

A vernacular is a native language or dialect, as opposed to another tongue also in use, such as
Spanish, French, or Italian and their dialects as compared to their mother language, Latin.

Language and Culture

Every individual’s language is “acquired by man as a member of society,” along with and at the
same time as other aspects of that society’s culture in which people are brought up.

The Genetic Classification/Relationship of Language

Genetic Classification
 The purpose of genetic classification is to group languages into families according to their degree
of diachronic relatedness. For example, within the Indo-European family, such subfamilies as Germanic
or Celtic are recognized; these subfamilies comprise German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian,
Danish, and others, on the one hand, and Irish, Welsh, Breton, and others, on the other.

Typological Classification

A typological classification groups languages into types according to their structural

characteristics.

• Isolating language is one in which all the words are morphologically unanalyzable (i.e., in
which each word is composed of a single morph); Chinese and, even more strikingly,
Vietnamese are highly isolating.
• Agglutinating language (e.g., Turkish) is one in which the word forms can be segmented
into morphs, each of which represents a single grammatical category.
• Inflecting language is one in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between
particular word segments and particular grammatical categories. The older Indo-
European languages tend to be inflecting in this sense.

Accent and Dialect

Regional Variation

To some extent such differences in pronunciation are part of the geographical dispersal of a language—
the degree of difference roughly corresponding to the way in which localities are separated from each
other. These variations in pronunciation can become powerful indicators of regional identity and
affiliation.

Isogloss

Line representing a boundary between the areas with regard to that one particular linguistic item.

Speech Community

“A group of people who use the same set of speech signals is a speech-community” ( Leonard
Bloomfield, 1933)

Regional Variation and Social Structure

Distinct groups or social formations within the whole may be set off from each other in a variety of ways:
by gender, by age, by class and by ethnic identity. These differences mostly frequently go hand in hand
with differing degrees of access to material resources.

Social and Regional Variations in Dialects

The most prestigious variety is standard English.

It shows that speakers at the top of the social scale (i.e. at the top of the ‘cone’) speak standard
English with very little regional variation; any variation that is apparent will usually occur between two
(or more) equally standard forms.
Received Pronunciation has the most prestige. It represents variation in pronunciation.

The most prestigious accent being known as RP (Received Pronunciation) which, like standard
English, has a social rather than regional distribution.
The main difference between the two diagrams is that there is no regional variation in the accent used
by the speakers of the highest social class. This is why we see a point at the top of the ‘cone’, rather than
a plateau. This means that speakers at the top of the social scale tend to pronounce their words with the
same accent (i.e. RP) regardless of their regional background. But, as with dialect variation, the further
we move down the social class scale, the greater spread of regional pronunciation we find.

Shifts in Pronunciation according to Situation

The social stratification of pronunciation will vary not only from speaker to speaker according to their
respective positions within the overall social structure: it also varies from any one speaker from situation
to situation.

Regional Variation and Social Structure

Distinct groups or social formations within the whole may be set off from each other in a variety of ways:
by gender, by age, by class and by ethnic identity. These differences mostly frequently go hand in hand
with differing degrees of access to material resources.

Topic 5-Language and Subcultures

Anti-languages may be understood as extreme versions of social dialects.

They are basically created by a process of relexicalization – the substitution of new words for old.

‘pelting speech’—an argot employed by roving bands of vagabonds in Elizabethan England.

Anti- Language

They tend to arise among subcultures and groups that occupy a marginal or precarious position in
society, especially where central activities of the group place them outside the law.

Linguistic features of an anti-language

Anti -languages are basically created by a process of relexicalization—the substitution of new words for
old.

Accounts of ‘pelting speech’, for example, contain over twenty terms for the classes of vagabond
including ‘rogue’, ‘wild rogue’, ‘prigger of prancers’ (horse thief), ‘counterfeit crank’, ‘bawdy bask

An argot in use among bar girls in Addis Ababa (capital of Ethiopia) included many items formed by
regularly substituting /ay/ in place of the first vowel of the original and inserting /ə/ before repetition of
the final consonant. Thus:’

sim (‘name’) becomes sayməm

bırr (‘dollar’) becomes bayrər

hedə (‘go’) becomes haydəd

bədda (‘copulate’) becomes baydəd

Source: Demisse and Bender (1983)

Linguistic features of an anti-language

Item Original/literal meaning New/metaphorical sense

kācā-kalā ‘unripe banana’ ‘young girl’

dabal-dekār ‘double decker’ ‘plump woman’

(from English)

sāinbord-olā ‘signboard’ ‘married woman’

(from English)

‘ola’=owner’

(reference to vermilion mark on forehead of married woman)

Source: based on Halliday (1978)

Linguistic Features of an Anti-language

An anti-language has the following characteristics:

• It may contain a list of partially relexicalized words (new words for an old word) or
overlexicalized words (having many synonyms for a word)
• It has a "relatively greater orientation" towards the construal of textual and interpersonal
meanings

(Halliday, 1976, p. 276)

• There are a number of factors that attribute to relexicalization (renaming) like

1. Convenience

2. Ease in lifestyle

3. Acceptance, and

4. Need

• The innovations in vocabulary and the proliferation of terms in certain key areas make possible
finer distinctions in meaning than are found necessary in the parent language.
• Some of the new items are actually synonymous with each other and virtually interchangeable.

CB Radio Slang

The broad slang used for Citizens’ Band (CB) radio transmission has some similarities with an anti-
language.

police station – ‘bear cage’, ‘bear cave’

police helicopter – ‘bear in the air’

police using radar – ‘smokey with a camera’,

‘portrait painter’,

‘kojak with a kodak’

police car – ‘smokey on rubber’,

‘jam sandwich’,

‘bubble-gum machine’

When a police vehicle is using flashing lights and a siren, it is ‘advertising’. When attempting to be
inconspicuous it is ‘sitting under the leaves’. Many expressions existed for diverse types of vehicle,
including:

lorry without trailer - ‘bobtail’

flat-fronted lorry - ‘cabover’

ambulance - ‘blood wagon’, ‘meat wagon’

breakdown truck - ‘dragging wagon’

Anti -language and social structure

In more extreme and hard-edged cases of anti-language, the anti-society that provides the
conditions for its generation tends to be much more marginalized and at the same time both more
insulated from the wider society and under greater pressure to conform to its norms.

Anti-language and the speech community

In the final analysis, viewed from the perspective of anti-language, the speech community
emerges as an arena of competing affiliations and antagonistic differences.

Topic 6-Language and Situation: Register

Language is sensitive to its context of situation.

• Register, sometimes also being referred to as stylistic variation.

• Context of situation – environment in which meanings are being exchanged

- circumstances and setting that provide background information about an

even, statement or idea
The Register of a Particular Situation

Being able to identify the register of a situation enables us to predict the kind of language we will need
to use in a particular situation.
FIELD

The field of the letter may broadly be described as that of ‘personal banking’ of ‘financial service’.

It may refer not just to topic but also to activity—in this case advising the customer about bank charges.
Here the writer clearly has a problem. The customer has previously been notified that he will have to pay
bank charges.

TENOR

The relationship presupposed by the letter is not so much between individuals in their own right, but
between a member of the organization (the bank) and a member of the public (a customer). We can see
this in the form of self- dentification adopted at the end of the letter.

MODE

The mode, obviously, is written. Generally, it displays several features of considered and self -conscious
prose composition.

A large proportion of the vocabulary, for instance, is derived from Latin roots.

The structure of the sentences is complex, especially in the way that one sentence is embedded inside
another. Complex structures of this type are more likely to occur in written rather than in spoken texts.
Dimension of Linguistic Variation

Language varies not just according to who we are but also according to the situations in which
we find ourselves.

REFERENCES

Behrens, S. 7 Parker, J. (2010). Language in the Real World. Routledge, USA and Canada.

Chaudenson, R. (2002). Creolization of Language and Culture. Routledge, London and New York.

Elbourne, P. (2013). Definite Descriptions. Oxford University Press, United Kingdom.

Meulen, A. & Abraham, W. (eds) (2004). The Composition of Meaning: From Lexeme To Discourse. John
Benjamins Publishing Co., USA.

Montgomery, M. (2007). Introduction to Language and Society Studies in Culture and Communication.
Routledge, London and NewYork.

Schiffman, H. (2002). Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. Routledge, London and New York.

Online References

https://www.slideshare.net/ahmetmesutates/sapir-whorf-hypothesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaWAnUrChU&list=TLPQMjEwODIwMjObrHOBS-NLFQ&index=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaRxu1-Z6NY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaRxu1-Z6NY&t=53s