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LECTURE NOTES SOCIOLINGUISTICS LECTURES 1-12
Detailed and thorough lecture notes of the first-year course Introduction to Sociolinguistics covering all lectures, so you are well prepared for the exam.
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Sociolinguistics book chapter 1 + Lecture 1What is Sociolinguistics?
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.
Society = group of people drawn together for a certain purpose
Language - A system of linguistic communication particular to a group, system of signs (conventional
(=not given by nature form/meaning combinations) used for human communication (spoken, signed,
written), consists of a list of signs (lexicon) together with a set of rules for combining them (grammar)
Sociolinguistics is a subfield of linguistics that examines the relationship between language and
society. -> How society affects language - How language affects society, study of our everyday life,
seeks to analyze data to make generalizations about language in society and search for patterns, but
also to question findings and examine how they influence how we use language, collect data via
questionaires, videorecording, … - data gets analyzed (quantatively or qualitatively)
Central questions: how identities are created and expressed, how people relate to one another in
group, resist, protest, or increase various kinds of power
Other fields: phonetics, phonology, historical linguistics
Society: a group of interdepending individuals who develop their own internal norms and values
Society shapes language: eg. When people from different region speak differently from those from
other region – stereotypes?, speech women vs. men (swearing, nicknames)
Languages shape society: eg. How being African American affects credibility in court
= 2-way relationship of language and society
Links to other IS disciplines:
The study of language and its role in society can help us better understand:
• history the historical trajectory of groups, who they’ve had historical contact with and how
that contact has shaped their language, the use of language to delimit national and ethnic
groups, the role of language in changing/shifting national boundaries and identities, …
• culture belonging, diversity, postmodernist understandings of identities as fluid and open to
change, …
• politics impact of government policies on linguistic groups, language rights, political
discourse, including how politicians use language and how people are affected by it, language
as a form of social control (proscribed languages), but also activism, …
• philosophy underlying assumptions encoded in language about truth, reality, and the nature
of meaning), …
• economics global markets for language-related goods and services, effect of language on
social gate-keeping, income, and economic behaviour, …
things are not fixed- can be negotiated, back and forth between individual and society
language: a tool to build relationships and influence others, makes us human
,Compared to modes of communication used by other species, “language was the most important
breakthrough,” allowing social behaviour to become more coordinated and precise, which resulted in
more social cohesion, social interaction, and emotional solidarity (McNeill and McNeill 2003: 23).
From a historical standpoint, languages are regularly used to define boundaries between nations and
make claims about who are the rightful inhabitants of certain regions.
From an anthropological standpoint, language is “a highly flexible instrument which registers changes
in a community more than any other element of culture” (Basso 1967:471 in Mesthrie et al.
2009:243).
Language also helps signpost new categories and identities (ethnic, national, gender, …): often these
do not exist until they are named.
Knowledge of Language
Code= the system two or more people use to communicate with each other, multilingual = access to
two or more codes and shift back and forth between languages
Issues for linguists regarding grammar (=the system of language):
1) What language comprises
2) How we may best characterize it
Prescriptive = prescriptivism approach (to describe grammar): seeks to outline the standard
language and how it should be spoken, preventing languages from deteriorating
- School grammars: aiming to teach people how to speak language correctly – idea: there is
one language variety that is correct and impose variety on speakers – inherently incorporates
notions of power – why and how? Some activists try to change that
Example prescriptive: me and my friend is ungrammatical; my friend and I is the best way to say
Vs. descriptive = descriptivism approach (by sociolinguists): describe, analyse and explain how
people actually speak their language (=their shared knowledge), pay attention to the rules inside the
head of speaker – be observant, not judgemental,
- A linguists grammar: approach taken by linguists when they write the grammar of a language
variety
Examples descriptive: in the US, people generally say apartment instead of flat
Noam Chomsky, one of the world's most well-known theoretical linguists, makes an important
distinction between competence in and performance of a grammar.
1) Competence - a person’s unconscious knowledge of the grammatical rules of a language, Chomsky
uses grammatical judgement, cannot be directly observed
2) Performance - the way individuals actually use language, real language in use, Sociolinguists tend
to use recordings of languages – main concern of SL, can be observed and recorded
3) Communicative competence (also known as sociolinguistic competence or pragmatic
competence) - ability to produce and understand utterances which are adapted to their contexts of
use: knowing how to use a language appropriately. – possible to have grammatical competence, but
lack communicative competence (when speaker assess a situation differently- underestimated
formality)
It is possible to have grammatical competence of a language but lack communicative competence
as a result of not understanding the rules of social relationships or other cultural conventions.
,According to Labov: language pushed and pulled by different speakers in different ways, linguistic
behavior of individuals can´t be understood without the knowledge of the community they belong to
-different from Chomskyan linguistics
Variants: the different structures for expressing the same meaning (car needs washing vs. needs to
be washed
Variation: reflections of different ways people speak in different social groups or regions, but also
variations within the speech of a single speaker, - inherent characteristic of all languages at all times,
and the patterns exhibited in variation carry social meaning (but also definite limits to variation- can´t
just pronounce anything as you please)
- While linguistics would like to view language as homogenous entity to make generalizations,
in fact language will exhibit considerable internal variations
Language and Speaker Identity:
Language plays a defining role in the way speakers construct, perform, and negotiate their individual
and group identities
Identity = a socially constructed affiliation (connection or link) with particular social categories, which
implies a differentiation from some other social categories. – something we construct the way we
relate to others, power and solidarity create role
- Identities are not fixed attributes of people or groups but are dynamically constructed
aspects which emerge through discourse and social behavior – are changeable
-
- Because language offers alternative ways of saying the same thing, it offers speakers the
possibility to construct, perform, and negotiate their individual and group identities at each
step of expressing themselves.
Social identity = linguistic construction of membership in one or more social groups or categories
- Social categories are not our identities but concepts we use to construct our identities,
categorizations must be enacted or reproduced in order to exist
Speakers express different aspects of their identity and negotiate relationships as they talk, remain
silent, or refer to others (or themselves) in certain ways – what is means to be a member of a social
category may very over time and how different speakers identify with or are assigned to these
categories may also vary
Power: ´the ability to control events in order to achieve ones aims´, ´the control someone has over
the outcomes of others´, the ability to control the actions of self and others (not only physical force
but also the ability to prevent opposition from arising by others as powerful) plays role in how we
choose to identify ourselves and how we form groups with others, power only becomes real when
people acknowledge them as leaders
Statement: we remain unequal participants and globalization remains an uneven process – linguistic
resources we have access to play a significant role in the unequal participation (eg.english important)
- Power is not only displayed, but also achieved through language
- Some people may have more control of the goods than others because certain languages or
varieties have been endowed with more symbolic power than others and therefore have
greater value (eg. Standard language to gain employment)
, Solidarity: motivation which causes individuals to act together and feel a common bond which
influences their social actions – intertwined with identity formation and group formation
Idiolect: an individual´s way of speaking, including sounds, words, style and grammar, study for ppl
interested in language competence
Language and culture
Culture here: not high culture but that necessary behaviors learned and do not come from genetic
endowment, culture = know-how a person must posses to get through everyday life
1st possibility: social structures determine linguistic differences eg. Age-grading = young ppl speaking
differently from mature adults
2nd possibility: Whorfian hypothesis: linguistic structure and behavior may either influence or
determine social structure or worldview (eg. reduced sexist language leads to reduced sexist
attitudes)
3rd possibility: language and society may influence each other
4th possibility: no relation at all between linguistic and social structure – premature
Whorfian hypothesis
The Whorfian hypothesis deals with the relationship of language to thought and the extent
to which language determines/limits thought.
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 Whorf intended the hypothesis
to mean: 1) Language determines thought or 2) language influences thought
1)The strong version of the hypothesis falls under linguistic determinism and says that
‘the language you speak determines (limits) your thoughts or what you are able to think
about and how you perceive things.’ and it limits the way we see/experience the world –
language controls worldview
- 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 that person to grasp.
(Scholar Whorf´s view: the social categories we create and how we perceive events and
actions are constrained by the language we speak – different speakers will experience world
differently, Language determines thought or language influences thought)
Very few linguists support linguistic determinism--the view that language completely
determines thought or that our language fundamentally limits the way we perceive and
experience the world.
2)The weaker version of the 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. – accepted by many
linguists, we can become able to understand the different views of languages
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