This is a broad summary of Van Herk's 'What is Sociolinguistics?'. It includes a summary of the chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12.
As Van Herk mainly explains certain methods and keywords through examples and literal definitions of keywords and specific jargon, this summary mainly contains key e...
Definition of sociolinguistics:
The scientific study of the relationship(s) between language and society.
Sociolinguistics can study how the language practices of one community differ
from those of the next.
We can study the relationship in a particular community between language
use and social categories like class and status, ethnicity and gender and
sexuality.
We can study the relationship between social and linguistic forces and
language change.
We can also choose to study how language can reveal social relationships.
We can study the relationships between different languages within and across
communities.
We can study how people feel about language and language diversity and
how their societies manifest those attitudes through language planning and
policy (and education).
Background: the history of sociolinguistics
The first systematic study of the relationship between language variation and social
organization is described in a 1958 article by the sociologist John L. Fischer.
The birth of sociolinguistics can be pushed back even further. Louis Gauchat’s work
on the French dialects of Charney, Switzerland (1905) correlates language variation
with the age and sex of the people he spoke to.
Many of us would trace the birth of modern sociolinguistics as a subdiscipline to the
work of William Labov, starting in the 1960’s. In several ground breaking studies in
Martha’s Vineyard and in New York’s Lower East Side and Harlem, Labov used
recordings of natural speech, correlated with sociologically-derived speaker
characteristics, to examine in detail the relationship between how people spoke and
how they fit into their sociolinguistic community.
Free variation: The choice between forms is completely arbitrary and unpredictable.
Structured variation: The choice between forms is linked to other factors.
Variationist researcher: Researchers who look at the correlations between
language variation and social and linguistic characteristics.
Difference between sociolinguistics and sociology of language.
, Chapter 2
When sociolinguists talk about “language”, we mean language as it is actually used.
This actually sets us apart from both normal people and from some other branches
of linguistics.
Mainstream linguists
Mainstream linguists usually elicit translations and grammaticality judgements from
native speakers of a language. They develop a set of rules or constraints that make
up the grammar. They’re interested in describing how language is represented in the
mind (a mentalist approach).
The producer in this framework is the “ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
homogeneous speech community” (Chomsky). It also involves a distinction between
competence and performance.
Competence: What speakers know about language.
Performance: What they actually come out with.
Sociolinguists
The sociolinguistic approach is empiricist, we only trust evidence that we find out
there in the real world. Use different tools, such as recording devices. We look at
frequently occurring language features in long stretches of speech, we count stuff
and look for correlations, and we describe our findings in terms of tendencies, or
probabilities, rather than absolute rules.
Difference between linguists and normal people
Our approach is descriptive (how people actually talk), rather than prescriptive
(how people “should” talk).
Variables that could cause you not to understand your interlocutor:
You haven’t spend much time in the area
Different age
Different sex
Different ethnicity
Different nationality
These variables can be the result of social distance.
Standard variety: The language taught in school, used in formal writing, etc.
Non-standard varieties: Other varieties. Non-linguists would call them dialects.
Mutual intelligibility: Linguists use this criterion to determine whether people are
speaking “the same language” or not. When people from different places can
understand each other.
Interlocutor: The person you are speaking with.
Dialect vs. mutual intelligibility
→ Look at the situation of former Yugoslavia - the Serbs and Croats are mutual
intelligible but because of the breakup of Yugoslavia they are considered distinct
languages.
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