sociolinguistics

• One of the principal uses of language is to communicate meaning, but it is also used to establish and to maintain social relationships. • It is the second function of language use that sociolinguists study.
• Regional/geographical dialects: • Varieties of a language spoken in a geographical area, such as Cockney dialect, and Yorkshire dialect in Britain, or North Midland dialect and South Midland dialect in the United States, and Guangdong dialect in China.
• Sociolects and standard dialects are often confused because they are interpreted only in terms of prestige. • In due course the sociolect with the highest status in a country often acquires the status of the standard dialect.
• A regional dialect is a variation of language different enough to be classed as a separate entity, but not different enough to be classed as a separate language. • Sometimes a dialect rises in status and becomes the standard variety of a country, becoming standard dialect, e.g. standard English, standard Chinese.
• Like other varieties of English, black English has its own features at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical level. • Simplification of consonant clusters at the end of a word (consonant deletion rule). • The final-position consonants are often deleted (passed [pa:s], mend [men], desk [des], and told [təul ] • A syntactic feature is the deletion of ‘be’ as in “They mine”, “You crazy”, “Her hands cold”, and “That house big”. • Copula verb deletion. (some other dialects of English and in languages such as Russian and Chinese)
• Another syntactic feature is the use of double negation constructions. • He don’t know nothing. • I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. • Such double negation constructions were found in all dialects of English of the earlier periods.
• Regional variation is speech variation that is geographically divided (according to the particular area where the speaker comes from). • The most distinguishable linguistic feature in the regional variation is accent.
Definition and the Goal
• 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 behaviours, some of which are linguistic.
• Ethic dialect: • A social dialect of a language that cuts across regional differences; it is mainly spoken by a less privileged population that has experienced some form of social isolation such as racial discrimination or segregation. • Black English is the kind of English spoken mostly by a large section of non-middleclass American Blacks.
• Accent and Dialect • Accent is the manner of pronunciation that identify where a speaker is from, in contrast to dialect, e.g. New York accent. • Dialect is a variety of a language with the combinational features of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
• No two speakers speak exactly the same way. • Each speaker has certain characteristic features of his own in the way of speaking. • “Shakespeare’s language” or “Lu Xun’s language”
Register
• Language varies with the user but it also varies with the situations under which it is used, i.e. the social context. • A register is the type of language which is selected as appropriate to the type of situation. • Three social variables determine the register: field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse.
sociolinguistics
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Contents: 1.Definition and Goal. nguage varieties. Dialectal varieties Register 3.Standard and Nonstandard Dialect 4.Pidgin and Creole 5.Bilingualism and Diglossia
• The goal of sociolinguistics is to explore the nature of language variation and language use.
Language variation
• Language use varies regionally, socially, stylistically, temporally, individually.
• Social dialects or sociolects: • Varieties of a language used by people belonging to particular social classes. • Since members of a speech community bind themselves together in groups for gains, security, amusement, or solidarity, they tend to use the same kind of language which is highly stratified in terms of social division, such as class, professional status, age and sex.
• Idiolects: • Varieties of a language used by individual speakers, with peculiarities of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. • Each individual in a speech community speaks in a characteristically individual way and makes special choice of words to express his thoughts.