,Sociolinguistics lecture 1 11-9
You will not be tested on the phonetic symbols that represent vowel sounds and on the names of
the scholars who’s theories we use but you do need to know the names of the theories.
22 November 12 o clock Spanish steps talk by dr. Heike Wise (Berlin)
Sociolinguistics connects to all 4 pillars: economics, politics, culture and history (and philosophy)
Google angram lets you look at terms and when they really start to “take off”
Language is important because it connects people, it is a means of expression and a way to create
new things that did not “exist” before
language consist of a list of such signs ( a “lexicon”) together with a set of rules for combining them
(a “grammar”)
Loquor ergo sum!
Linguistics = the scientific study of human language.
Socio indicates the relationship between language and society.
Sociolinguists analyse language in order to make generalizations about how people use language in
different contexts and to understand how societal norms are intertwined with language use.
To what extent do patterns found in one society hold in another?
Central concerns of sociolinguistics include how people use language to
- create and express identities
- relate to one another in groups
- resist, protect, or increase various kinds of power.
Sociolinguistics is as much about people as it is about language.
Sociolinguistics is a subfield of linguistics that examines the relationship between language
⟷society
Society = a group of interdepending individuals who develop their own internal norms and values
Hillary Clinton’s conundrum: it is almost impossible to sound like a woman and powerful at the same
time
How you present yourself linguistically determines how you’re perceived socially.
A major focus of linguistics is to describe, analyze, and understand the knowledge speakers have of
the languages they speak.
The linguistic system that a speaker knows is their internalized “grammar” of a language.
Noam Chomsky makes an important distinction between language competence and language
performance
- Competence: a person’s unconscious knowledge of the grammatical rules of a language
(abstract, not amenable to observation)
- Performance: the way individuals actually use language (physically realized, can be directly
observed, measured, recorded, etc.)
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,Studying an individual’s idiolect-an individual’s distinctive way of speaking –is a valid object of study
for linguists interested in language competence
Sociolinguistics is primarily concerned with real language in use (i.e. performance) as opposed to an
idealized competence.
Because they are interested in the use of language in social contexts, sociolinguists are interested in
commonalities that bind groups of speakers together and distinguish them from others (dialects,
sociolects, ethnolects)
Communicative competence is the ability to produce and understand utterances which are adapted
to their contexts of use: knowing how to use a language appropriately.
It is possible to have grammatical competence in a language but lack communicative competence as
a result of assessing a situation differently or incorrectly matching words to their social contexts of
use.
Descriptive < describe. Prescriptive < prescribe
A descriptive approach is concerned with how a language is spoken.
A prescriptive approach is concerned with how a language “should” be spoken.
Powerful people/privileged groups decide how a language “should” be spoken and what is
considered (grammatically) correct.
Power = the ability to control the actions of self and others (not only physical force but also the
ability to prevent opposition from arising by being acknowledged by others as powerful).
Power is not only displayed through language. It is often achieved through language. Powerful
speakers or powerful languages?
While we are all part of a global society whose consequences no one can escape, we remain unequal
participants and globalization remains an uneven process
The linguistic resources we have access to play a significant role in this unequal participation.
Identity = a socially constructed affiliation with particular social categories, which implies a
differentiation from some other social categories. Identities are dynamically constructed.
Whorfian hypothesis
- The Whorfian hypothesis deals with the relationship of language to thought and the extent
to which language determines/limits thought.
- It is named after Edward Sapir (1884-1939), an anthropological linguist, and his student,
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), a chemical engineer by training.
- The most controversial part of the Whorfian hypothesis has to do with linguistic
relativism/determinism because scholars disagree on what (Sapir and) Whorf intended the
hypothesis to mean:
o Language determines thought (linguistic determinism)
o Language influences thought (linguistic relativity)
- strong version
o The strong version of the hypothesis, also known as linguistic determinism, says that
‘the language you speak determines (limits) what you are able to think about and
how you perceive things.’
This strong version implies that if the language a person speaks doesn’t have
a word for a particular concept, then that concept is difficult or impossible
for the speaker to grasp.
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, o Very few linguists support linguistic determinism--the view that language completely
determines thought or that our language fundamentally limits the way we perceive
or experience the world.
- weak version
o The weaker version of the Whorfian hypothesis, linguistic relativism, suggests that
language influences the way we think or perceive things, but it doesn’t prevent us
from seeing things from different perspectives and forming new thoughts and ideas.
o Many linguists accept the weak form of the Whorfian hypothesis: the linguistic
relativity hypothesis
indexicality of language
- Language indexes (points to or indicates) one’s social class, status, region of origin, gender,
age group and so on.
- Indexicality: the association of a linguistic form with a particular social meaning
- In the sociolinguistic sense, this indexical aspect of language refers to certain features of
speech (including accent), which indicate an individual’s social group (or background)
- The use of these features is not exactly arbitrary since it signals that the individual has access
to the lifestyles that are associated with that type of speech.
Linguistic profiling: using a person’s accent, way of speaking, and other linguistic cues to assess the
social characteristics of an individual (usually for the purpose of discriminating against them, restrict
access or impose penalties).
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