Sociolinguistics

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Sociolinguistics

• Introducing Sociolinguistics
• Dr. Emma Moore

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Contents

• What is sociolinguistics?
• Why study sociolinguistics?
• What is the scope of sociolinguistics?

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What is Sociolinguistics?

• What the academics say

We can define sociolinguistics as the study of
language in relation to society.
Hudson (1996 1)
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What is Sociolinguistics?

• What the academics say

Trudgill (2004 21)
Sociolinguistics is that part of linguistics
which is concerned with language as a social and
cultural phenomenon. It investigates the field of
language and society and has close connections
with the social sciences
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What is Sociolinguistics?

• What the academics say

Holmes (1992 16)
The sociolinguists aim is to move towards a
theory which provides a motivated account of the
way language is used in a community, and of the
choices people make when they use language
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What is Sociolinguistics?

• No set definition or single approach, but a set
  of reoccurring themes
• Combining linguistic AND social theory
• Drawing upon our knowledge of the social world to
  better understand language

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What is Sociolinguistics?
Language
Society
Attitudes
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What is Sociolinguistics?
Politics capitalist, communist, sexist,
democratic, fascist
Language
Setting formal, casual
Power rights, norms, judgements
Attitudes religious, gender, education
History war, change,events
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Why did sociolinguistics emerge?

• The legacy of formal linguistics
• Constructs models of the linguistic system
• Phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics
• Interested in humans underlying knowledge of
  language structure

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Isolating language structure

• Chomskys competence/performance distinction
• Competence underlying knowledge of language
  structure
• Performance language output which is affected
  by language-external conditions

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
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Something that makes sociolinguists cross

• Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an
  ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
  homogenous speech-community, who knows its
  language perfectly and is unaffected by such
  grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory
  limitations, distractions, shifts of attention
  and interest, and errors (random or
  characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the
  language in actual performance. This seems to me
  to have been the positions of the founders of
  modern general linguistics, and no cogent reason
  for modifying it has been offered (Chomsky
  1965).

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Lets think about that

• Do ALL speakers share the same underlying
  knowledge of language?
• How do we know?
• Is language solely a cognitive process?

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What do we use language to do?

• Communication AND achievement of social goals
• Language without social knowledge a social
  monster (Hymes 1974 75)
• Attitudes
• Stances
• Judgements

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How do we know what to say?

• Not just important to know the linguistic rules,
  but the social rules too
• When is it appropriate to speak?
• Who is able to speak?
• Which speech forms are affective in getting what
  you want done?
• Our sociolinguistic knowledge is structured
• Communicative competence (Hymes 1971)

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Exercise

• You want someone to pass you a copy of the bus
  timetable. How would you ask
• a friend?
• someone at the bus stop?

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So, what do sociolinguists want to do?

• Provide a socially realistic linguistics
• To do this we must
• Represent all speakers
• Not rely upon speaker intuition
• Be descriptive not prescriptive
• This allows us to learn more about language

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Example of a socially-realistic linguistics

• Developing the work of dialectologists
• To represent all sorts of social identities,
  social groups and individuals
• Region
• social class
• age
• gender
• social group
• How do linguistic features pattern according
  social groupings?
• Also known as Variationist sociolinguistics or
  quantitative sociolinguistics

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Anything else?

• Solve social problems involving language
• To do this, we must
• Think about the role of power in language
• Look to language for evidence of social
  inequality
• Examine social policy with respect to language
• This allows us to learn more about society

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Examples of policy implications

• Sexism/racism in language
• Does our language render women invisible
• Dialect and education research and inequality
• Is it harder for nonstandard children to achieve
  academic success?
• Language policy and planning affects social
  policy
• Multilingualism Standardisation Education
  Globalisation

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The structure of language variation

• Variation based on social factors is not FREE
  VARIATION

She were a good laugh
Free Variation Whether or not one form or
another form is used is linguistically
insignificant
She was a good laugh
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Sociolinguists believe in structured heterogeneity

• Social constraints
• Linguistic constraints

She were a good laugh
Social Social class
Linguistic Type of pronoun?
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Social constraints on language

• We learn to speak in different ways because of
  our place in society
• Social class
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Age
• Region of origin

• Language is indexical It reflects our social
  memberships
• It also helps to construct and define our social
  memberships

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Are we all experts?

• We all have stories about our experience of
  language and its interaction with society
• Sociolinguistics a target for disparagement?
• Sociolinguistics as scientific and rigorous as
  any other academic field

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Summing Up

• Sociolinguistics is interdisciplinary
• It emerged from a particular stance towards
  formal linguistics
• Well focus on the branch of sociolinguistics
  that aims to provide a socially-realistic
  linguistics

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References and Additional Reading

• Hudson, R.A. (1996) Sociolinguistics. Cambridge
  CUP.
• Meyerhoff, Miriam (2006) Introducing
  Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh EUP.
• Trudgill (2000) Sociolinguistics, Fourth edition.
  London Penguin books.
• Holmes, Janet (1992) An Introduction to
  Sociolinguistics. London Longman.
• Hymes, Dell (1971) On Communicative Competence.
  Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Hymes, Dell (1974) Foundations in
  Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia University of
  Pennsylvania Press.
• Required Reading Meyerhoff (2006 Chapter 1)