Sociolinguistics Tutorials- Week 1
Key words Chapter 1:
Society: Group of people who are drawn together for a certain purpose.
o Solidarity: Refers to the motivations which cause individuals to act together
and to feel a common bond which influences their social actions. Language
contributes to this feeling of belonging by referring a code as language of
dialect.
o Idiolect: Individual’s way of speaking, including sounds, words, grammar, and
style (i.e., The difference between British-English and American-English)
Linguistics: Researchers who research the language spoken, and the knowledge of
how to speak that language, of a certain society. For there research they take a
descriptive approach to language.
o Descriptive approaches to language: Describe, or analyse, and explain how
people speak their languages.
o Prescriptive approaches to language: Seek the outline the standard language
and how it should be spoken ( grammar- researchers use this approach)
Sociolinguistics: Study of ideas about how societal norms are intertwined with our
language use. Focusses on the correlations between social structure and language (=
Variationist sociolinguistics)
o Micro-sociolinguistics: Investigates how social structure influences the way
people talk and how language varieties and patterns of use corelate with social
attributes, such as sex and gender.
o Macro-sociolinguistics (Sociology of Language): Studies what societies do
with their languages, that is, attitudes and attachments that account for the
functional distribution of speech forms in society.
Chomsky/ Chomskyan Linguistics: ‘The father of Social Linguistics’, was an
American linguist who
o Competence: Native speaker’s knowledge of his language, the system of rules,
his ability to produce and understand. Things in your head that allow you to
produce grammatically correct sentences.
Chomsky mainly used the competence in his linguistic research since it
was found to be too difficult to research the actual scenery. That is why
the arguments of Chomsky are mostly grammatical judgements.
o Performance: The study of the system of rules; study of actual sentences
themselves, of the actual use of the language in real-life situation
Labov: Went against the theory of Chomsky, he stated that language is formed by the
pushing and pulling of the language, since the language is confronted with different
influential factors.
o The individual language of people cannot be researched without the research of
the community it is spoken in (view of current sociolinguistics)
Communicative competence:
o Linguistic Variation: The difference between performance of the same
language within a community. Variation is the key within linguistics since the
language is continuously developing.
, o Identity: Fluent groups of people who are bound together by dynamically
constructed aspects which emerge through the discourse and social behaviour.
Social Identity: Identity as defined as the linguistic construction of
membership in one or more social groups or categories.
Power: The ability to control events to achieve one’s aim, and the control someone has
over the outcomes of others.
o Speaking, and especially writing, the ‘standard’ language o a community opens
certain doors for the speaker, therefore the speaker is assigned some form of
power.
Linguistic anthropology: Addresses the relationship between language and culture/
o Culture (Goodenough’s definition): A society’s culture consists of whatever it
is one must know or believe to operate in a manner of acceptable to its
members, and to do so in any role that they except for any of themselves.
The knowhow, which is necessary to operate within a society, same
role as what communicative competence has for language.
o Different possibilities to express the relationship between language and
society:
Social structure may either influence or determine linguistic structure
and/or behaviour.
Socia organization of age groups (i.e.) influences the language
used in these groups; children speak differently with one
another than adults do.
Linguistic structure and/or behaviour may either influence or determine
social structure and worldview ( Whorfian Hypothesis)
Language and society may influence each other
No relationship at all between linguistic and social structure, these
structures thrive independently.
Whorfian hypothesis: The structure of language influences the speakers view on the
world. How the specific language that you speak influences thought.
o Strong Linguistic determinism: The social categories we create and how we
perceive events actions are constrained by the language we speak. Different
speakers will therefore experience the world differently insofar as the
languages they speak differ structurally.
Example: Some societies will have fewer words to describe a certain
event, which results in them lacking to talk about it compared to a
society where these words are present.
The grammatical categories available in a particular language not only
help the users of that language to perceive the world in a certain way,
but they can limit such perception.
o Weak Linguistic relativism: Language influences thought, influences how
people think and categorize things.
Language provides speakers with a systematic default bias in their
habitual response tendencies.
o Arguments against this theory:
Pinker: Think the theory is unsustainable. The theory sustains an
answer to these three questions; prove that speakers of different
, languages think differently that this difference affects reasoning and
that this difference is correlated to language.
Deutscher: if the inventory of readymade words in your language
determined which concepts you were able to understand, how can you
learn anything new?
Boas: No necessary connection between language and culture, and
language and race.
Sapir: Dismisses the claim that certain types of languages can be
associated with advanced cultures and that others are indicative of
cultures that are less advance.
Critical sociolinguistics (/ Interventionist approach): The processes of how language
can create and sustain power systems and social inequality.
o Critical discourse analysis: Analyses on how language is used to exercise and
preserve power and privilege in society, how it buttresses social institutions,
and how even those suffer therefore fail to realize that many of the things that
appear to be natural or normal are culturally constructed and not inevitable.
Critics: it is a resource for people who are struggling against
domination and oppression in its linguistic forms.
Indexicality: Phenomenon of a sign pointing to (or indexing) some object in the
context in which it occurs.
Linguistic profiling: Practice of identifying the social characteristics of an individual
based on auditory cues, in particular dialect and accent
o Language and speaker identity
, Key words Chapter 2:
Language: System of linguistic communication particular to a group; includes spoken,
written and signed modes of communication.
o Style: Discuss differences in formality
o Register: Denotes specific ways of speaking associated with professions or
social groups
o Genre: A set of co-occurring language features associated with frames.
Variety: General term for a way of speaking, can be further defined by location, social
class, or function.
Vernacular: The language a person grows up with and uses in everyday life in
ordinary, commonplace, social interactions.
o Dialect (common definition): Local non-prestigious variety of a real language.
o Dialect (scientific definition): Must be looked at three aspects
The history of the dialect
Dialect (= regional variety of a language that has an associated literary
tradition) and patois (= regional variety of a language that lacks
traditional literary tradition) pejoratively: patois is regarded as
something lower than a dialect since it misses tradition.
The term dialect often implies nonstandard or even substandard, when such terms are
applied to language, and can cannot various degrees of inferiority, with that connotation of
inferiority carried over to those who speak a dialect.
Mutual intelligibility: Applies to the situation to research if the two dialects are from
the same language or must be seen as two different languages if two dialect
speakers can understand each other, they speak the same language. If they cannot,
there are two separate languages. Problems with using mutual intelligibility as
criterium to determine whether it is a dialect or language:
o Not objectively determined fact: The ability to understand someone who speaks
a dialect, may differ between persons based on their own experience with
different ways of speaking.
o Dialect continuum: Used to differentiate among regional varieties, in which
there is a gradual change of the language.
This distinction is based more on social identity and political
boundaries than on linguistic criteria.
o Dialect geography: Describes the attempts made to map the distributions of
various linguistic features to show their geographical provenance.
Variables: Features of different languages
o Isoglosses: Maps which are drawn surrounding a certain feature, to distinguish
an area in which a certain feature is found from areas in which it is absent.
Standardisation: Refers to the process by which a language has been codified in some
way. People tend to think of language as a static institute, however language is fluid
and always changing due to surrounding elements.
o Standard language ideology: Belief that one variety is superior to others and
that that variety is the only correct form.
