Sociolinguistics Flashcards

Language and Society

he concept of communicative competence is the revival of interest in language in its broadest sense is communicative competence. The term was first used by Dell Hymes (1972). He argued that it was essential to incorporate social and, cultural factors into linguistic description. In his view, the Chomsky an notion of the child internalizing a set of rules which enable her/him to produce grammatical sentences doesn't go far enough: the child learns not just grammar but also a sense of appropriateness. It is not sufficient for the child to be linguistically competent; in order to function in the real world, s/he must also have learned when to speak, when to remain silent, what to talk about -and how to talk about it –in different circumstances.

Imagine someone who speaks at the same time as others, who doesn't respond to questions, who looks away when addressed, who stands embarrassingly close to another speaker, who doesn't laugh when someone tells a joke. Such a person might use well-formed sentences, but we would all recognize that they were incompetent in an important sense. It is this knowledge of how language is used in a given society which constitutes communicative competence (Coates, 1993).

A language is a set of words and rules of grammar for the use of those words. Words are symbols that stand for ideas and objects that are important in a culture. A word is merely a combination of sounds and letters that have no meaning apart from that which is assigned to it by the language. In English, the letters c-a-r stand for an automobile, but in French an automobile is symbolized by the word vulture, in German it is called Wagen, and in Spanish it is referred to as cache. Some languages do not even have a word for automobile. In Indonesian, it is known as mobil but before that it is known as oto.

Many languages borrow from other languages. A primitive tribe that is exposed to automobiles may add to their language the word for car that is used by the people who have introduced the car to their culture, or the tribe may make up a new word for car. The French had no word in their language for bulldozer when they first used this piece of equipment. A government commission whose aim is to preserve the French language created a new word for bulldozer: boater. Rather than use the new word, however, the French people adopted the English term "bulldozer." Language not only helps people interpret the world, but it is also an important part of the cultural identity of a people. Thus, a language enables a people to store knowledge and transmit their culture to succeeding generations. In the modern times, storing knowledge can be in the form of internet and multimedia, where the language stored in the form of MP3, DVD, VCD, CD, etc.

Communicative competence shifted across time as there are a lot of new technologies influencing it. From the global presence till the rise of the global teenager which has similar impact in every country in the world, except those with very primitive society. Global operators such as CNN International a 24 hour news service and MTV program are often regarded as the vehicle for submerging the world’s teenagers with US English music culture (Gradoll, 1997).

Spoken language has its relation with oral culture that we can see in verbal interaction how social structure is constructed, so the two different media of audio and visual modes of interaction. The spoken medium in this case the audio visual taken from programs transmitted by satellite dish (parabola) will give us up-to-date news of various things. There is one factor that make the condition not interactive that the viewers cannot answer directly to what the host says. However, with the use of mobile phone using Short Message Service (SMS), facsimile messages (fax), e-mail messages, the factor above can be overcome.

Various aspects of verbal interaction such as the interlocutors may not speak at the same time can be overcome by the use of facsimile messages, etc. as stated above. These facsimile messages and SMS can be transformed into saved messages, printed messages such as in the MTV programs for youngsters. Young people can respond to the spoken language of a VJ MTV or Video Jockey of MTV program directly. This is an impossible thing to happen five years ago.

Another form of speech is written speech and it happens during the MTV program. So, actually when MTV listeners watch the program, they will be trained by authentic oral speech, latest songs, written SMS that can be seen on the TV screen. These viewers are famous as the ‘MTV generation’.

Language and Its Definition

The concept of communicative competence is the revival of interest in language in its broadest sense is communicative competence. The term was first used by Dell Hymes (1972).

Satellite Television

Satellite television channels bring English into homes, creating a global audio visual culture. It has been regarded as a major drive of global English and one of the famous TV channel is MTV.

The Impact of Language

Advertisements of English language products from multinational corporations reflect the easy availability of English language product on the world market. In line with the improvement of the program, they have reached the people in the individual countries that is beyond English speaking audiences.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis-language influences the way people see the world, which means every language has an effect upon what the people who use it see, feel, think and can talk about.

Speechand Writing

Speech is transient, rather than permanent. Because of physical constraints, interlocutors may not speak at the same time, or else they cannot hear what the others say. They are bound by the non-reversible distribution of turns at talk. Written language, by contrast, can be stored, retrieved, and recollected, and responses can be delayed. Because it cannot be immediately challenged as in oral communication, written language carries more weight and hence more prestige.

Groups

The difference between primary and secondary groups are primary group is a relatively small group whose member interact in a regular and intimate basis. Secondary group is a group or category that people use to evaluate themselves and their behavior.

Boundaries

Groups are distinguishable from the social environment. They are cohesive units with their own boundaries. The boundaries of a group can be defined by recurring patterns of interaction, by formal membership requirements, by culturally meaningful symbols such as uniforms and badges, and by conflict with other groups.

Size

The number of members in a group is an important structural characteristic that influences the behavior of a group's members in a variety of ways (Simmel, 1950; Blau, 1977). Large groups are always secondary groups and have the characteristics of secondary groups. Small groups can be either primary groups or secondary groups, but even those that are secondary groups often have some traits of primary groups, such as face-to-face interaction.

Social Positioning

The use of social deictic like pronouns, forms of address, or names, is one way speakers align themselves to the cultural context as they understand it. We have seen how changes in intonation and pronunciation can also indicate changes in our perception of our role as a participant in an interaction, and in our alignment to others, a positioning footing, i.e. the stance we take up to ourselves and to the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of utterances. A change in footing is usually marked by a change in register, tone of voice or bodily orientation.

Protecting Face

The ultimate aim of negotiating frames and footings in conversation is to protect one's own and other participants' face at all times. For the co-operative principle is a guide to individual behavior than it is the very condition of continued social interaction, and the enactment of a group's cultural self-understanding. Members of a cultural group need to feel respected and not impinged upon in their autonomy, pride, and self-sufficiency (negative face). They also need to be reinforced in their view of themselves as polite, considerate, respectful members of their culture (positive face).

Conversational Style

In face-to-face verbal exchanges, the choice of orate features of speech can give the participants a feeling of joint interpersonal involvement rather than the sense of detachment or objectivity that comes with the mere transmission of factual information. Different contexts of situation and different contexts of culture call for different conversational styles.

Sociolinguistics

ociolinguistics is concerned with investigating the relationships between language and society with the goal being a better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication (Wardaugh, 1998). Hudson (1996) quoted by Wardaugh described that sociolinguistics is the study of society in relation to language. It investigates how social structure influences the way people talk and how language varieties and patterns of use correlate with social attributes such as class, sex, and age (Coulmas, 1997, Wardaugh, 1998).

Sociolinguistics is the field that studies the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live. It is a field of study that assumes that human society is made up of many related patterns and behaviors, some of which are linguistic. One of the principal uses of language is to communicate meaning, but it is also used to establish and to maintain social relationships.

Watch a mother with a young child. Most of their talk is a) devoted to nurturing the social bond between them, b) listen to two friends talking c) much of their conversation functions to express and refine their mutual compact of companionship. When you meet strangers, the way they talk informs you about their social and geographical backgrounds, and the way you talk sends subtle or blatant signals about what you think of them. It is these aspects of language use that sociolinguists study.

In the thirty years or so that it has been recognized as a branch

of the scientific study of language, sociolinguistics has grown into one of the most important of the 'hyphenated' fields of linguistics. This term distinguishes the core fields of historical and descriptive linguistics (phonology, morphology, and syntax) from the newer interdisciplinary fields like psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics or the sociology of language.

Stranded at times between sociology (one of the field's putative parents) and linguistics (the other), the practitioners of sociolinguistics have so far avoided the rigorous bounds of a single theoretical model, or the identifying shelter of a single professional organization. They apply a plethora of methods to a multitude of subjects that all have in common one single thread: languages and their use in social contexts.

Sociolinguistics takes as its primary task to map linguistic variation on to social conditions. This mapping helps understand not just synchronic variation (variation at a single point of time), but also diachronic variation (variation over time) or language change. The close intertwining of linguistic and social facts is crucial to a sociolinguistic approach. Even before small children can speak clearly, they develop a distinct style of address to be used when speaking to anyone or anything smaller. As they grow, they add more and more variations to their speech, and these come to be associated with recognizable styles. As early as the age of five, children asked to play roles try to imitate the styles of speech of many different people. These small variations in language that everyone acquires in normal upbringing can be used to identify us, or the person we are talking to, or the subject we are talking about. There is no single-style or single-variety speaker; no speech community that does not have a choice of varieties; and many fewer monolinguals than English speakers might imagine.

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is concerned with investigating the relationships between language and society with the goal being a better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication (Wardaugh, 1998).

Complementary Approaches

Eschewing the normal acrimony of academic debate, we might say that the various complementary approaches to the study of language each find a different aspect of the complex phenomenon to be of enthralling interest.

Print Language and Literate Culture

The technology of writing and print technology have over time not only changed the medium of language use, but irrevocably changed our way of thinking and talking about culture.

Print and Power

Institutional power has traditionally ensured cultural continuity by providing a safeguard against the unbounded interpretation texts. With the advent of print culture, the need to hand-copy texts disappeared, and so did the caste of scribes.

Cultural Identity

It is widely believed that there is a natural connection between the language spoken by members of a social group and that group's identity. By their accent, their vocabulary, their discourse patterns, speakers identify themselves and are identified as members of this or that speech and discourse community.

Language Crossing as An Act of Identity

One way of surviving culturally in immigration settings is to exploit, rather than stifle, the endless variety of meanings afforded by participation in several discourse communities at once. More and more people are living, speaking and interacting in in-between spaces, across multiple languages or varieties of the same language choose one way of talking over another depending on the topic, the interlocutor and the situational context.

Linguistic Nationalism

The association of one language variety with the membership in one national community has been referred to as linguistic nationalism.

Current Issues

The relationship of language and culture in language study is one of the most hotly debated issues at the present time.

Cross-Cultural, Intercultural, Multicultural

The term 'cross-cultural' or Intercultural usually refers to the meeting of two cultures or two languages across the political boundaries of nation-states. They are predicated on the equivalence of one nation-one culture-one language, and on the expectation that a 'culture shock' may take place upon crossing national boundaries.

Presupposition and Entailment

The technical terms presupposition and entailment are used to describe two different aspects of this kind of information. It is worth noting at the outset that presupposition and entailment were considered to be much more central to pragmatics in the past than they are now. In more recent approaches, there has been less interest in the type of technical discussion associated with the logical analysis of these phenomena.

Presupposition

A presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. Presupposition is treated as a relationship between two propositions. In the analysis of how speakers' assumptions are typically expressed, presupposition has been associated with the use of a large number of words, phrases, and structures.

Particularized Conversational Implicatures

Our conversations take place in very specific contexts in which locally recognized inferences are assumed. Such inferences are required to work out the conveyed meanings which result from particularized conversational implicatures. Because they are by far the most common, particularized conversational implicatures are typically just called implicatures.

Properties of Conversational Implicatures

So far, all the implicatures we have considered have been situated within conversation, with the inferences being made by people who hear the utterances and attempt to maintain the assumption of cooperative interaction. Because these implicatures are part of what is communicated and not said, speakers can always deny that they intended to communicate such meanings, conversational implicatures are deniable. They can be explicitly denied (or alternatively, reinforced) in different ways. Implicatures can be calculated, suspended, cancelled, and reinforced.