Language and Society

Smallest element of society is individuals. (Is individual nature or nurture - wrong question, it is
both.) Individual —> self —> group —> society —> world
We’re first human beings then social beings. Society is internal at the beginning. —> Newborn
babies see mother and itself as the same things, it has no sense of self, thus no sense of other.
Then it is external. —> The concept of other starts in the family, the first other is the father, it
sees that mother is not its. This is when the primary socialization starts, in the family. Then the
secondary socialization starts, the adult socialization, in school etc.

What is society -as metaphors?

1. Society as a functioning organism - focuses on harmony
It is like human body —> our bodies have many organs, all organs are necessary with specific
functions, no part is useless. Societies have identifiable structures all with clear functions, brain
is like the government, some useless people are like germs, societies evolve in time.
Units of society and how they contribute to the harmony
The economy —> getting basic resources - food, shelter
The polity —> getting organized
The law, socialization —> keeping things orderly
Family, kinship, intimacies —> reproducing the society
Language, media —> developing communications
Science, education —> acquiring and developing knowledge
Religion —> cultivating a spiritual side to life
2. Society as a conflict - focuses on conflict
History of societies is history of wars. Marx says history of all societies are history of class
struggle, denial of human needs and interest. Machiavelli (the prince), Hobbes argue that
societies need strong government to put things in order. Michael Foucault - Normal v abnormal
distinction
Key elements in the conflict
Economic —> class, caste, slavery, global inequality
Ethnicity —> race, racism
Gender —> patriarchy, sexism
Sexuality —> homophobia
Age —> generations and divisions
States and nations —> colonization, genocide, wars
Health —> sickness, disablement
3. Society as everyday drama / theatre - macro perspective
Social life is a theatre, and we are actors. We have several identities, we play different social
roles in different social situations that are assigned to us.
4. Society as language
Society is structured like a language and can be analyzed as a discourse.

What is language ?
Systemic-Functional Grammar (Halliday)
Language is social semiotic -a system of signs to express social meaning in context.
Systemic is interrelated sets of options for meaning-making. Functional is functional. There are
3 linguistic options:
Level of behavior - choice of what one can do
Level of semantics - choice of what one can mean
Grammatical level - choice of what one can say
What is social reality?
It’s not like natural reality, social rules are not like physics rules.
Essentialism V Social constructionism - 2 ends of the spectrum
Essentialism - they believe that human characteristics are most influenced by biological factors,
there’s human nature, an essence
Social Constructionism

Background of social constructionism

Middle Ages
wars, pandemics, the catholic church, superstitions, feudalism
Protestant Reformation and Renaissance
Enlightenment Period

In the medieval period, the church was the sole arbiter of truth. But after
Enlightenment, search for truth started.

Humanism- it believes in the good in human, rationalism - reason became more

important, positivism - science became more important
Peace, Progress, Prosperity are 3 promises of enlightenment. Peace was not
accomplished

Modernism (Structuralism)  search for truth led to search for rules processing the world, and
there was a belief in a ‘right’ way of doing things, which could be discovered. (Marx, Freud,
Piaget)

This is Essentialism (Positivist paradigm) and Neo-essentialism (Postpositivist paradigm). They

focus on large cultures. Neo-essentialism is a belief in diverse social realities but weakened by
maintaining a positivist structural-functional sociology -still the norm. It does not focus on the
essential quality of things, but rather on the consideration of what is essential in life.

Structuralism in Language
Saussure tries to find sturctures in language: sign = signifier + signified (arbitrary). The
meaning of a sign resides not intrinsically in that sign itself, but in its relationship to
other signs.
Postmodernism (Post-structuralism)  it rejects the rules and structures underlying in the real
world. Postmodernism emphasizes the co-existence of a multiplicity and variety of situation-
dependent ways of life. Nietzsche claimed that science, reason, progress turned into dogmas
themselves. He took the more nihilistic view that human life is not progressing, that there is no
grand purpose to be discerned.
This is Non-essentialism / Social constructionism. It focuses on small cultures.
Post-structuralism in Language
Language is a site of variability, disagreement and potential conflict, rather than a system
of signs with fixed meanings upon which everyone agrees, as Saussure argued.
Language is a fundamentally social phenomenon; it is something that occurs between
people.

Social Constructionism
 Anti-Essentialism
Social constructionism argues that there are no ‘essences’ inside people that make them
what they are. But social constructionism is not just saying that one’s cultural
surroundings have an impact upon one’s psychology. Both of these views are
essentialist.
There is no essence, our knowledge of the world is something people construct between
them. Language is of great interest to social constructionists.
Society is constructed through three stages and language is the essential system to help
us do it:
Externalization- we create cultural products (values, beliefs, material products) through
social interaction. These products become external to those who have produced them.
Social constructs —> manners, holidays, nations, religion, marriage, school,
family, trust, money, humor, motherhood, dressing,
We produce social constructs by reification (The act of changing something
abstract into something real), institutionalisation (like your school is school but
not another building because of prior and ongoing consensus), habitualization
(we accept the society constructed before us, society is a matter of habit),
naturalization
Objectification- then they take on a reality of their own, becoming independent of those
who created them
Internalization- we learn the supposedly "objective facts" through socialization,
 Critical realism
Our knowledge of the world is not the reflection of reality but vice versa because we
construct our own versions of reality. All knowledge is derived from looking at the
world from some perspective.
It also opposes what is referred to as positivism and empiricism because they say that
what exists is what we perceive to exist.
 Historical and cultural specificity  Mainstream psychology asks questions such as: ‘How
are attitudes formed?’, ‘Why do people behave altruistically?’ and ‘How does play influence
children’s development’? The assumption underlying such questions is that we can find an
answer to such questions that applies to all people – we are discovering ‘human nature’.
But social constructionism argues that the ways in which we commonly understand the
world, the categories and concepts we use, are historically and culturally specific. Whether
one understands the world in terms of men and women, children and adults, urban life and
rural life, etc. depends upon where and when in the world one lives.

Large cultures
Ethnic, national or international groups like European, British. Essentialist, culturist perspective
because people tend to find norms in cultures and there is onion-skin relationship. (Sub-culture
is a social group which is perceived to deviate from the normative ideals of adult communities)
Hofstede’s Onion Model of Culture
Culture is defined as the collective mental programming of
the human mind which distinguishes one group of people
from another. This programming influences patterns of
thinking which are reflected in the meaning people attach
to various aspects of life and which become crystallized in
the institutions of a society.
Small cultures
Any cohesive social group like hospital, family, school, organizations. Non-essentialist, non-
culturist because they are to liberate culture from notions of ethnicity and nation and from the
perceptual dangers they carry with them. No onion-skin relationship. -metrobus, escalator
culture, twitter, they exist irrespective of large cultures
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Interculturality
Grammar of Culture

This is a map to help us read intercultural events

Underlying universal cultural processes  This is the basis upon which we are able to read
culture. These processes are shared by all of us.
Personal trajectories  individual’s personal travel through society, bringing histories from their
ancestors and origins. This domain crosses the subtle boundary with the underlying universal
cultural processes. Thus, through these, we can cross into new domains.
Particular social and political structures  Structures that make us different from each other,
like nation, religion, language, economic system.
Particular cultural products  Outcome of cultural activity, artefacts and cultural practices
(everyday things we do which might seem strange for people from another culture)
When you go from right to left, you either confirm or resist social structure because you’re
moving from a universal phase to essentialist phase.
(Moving from left to right, personal trajectories and underlying universal cultural processes
enable individuals or groups of individuals to introduce their personal cultural realities into
existing structures. Moving from right to left, the degree to which this can be successful will
depend on how far existing structures are confirmed or resisted.)

Interculturality examples / examples of small cultural encounters (without large culture

influence)  black coffee for med students, soft coffees for other students. But it is almost
impossible to talk about even small culture without stereotyping, over-generalization, reification
bc we don’t have linguistic tool kit. It is better to focus on “what culture does” rather than
“what it is”.
Teaching English has also this Essential way of teaching, one country-one culture. With the
spreading of English, its globality, we started to question the phenomenon of “native-speakers”
Society shifted from a structuralist view to functional.

Identity
Modernism & Structuralism  Post-modernism & Post-structuralism
Essentialism  Non-essentialism
Psychological theories of identity / psycholinguistic approaches to SLL  Sociological theories of
identity / approaches to SLL

Identity was a more individual concept, analyzed in a psychological approach (essentialist

theories). But then they realized that it is more sociological (post-structuralist theories) and
socio-culturally constructed. (A shift from psychological theories of identity to sociological
theories of identity)
Unlike psycholinguistic theories for identity, post-modern theories see it “How a person
understands his or her relationship with the world?”
When you say “I am…” to answer “Who am I?”, it suggests a state, rather than a process,
and it projects how you want to be seen by others. Post-modern theories of identity
 answer this question with “becoming” rather than “being”, because “being” is static and
essentialist.
For the post-modern theories, identity is multiple, conflictual, dynamic, shifting,
fragmented, embedded within power relations, located within the larger world.

Then, they started to analyze the language learning from a sociological, anthropological
perspective rather than a psycholinguistic one. (A shift from a focus on linguistic input and
output in SLL to an emphasis on the relationship between the language learner and the larger
social world.)

Social identity V cultural identity

Social identity  relationship between the learner and the larger social world, mediated
through institutions like families, schools, workplaces etc.
Cultural identity  relationship between an individual and members of a particular ethnic
group, who have similar ways of understanding the world and a common history

Social and cultural identities are now kind of the same, and identity is often framed as multiple
and conflictual. But, the remnants of more essentialist notions of identity, which frequently
equate identity with culture, or ethnic identity, still remain.
Multiple features of identity  There are many identity markers, being Turkish is one of them.
And for some, it may be primary or secondary. Also, if you are not a nationalist, but your
nationality is being threatened, you may want to state your nationality. So, our identity-claims
may differ in different situations.
Conflictual features of identity  My gender identity may conflict with my ideological identity,
or religious identity may contradict with my identity in a social dilemma (Muslim v LGBTQ
activist)
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Otherization
In psychology
In order to exist or survive, one has to make sense of the other (psychological coping
mechanism, it actually has evolutionary background). So, it’s inevitable.
We use all identity markers we studied and a binary system to otherize someone
In sociology
It is socially constructed
First, in-group is created by defining “self, we, us” and always the positive things are
emphasized. Then out-group is created by defining “others, they, them” and always
negative things are emphasized. (The reference point is “self”. If you acknowledge the
positive aspects of the other, then it is not otherization)
This leads to the judgement of superiority and inferiority
There is hierarchy between different kinds of others  Upper-class Syrian immigrants
are less otherized than lower-class Syrian immigrants. Nationality is divided by social-
class here.
In linguistics
It is articulated through language
However, “we” does not necessarily imply “other”, in discourse studies. Inclusive we
(Obama’s “Yes, we can” speech) V exclusive we (emphasis on we-they differentiation,
polarization) -language and society perspective
It is also very dynamic.

Orientalism  Edward Said demonstrated how the representation of the Eastern World as
passive, mysterious and inferior, has allowed the Western world to define themselves in positive
terms. (the term “exotic” is an orientalist expression)
Occidentalism  representation of the Western world as dehumanizing
Eastern people can be Orientalist, just as Western people can be Occidentalist.
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