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| Image taken from: https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/all-about-linguistics-2013-release/branches/sociolinguistics |
Objective:
Students will be able to:
- discuss the importance of key concepts and areas of study in sociolinguistics.
- discuss the importance of developing sociolinguistic competence when learning a second language.
| Sociolinguistics |
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| Key concepts |
| Areas of study |
Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics, the study of the sociological aspects of language. The discipline concerns itself with the part language plays in maintaining the social roles in a community. Sociolinguists attempt to isolate those linguistic features that are used in particular situations and that mark the various social relationships among the participants and the significant elements of the situation. Influences on the choice of sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary items may include such factors as age, sex,education, occupation, race, and peer-group identification, among others. For example, an American English speaker may use such forms as “He don’t know nothing” or “He doesn’t know anything,” depending on such considerations as his level of education, race, social class or consciousness, or the effect he wishes to produce on the person he is addressing. In some languages, such as Japanese, there is an intricate system of linguistic forms that indicate the social relationship of the speaker to the hearer. Social dialects, which exhibit a number of socially significant language forms, serve to identify the status of speakers; this is especially evident in England, where social dialects transcend regional dialect boundaries.
Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation. Multilinguals, speakers of more than one language, sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety. Read more.
Multilingualism is ‘the ability of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than one language in their day-to-day lives’ (EC 2007:6, see also PDF). Multilingualism can often be seen to refer more to societies and states rather than individuals. When it comes to individuals’ abilities in more than one language, the term plurilingualism might be more appropriate and this has been defined by the Council of Europe (2007:17) as the use of ‘languages for the purposes of communication … where a person … has proficiency, of varying degrees, in several languages and experience of several cultures’. Note that we can talk of different levels of ability in the same individual: a person may speak one of his or her languages more easily than another, but she/he remains ‘plurilingual’.
Read more on this website
Linguistic Prestige. In sociolinguistics, the degree of esteem and social value attached by members of a speech community to certain languages, dialects, or features of a language variety.(Read more on this website)
Dialect, a variety of a language that signals where a person comes from. The notion is usually interpreted geographically (regional dialect), but it also has some application in relation to a person’s social background (class dialect) or occupation (occupational dialect).
Normally, dialects of the same language are considered to be mutually intelligible, while different languages are not. Intelligibility between dialects is, however, almost never absolutely complete. On the other hand, speakers of closely related languages can still communicate to a certain extent when each uses his own mother tongue. Thus, the criterion of intelligibility is quite relative. In more-developed societies the distinction between dialects and related languages is easier to make because of the existence of standard languages. (Want to Read more?)
Pragmatics focuses on how speakers use language to present information and how hearers draw inferences from what is said about the speaker’s communicative intention. Some of the issues addressed are how particular ways of speaking (including the choice of words, sentence forms, and prosody (intonation, rhythm, pitch)) convey subtle features of messages; how language conveys ‘who did what, when, where, why, and how;’ how we use language to accomplish ‘speech acts’ (e.g. apologies, declarations, requests, threats) that bring us closer together or take us further apart.
(More information on this website)
References:
About education. (n.d.) Linguistic prestige. http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/Prestige.htm
Encyclopedia Britannica. (n.d.). Dialect. Recovered on March
16, 2016, from: http://www.britannica.com/topic/dialect
Encyclopedia Britannica. (n.d.). Sociolinguistics. Recovered on March 16, 2016, from: http://www.britannica.com/science/sociolinguistics
Wikipedia. (n.d.) Code-switching. Recovered on March 16, 2016, from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
