5.

Sociolinguistics
Wardhaugh, Ronald: An introduction to sociolinguistics

All languages exhibit internal variation  each language exists in a number of varieties.

Variety:

- Hudson: a set of linguistic items with similar distribution (so Canadian and London
English would be distinct varieties)

- Ferguson: any body of human speech patterns which is sufficiently homogeneous to

be analyzed by available techniques of synchronic description and which has a
sufficiently large repertory of elements and their arrangements or processes with broad
enough semantic scope to function in all formal contexts of communication

Language vs. variety:

- Language: referring to either a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms.

- Dialect: referring to one of the norms.

- examples:

o France:

 un dialecte: regional variety of a language that has an associated

literary tradition

 un patois: regional variety that lacks literary tradition  tends to be

used pejoratively

o English:

 dialect: used for local varieties (like Yorkshire dialect), and for
informal, lower-class speech as well

 often equivalent to nonstandard

o Hindi and Urdu

 they are the same languages, but differences are magnified for political
and religious reasons

 Hindi is written left to right, Urdu is written right to left, different

borrowings, etc

o Yugoslavia:
  Serbs and Croats failed to agree on most things after the death of
President Tito

 divisiveness

 linguistically, Serbo-Croatioan is one single South Slav language, but

used by two different groups, Serbs and Croats, there are two distinct
varieties of it, with different vocab items and different scripts (Roman
for Croatian and Cyrillic for Serbian)

o Netherlands-Germany

 continuum of dialects of one language historically, but then the two

became standardized as the languages of the Netherlands and Germany
(standard Dutch and standard German)

 they aren’t mutually intelligible

Language and dialect:

- Scandinavia (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish)  recognized as different languages; yet

if you speak any of them, they are somewhat mutually comprehensible

- Cantonese and Mandarin: same language? Actually different languages, but they say
it’s 2 different dialects of the same language

- English: Cockney and a native US dialect speaker may find it hard to communicate

o do they speak separate languages?

o if you search for a translated book, it’s translated in English, not in ‘American’

Another problem is that the terms language and dialect are also used in a historical sense 
assumption that there was one single language (Indo-European), and the speakers spread
across the world, and speak different dialects (English, German, French, Russian, Hindi) 
neo-grammarian model of language.

Standardization: the process by which a language has been codified (grammar, spelling books,
dictionaries, even literature). Once standardized, language can be taught deliberately.

Haugen’s steps for one variety to become the standard for a language:

- formal matters of codification: grammar, dictionaries

- formal matters of elaboration: use of the variety in literature, courts, education,

administration and commerce
 - selection of the norm: the norm will be associated with power, usually an elite variety
is chosen

- functions: give prestige, bring together communicates of speakers and non-speakers of

that variety

Standard English: hard to determine what the norms are.

- English used in print and taught in schools to non-native speakers

- historically, the dialect of English that developed after the Norman Conquest

Society is any group of people who are drawn together for a certain purpose or purposes.

Language is what all members of a particular society speak.

Sociolinguistics concerns with how people use language to create and express identities,
relate to one another in groups, and seek to resist, protect, or increase various kinds of power.

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, which in most cases is language
 this knowledge of system or grammar is both something which every individual who
speaks the language possesses and also some kind of shared knowledge, that is,
knowledge possessed by all those who speak the language
 language is an abstract, communal possession; it is the knowledge of rules and
principles and of the ways of saying and doing things with sounds, words and
sentences; it is knowing what is in the language and what is not
 Chomsky:
o most influential figure in late 20th century linguistics
o in order to make meaningful discoveries about the language, linguists have to
make distinctions between what is important - language universals like
learnability of languages, characteristics they share, rules and principles that
speakers follow -, and what is unimportant about language and linguistic
behavior – how individuals use specific utterances in a variety of ways
o distinction between competence – speakers’ knowledge about their language - ,
and performance – what they do with the language.

Variation

 the language we use in everyday life is remarkably varied, although some investigators
think that each language is a homogeneous entity and it is possible to write their
categorical rules

 but in reality no one speaks the same way all the time and people constantly exploit
the nuances of the languages they speak internal variation of languages
  theoretical linguistics: the linguist’s task should be to write grammars that will help us
develop our understanding of language: what it is, how it is learnable, and what it
tells us about the human mind

 no individual is free to do just what he or she pleases, individuals know the various
limits (or norms), and that knowledge is both very precise and at the same time
almost entirely unconscious

 linguistic behavior depends on identity, group membership, power and

socialization

Scientific investigation

 the scientific study of language, its uses, and the linguistic norms that people observe
poses a number of problems

 some attempts were made to arrive at and understanding of the general principles of
organization that surely must exist in both language and the uses of language

 Saussure (1959): distinction between langue (group knowledge of language) and

parole (individual use of language)

 Bloomfield (1933): contrastive distribution : pin-bin --> /p/ and /b/ are contrastive
units

 Pike (1967): emic and etic features in language

 Chomsky (1965): surface characteristics of utterances and the deep realities of

linguistic form behind these surface characteristics

 language universals: the essential properties and various typologies of languages and
the factors that make languages learnable by humans but not by non-humans

Language and society

 ‘linguistic items’: sounds, words, grammatical structures

 sociology studies concepts as identity, power, class, status, solidarity, accommodation,

face, gender, politeness

 sociolinguistics examines the possible relationships between ‘linguistic items’ and

sociology’s concepts

 possible relationships between language and society:

1. social structure influence or determine linguistic structure and behaviour

2. linguistic structure and/or behaviour influence or determine social structure

3. language and society influence each other

 4. there is no relationship between the two, they are independent of each other

 Gumperz: sociolinguistics is an attempt to find correlations between social structure

and linguistic structure and to observe any changes that occur

 Chambers: ‘Sociolinguistics is the study of the social uses of language’

 Holmes: ‘the sociolinguist’s aim is to move towards a theory which provides a

motivated account of the way language is used in a community, and of the choices
people make when they use a language’

Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language

 sociolinguistics or micro-sociolinguistics: investigates the relationship between

language and society with the goal being a better understanding of the structure of
language and of how languages function in communication; Hudson (1996): ‘the study
of language in relation to society’

 sociology of language or macro-sociolinguistics: investigates the relationship between

language and society with the goal trying to discover how social structure can be
better understood through the study of language; Hudson (1996): ‘the study of society
in relation to language’

 Trudgill (2003): ‘sociolinguistic research is a work which is intended to achieve a

better understanding of the nature of human language by studying language in its
social context and/or to achieve a better understanding of the nature of the relationship
and interaction between language and society’

 Fairclough’s and van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis focuses on how language is
used to exercise and preserve power and privilege in society

 ethnomethodology is the study of commonsense knowledge and practical reasoning

Methodological concerns

 those who seek to investigate the possible relationships between language and society
must have a twofold concern: they must ask good questions, and they must find the
right kinds of data that bear on those questions

 sociolinguistics is an empirical science

 there are 8 principles that sociolinguistic investigations should follow:

1. the cumulative principle

2. the uniformation principle

3. the principle of convergence

4. the principle of subordinate shift

 5. the principle of style-shifting

6. the principle of attention

7. the vernacular principle

8. the principle of formality

 aim of linguistic research is to find out how people talk when they are not being
systematically observed

 the above principles are fundamental to studies in language variation

Languages, dialects and varieties

Variety: a set of linguistic items with similar distribution (Hudson, 1996)

 a variety can be something greater than a single language as well as something less,
less than something traditionally referred to as a dialect

Language and dialect

 language and ethnicity are virtually synonymous (Coulmas, 1999)

 language can be used to refer either to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related
norms, and dialect to refer to one of these norms

 dialect is also used for both for local varieties of a language, e.g., Yorkshire dialect,
and for various types of informal, lower-class, or rural speech, and is often equivalent
to nonstandard or even substandard

 sociohistorical factors play a crucial role in determining boundaries between language

and dialect e.g., Hindi and Urdu in India, because they are the same language, but one
in which certain differences are becoming more and more magnified for political and
religious reasons

 in understanding the various relationships between languages and dialects concepts of

‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ help us

 power: a language has more power than any of its dialects; it is the powerful dialect
but it has become so because of non-linguistic factors, like money, status or influence

 solidarity: a feeling of equality that people have with one another; a feeling of
solidarity can lead people to preserve a local dialect or an endangered language

 terms as language and dialect are also used in historical sense, because it is possible to
speak of languages as English, French, German, Russian and Hindi as Indo-European
dialects
  it is still difficult to define what makes a language, so an alternative approach is to
acknowledge that there are different kinds of languages and to discover how languages
differ from one another

 one such attempt by Bell (1997) has listed 7 criteria that may be used to distinguish
different languages

1) Standardization : the process by which a language has been codified in some

way, which involves the development of grammars, spelling books,
dictionaries; requires an agreement what is in the language and what is not; it
is believed that if the canonical variety of a language is not universally
supported and protected, the language will inevitably decline and decay;
language takes on ideological dimensions; the chosen norm is associated with
power; the standardization process performs several functions: it unifies
individuals and groups or even separates them, so it reflects some kind of
identity: regional, social, religious or ethnic; Standard English!, sometimes
governments involve themselves in the standardization process or it is
undertaken for political reasons; occasionally there are more than one
standardized varieties like in Norway; it is also a process that attempts to
reduce variety and diversity

2) Vitality : refers to the existence of a living community of speakers; it

distinguishes language that are ‘alive’ and that are ‘dead’

3) Historicity : refers to the fact that a particular group of people finds a sense of
identity through using a particular language: it belongs to them; language is the
strongest tie

4) Autonomy : it is a feeling, because a language must be felt by its speakers to be

different from other languages, even when they are similar. Subjective
criterion.

5) Reduction : refers to the fact that a particular variety may be regarded as a sub-
variety rather than as an independent entity e.g., Cockney is regarded a variety
of English.

6) Mixture : the feelings speakers have about the ‘purity’ of the variety they speak

7) de facto norms : refers to the feeling that many speakers have that there are
both ‘good’ and ‘poor’ speakers and that the good speakers represent the
norms of proper usage (like Parisian French)

English, Haitian Creole, Latin and Chinese are all equal as languages, but that does not
necessarily mean that all languages are equal! The first is a linguistic judgment, the second
one is a social one.
Language and dialect:

- a dialect is a subordinate variety of a language (like Swiss German is a dialect of

German)

- one language can have various dialects

- if very few people speak a language, is it a dialect?  not really, because it is not a
subordinate of a larger language

 vernacular: the speech of a particular country or a region, or a form of speech

transmitted from parent to child as a primary medium of communication, e.g.,
Standard English

 koiné: a form of speech shared by people of different vernaculars, it a common

language, but not necessarily a standard one, e.g., Hindi

Regional Dialects

 regional variations of languages are easy to observe

 differences in pronunciation, in the choices and forms of words and syntax (by
geographical location)

 dialect – patois distinction:

o patois: used for varieties without writing tradition, describes only rural forms
of speech, refers to the speech of the lower strata of society, dialect has a wider
geographical distribution than patois

 dialect continuum: a continuum of dialect sequentially arranged over space; over large
distances the dialects at each end of a continuum may well be mutually unintelligible,
and also some of the intermediate dialects may be unintelligible with one or both ends,
or even with certain other intermediate ones

 dialect geography: describes attempts made to map the distributions of various

linguistic features so as to show their geographical provenance

 isogloss: a line on a map marking an area having a distinct linguistic feature.

 dialect boundary: the result of several isoglosses coincide

 dialect – accent:

o dialect (regional variation) should not be confused with the term accent

o Standard English is spoken in a variety of accents

 Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent of perhaps as few as 3 percent of those who
live in England, in the UK it is usually associated with higher social or educational
 background, with the BBC and most commonly taught to students learning English as
a foreign language; it is a non-localized accent. Received means you can be “allowed”
to better parts of society if you have this accent. Other names of this accent: Queen’s
English, BBC English, Oxford English

 Estuary English: a development of RP along the lower reaches of the Thames

 in North-America the most generalized accent is General American or network

English, the accent associated with announcers on the major television networks

 it is impossible to speak English without accent!!!

Social Dialects

 dialect: can also mean differences in speech associated with various social groups or
classes

 social groups or social classes can be defined according to occupation, place of

residence, education, income, racial or ethnic origin, cultural background, religion,
and so on…

 such factors relate directly to how people speak

 social dialects originate among social groups and are related to a variety of factors, as
social class, religion…

 in Baghdad, Christian, Jewish and Muslim inhabitants speak different varieties of

Arabic

 social dialectology is a branch of linguistic study

Styles, Registers, and Beliefs

 Style

o formal, or informal speech that depends on the kind of occasion, social, age
and other differences between participants,

o e.g., What do you intend to do, your majesty? as opposed to Waddya intend
doin’, Rex?

 Register

o they are sets of language items (vocabulary, intonation, syntax, phonology)

associated with discrete occupational or social groups, e.g., surgeons, airline
pilots, bank managers

o each register helps you to express your identity at a specific time or place

 dialect, style and register differences are largely independent

 What are the specific linguistic features we rely on to classify a person as being from a
particular place, a member of a certain social class, representative of a specific
profession?

o the presence or absence of certain linguistic features, consistency or inconsistency

in the use of cues

 receptive/productive linguistic ability