CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. BACKGROUND
Places will show the relationship between Language and Society. It will show
the place of social interactions, social activities and social contexts. In society,
Language has crucial role, meaning that Language is crucial thing for their
communication because language can be a tool for their development. Language will
change based on the social categories. It is related to Sociolinguistics that learn about
how language differs because of certain social variables such as ethnicity, religion,
status, gender, level of education, age, etc., As the usage of a language varies from
place to place, language usage also varies among social classes.

B. THE TOPICS
This paper will discuss about The Social Categories: Gender, Age and
Address Term. There are 8 topics which will be discussed in this paper:
1. Language and Social Class
2. What is Sexist Language?
3. Gender-Speech Differences
4. Gender and Social Class
5. X and Y Generation’s Language Differentiation
6. Age-Features of Speech
7. Age Grading and Language Change
8. Address Form and Social Naming

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 CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION

1. Language and Social Class

Social class is a measure of status which is often based on occupation, income
and wealth, but also can be measured in terms of aspirations and mobility
(Wardhaugh, 2016). These factors can then be used to group individuals scoring
similarly on these factors into socioeconomic classes. As we will see, the notion of
contrast (and sometimes conflict) has been influential in shaping how some
sociolinguists interpret linguistic variation that is stratified by social class, and it
colours the explanation for some patterns of variability within a larger speech
community. In this work, the term ‘class’ is used more in the sense of Weber’s notion
of class as being based on a series of social actions.
In the topic here will explain the relationship between Language and Social
class. According to Barger: Social class is a social stratification based on economy.
Research has been shown in Nigeria that social class influences the students’ skill in
learning English in their classroom. There, English is language which determines the
development the students to reach high education and get broad knowledge. In other
hand, parent has crucial role for the development children skill in English, only the
children who in the middle and high class which probably have good English in their
class because of parent occupations. The reason is parents in middle or high class can
develop their children to speak English by preparing the facilities in their house such
as television, gadget, computer and many other technologies.
Thus, Social class is a function of the intersection of a whole lot of different
social (and sometimes even personal) attributes. So there are a number of different
ways in which class can be measured, and sociolinguists have tried to use a number
of different metrics in their studies of speech communities. Some of the more careful
work on class has taken such factors as people’s accommodation into account, giving
higher scores to people that own their own homes rather than rent, and even more
points to people depending on how much their home is worth and whether they have
made structural improvements on the property and carefully maintain its appearance.
But perhaps the most frequently used measure is a person’s occupation and/or the
occupation of the primary breadwinner in their family when they were growing up.

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 On the basis of factors like this, a speech community can be subdivided into different
socioeconomic classes (SECs).

2. What is Sexist Language?

Sexist Language is language that focuses on the inherent superiority of one
sex over the other in some elements such as vocabulary, grammar, technical term
(meaning), and others. Other sources said that Sexist Language is language that
excludes either man or women when discussing a topic which is applicable to both
sexes. Doyle (1998:149) states that terms and usages that exclude or discriminate
women are referred to as “sexist language”. This includes using the word man to
refer the humanity and using titles like Congressman and fireman. Another common
error that shows gender prejudice is assuming that the subject of all sentences is male.
For instance, the statement “Each student takes his own topic for his term paper.”
This statement direct the reader to affect that all students in the class are male but the
probability that of them are female. Underlying sexist language is gender prejudice
which can occur intentionally or unintentionally.
Some societies said that Sexist Language must be avoided by all of people
for some reasons. Sexist language encourages the discrimination and discourages
people pursuing their dream. If engineer are always addressed as male, a girl wants
to be an engineer may feel that she has no desire, since all engineers are men. Sexist
language also upsets people when they obtain themselves rejected. This is not a
matter that interrupts their right to free speech. We are free to use unpleasant
language and also free to decide that we do not agree with the definition of what is
sexist language. However, if we are using language that is unpleasant to half our
audience, they will not get our message across. People will not be accessible to our
arguments if audiences are pained by our use of completely masculine pronouns
(Magnusson, 2018).

3. Gender-Speech Differences
Here, there is differences between Gender and Sex. According to Wareing
(2004:76) sex refers to a biological category while gender refers to a social category.
Numerous observers have described women’s speech as being different from that of
men. I should also observe that there is a bias here: men’s speech usually provides
the norm against which women’s speech is judged. We could just as well ask how

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men’s speech differs from that of women, but investigators have not usually gone
about the task of looking at differences in that way. For example, in discussing
language change in Philadelphia, deliberately recasts his statement that ‘Women
conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed,
but conform less than men when they are not’ to read that men ‘are less conforming
than women with stable linguistic variables, and more conforming when change is in
progress within a linguistic system.’ He does this so as to avoid appearing to bias his
findings.
Any view too that women’s speech is trivial, gossip-laden, corrupt, illogical,
idle, euphemistic, or deficient is highly suspect; nor is it necessarily more precise,
cultivated, or stylish – or even less profane than men’s speech. Such judgments lack
solid evidentiary support. For example, apparently men ‘gossip’ just as much as
women do; men’s gossip is just different. Men indulge in a kind of phatic small talk
that involves insults, challenges, and various kinds of negative behaviour to do
exactly what women do by their use of nurturing, polite, feedback-laden, cooperative
talk. In doing this, they achieve the kind of solidarity they prize. It is the norms of
behaviour that are different.
Women and men are different, not only in conditions of their physical
characteristics but also in conditions of their speech in communication. Haas (in
Frankie 2013) retells that male speech and female speech have been observed to
differ in their form, topic, content, and use. Men may be more talkative and directive
as they use more non-standard forms, talk more about sports, money, and business,
and more commonly refer to time, space, quantity, destructive action, perceptual
attributes, physical movements, and objects. On the other hand, women are
frequently more supportive, polite, and expressive, talk more about home, and
family, and use more words involving feeling, evaluation, interpretation, and
psychological state. However, it cannot be concluded that the differences in the
speech of men and women are universal as these findings cannot be generalised to
all contexts.
This topic explains about the differences in the linguistics features in the
speech of men and women. Women’s speech is very much affected by their choice
of linguistics forms. They prefer to use a lot of questions to ask about information
which incidentally helps to develop quite a fair participation especially in terms of
turn talking by all speakers. Thus, women’s speech is shorter in forms than the men’s

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 and they change from one topic to another in a shorter time than men. Humour is
frequently used by women speakers to create a relaxed and gaiety atmosphere that is
filled with enthusiasm and joy with the unexpected rushed of giggles and laughter in
their speech. So, Men, in contrast used minimal question in their conversation and
the absent of humour discard giggles and laughter.

4. Gender and Social Class

Gender is something that cannot be avoided in the society (Subon, 2013). It’s
related to social class. In many traditional cultures, women is placed in the second
position after men. The functions and roles which are performed by women in society
unconsciously supposed as the society of second class. In this position, the gender
bias is happened in society. Although, all of people aware that there are many
differences between men and women biologically but in the context of culture, the
role which is performed must have equality. Based on the phenomenon here, culture
construction has strong contribution in positioning the women’s and men’s role. So
that’s why, many inequalities appear the movement of feminism which claims men’s
domination.
Moreover, women in this era, in globalization can be a Master of Science and
technology. Meaning that they have same equality as men. Nowadays, women have
additional jobs outside of their home. They have multiple roles such as housewife,
farmer, breeder, merchant and others. This jobs usually are done by the men in daily
life but in fact women can do it perfectly. So, we can conclude that gender influences
the social class in society.

5. X and Y Generation’s Language Differentiation

That there are differences between men and women is hardly a matter of
dispute. Females have two X chromosomes whereas males have an X and a Y. This
is a key genetic difference and no geneticist regards that difference as unimportant.
On average, females have fatter and less muscle than males, are not as strong, and
weigh less. They also mature more rapidly and live longer. The female voice usually
has different characteristics from the male voice, and often females and males exhibit
different ranges of verbal skills. However, we also know that many of the differences
may result from different socialization practices. For instance, women may live
longer than men because of the different roles they play in society and the different

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 jobs they tend to fill. Differences in voice quality may be accentuated by beliefs about
what men and women should sound like when they talk, and any differences in verbal
skills may be explained in great part through differences in upbringing. (It has often
been noted that there is far more reading failure in schools among boys than girls,
but it does not follow from this fact that boys are inherently less well equipped to
learn to read, for their poor performance in comparison to girls may be sociocultural
in origin rather than genetic.) There is also an important caveat concerning all such
studies showing differences between groups, and the two genders are just groups like
any other; it is one I made earlier and will repeat here. For many in the two groups
under comparison there will be no difference at all: the next person you meet on the
street may be male or female, tall or short, long-lived or short-lived, high-voiced or
low-voiced, and so on, with not one of these characteristics being predictable from
any other. (Given a thousand or more such encounters some tendencies may emerge,
but even knowing what these are would not help you with the very next person you
meet.)

6. Age Grading and Language Change

a. Age Grading
The term “age-grading” was first introduced by anthropologist/linguist
Charles F. Hockett, but defined as it is used today by sociolinguist William Labov.
He defined it as an individual linguistic change against a backdrop of community
stability. Age-grading is not limited to changes at any one particular stage in life, but
can be studied in the way that babies, adolescents, young adults speak, and the elderly
speak.
The age pattern is a typical sociolinguistic pattern based on the age of a
speaker. It describes a characteristic type of age-graded linguistic variation and
describes change in the speech behavior of individual speakers as they get older.
General linguistic tendencies can be determined for different life stages: adolescence
(up to 50 years age), older adults (over 50 years old).
The formulation of the age pattern (age-grading): There is a relationship
between the age of a speaker and the use of a particular linguistic variety in the form
that:
1) Adolescents will generally use more non-standard varieties than younger adults
(non-prestige varieties, often specific ‘anti-prestige’). From adolescence to

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 adulthood the use of non-standard forms of speech will gradually decrease in
favor of more standard form of speech (prestige varieties) until a particular stage
in late adulthood.
2) The frequency of using standard forms of speech will again decrease within older
adults and more non-standard forms (non-prestige varieties) will be used.

b. The Study of Language Change

Language change is the phenomenon by which permanent alterations are
made in the features and the use of a language over time (Downes, 1984). It can be
all natural languages change, and language change affects all areas of language use.
Types of language change include sound changes, lexical change, semantic change,
and syntactic change. The branch of linguistics that expressly concerned with
changes in a language (or languages) over time is historical linguistics (also known
as diachronic linguistics).
There is 3 problems of change are central questions within the study of
language change and they have been treated as the three central problems Holmes
(2001: 168):
1) The actuation problem is concerned with an explanation of what it is that actually
triggers language change.
2) The transition problem is concerned with the factors that are responsible for the
spread of linguistic change within a speech community.
3) The embedding problem is concerned with the localization of change with respect
to the linguistic and social settings in which this change is taking place.

Language change and the mechanics of language change are investigated by

apparent time studies and real time studies of language change which differ from
each other in the way they approach the detection of language change in speech
community.

1) Apparent time studies of language change focus on a comparison between the

speech patterns of different age groups (e.g. younger and older speaker) within the
same speech community at a certain moment in time. If younger speakers show
linguistic differences to older speakers in a speech community, this can be
interpreted as an indication of linguistic change taking place in this community.
However, in the course of such a comparison, it is important to make a distinction

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 between linguistic differences that are based on speaker age (thus due to the stable
variable of age-grading) and differences that truly reflect language change in
progress.
2) Real time studies of language change focus on detecting change not in apparent
time but in real time. The speech of different age groups are compared at different
moments in time in order to detect historical change in the community. E.g. to
find out about linguistic change in a community as it progresses through time.
Language change in real time can be illustrated by the repetition of a community
study. That is, the linguistic variation in a speech community is reinvestigated in
a new study undertaken after a certain amount of time. Significant deviations from
the originally found speech patterns within this community are interpreted as signs
of linguistic change over time.

7. Address Form and Social Naming

1) Address Form
(Yang, 2010) Address forms are a key to the understanding of social concepts
and human relationship in a society. Different degrees of status difference or
intimacy need the choosing of different forms of address. The connotations of
English address forms are all different and each gets different stylistic or emotional
implications, and rules for their usage are quite complex, and they vary from class to
class, age group to age group, place to place. In addition, they are also affected by a
series of social factors. How to address people appropriately needs not only a good
understanding of the rules, but also the taking of all relevant factors into
consideration. Address form can also be a marker of regional difference, sex or racial
discrimination, social class difference, etc. It is an important aspect of social
behaviour. In English teaching, the teacher should be aware of the importance of the
choosing of proper address forms. The misuse of a title can sometimes put other
people in an awkward situation, even offend them if we keep ignoring its important
function. A thorough study and good mastery of address forms is necessary for
intercultural communication.

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a. Region Difference

There are differences even in the way different regions in the United
States use different forms of address. For example, the use of a person’s first
manes in North America does not necessarily indicate friendship or power. First
names are required among people who work closely together, even though they
may not like each other at all. First names may even be used to refer to public
figures, but contemptuously as well as admiring. The various use of address
forms sometimes merely serve as a marker of regional difference, but sometimes
it is enough to cause miscommunication. Wolfson and Manes (1978) reported
that the address form ma’am has different meanings in the southern part of the
United States than it has elsewhere. In the South, the term ma’am is often used a
substitution for the formula “I beg your pardon?” or “pardon?” in asking someone
to repeat what he has said or to explain something. The contrast in the use of the
two forms is exemplified in the following conversation.

(1) A: Could you tell me how late you’re open this evening?
B: Ma’am?
A: Could you tell me how late you’re open this evening?
B: Until six.

In addition, it was found that the phase “Yes, Ma’am” is often used
instead of “You’re welcome” as a response to “Thank you”. For example:

(2) A: Could you tell me how late you’re open this evening?
B: Until five-thirty.
A: Thank you very much.
B: Yes, ma’am.

Not only is the form “ma’am” gives different meanings in the South, it
is also used in very different social contexts than elsewhere in the country. In the
northeast, for example, “ma’am” was found to occur between strangers and, to a
lesser extent, from lower to upper status speakers. In the South, however, it was
found that the term was used not only to strangers but also to acquaintance and
even intimates. Thus, graduate students at the University of Virginia were heard
to be addressed as “ma’am” by their male professors, female colleagues were
given this address form by their male colleagues, and husbands were even heard

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 to use this term to their own wives. While it is unlikely that women from other
parts of the country would become offended if they were addressed as “ma’am”
in situations where they were unaccustomed to it, it is possible that southern
women would misunderstand the absence of this form where they were used to
expecting it, and would therefore regard non-southern speakers as rude or lacking
in respect for women.

b. Sex Variation

We all know that address forms of English is asymmetrical, that is, we

can use “Mr.” to address all the male, but we use different terms to address the
female who are unmarried (Miss) and who are married (Mrs.). Another
noteworthy phenomenon concerning address forms among speakers of American
English is the way in which strangers in public situations address unknown
women by terms of endearment. Women in America are often addressed with a
good deal less respect than are men. Those women are mostly women in service
encounters. The commonly used terms of endearment are dear, love, honey,
sweetheart, but some others are unusual, such as cake, peach, tomato, dish,
cheese, etc. For example:

(3) (From The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by Eliot)

Shall I part my chair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?

The fact that women are addressed publicly by nonreciprocal terms of

endearment, no matter what their age or status, may be seen as a sign that female
are generally held in less respect than are males in American society. There are
some other differences between address forms of male and female. R. B. Rubin,
in a study of address forms for male and female professors, found that female
professor, especially those in the 26 to 33 age group, were addressed by first
name much more often than their male colleagues. Rubin also points out that
female students use familiar terms more often than male students. Another study
by McConnell-Ginet (1978) found that women in general American society had
at their disposal a much smaller number of address forms than did men. That is,
while men seem to be free to address other men, especially those whose
occupation involve driving taxis or bartering, by use of such terms as Buddy or

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 Mac, social rules for women preclude such usage. Women are addressed by terms
of endearment, or nothing at all.

c. Race Variation

In the United States, the white have often used naming and addressing
practice to put blacks in their place. Hence the odious use of “Boy” to address
the blacks is well-known, as is shown in the following example:

(4) A black physician, Dr. Poussaint, was stopped by a white policeman in a

southern town in the United States and was questioned:
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Doc. Poussaint, I’m a physician.”
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Alvin”

In this conversation, the policeman insulted Doc. Poussaint three times.

For two times he used the racial discriminating address form “boy”, another was
that he was not satisfied with the physician’s answer “Doc. Poussaint” and
continued to ask the “name” of the physician. By being addressed “boy”, Doc.
Poussaint experienced a feeling of “profound humiliation”. The asymmetrical
use of names was also a part of the system. White people addressed the blacks
by their first names in situations that required them to use title, or title and last
names, if they were addressing whites. There was a clear racial distinction in the
practice. According to Johnson, one consequence of this practice was that:
Middle and upper class Negro women never permit their first names to be
known… The wife of a well-to-do Negro businessman went into a department
store in Atlanta to enquire about an account. The clerk asked her first name, and
she said “Mrs. William Jones”. The clerk insisted in her first name, and when
she refused to give it, declared that the business could not be completed without
it. It was a large account, and the manager, to whom appeal was made, decided
that “Mrs.” was simply “good business” and not “social equality” (Johnson
1982). In this case, “good business” overrode the desire to reinforce the social
inequality that would have resulted from the woman’s giving the salesclerk the
information requested and then the inevitable use of that first name alone by the

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clerk requested and not “social equality”. The special or asymmetrical use of
address forms indicates racial discrimination in America.

2) Social Naming
Social naming is a set of names which is used as identity of particular
groups in a region. By knowing the characteristics of their social naming, we
can understand their region where they live. In Western Culture the social
name consists of given name and surname. Given name known as a first
name, forename, or Christian name. It also combines together with a surname
(also known as a last name or family name). For instance:

Thomas and Jefferson in Thomas Jefferson

The latter to indicate that the individual belongs to a family, a tribe,

or a clan. Where there are two or more given names, typically only one (in
English-Speaking culture usually the first) is used in normal speech.

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 CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION

From this paper, we can conclude that there are many relations between
societies and languages in particular place. Based on the topic which is discussed in
this paper, prove that there are many social factors that influence the society in
mastering a language such as gender, social class, speech differences, age, address
term and also social naming. These social factors make the society has its many
language features in their particular place.
In society, language has crucial role. It is a crucial tool to communicate each
other. By using language, society can deliver their idea well. As the context of
society, language is related to the society who are in every place. So that’s why, all
of the discussions are related to the Sociolinguistics view and the usage of a language
varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes.

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Magnusson, S. (2008, January 18). Sexist Language . "Gender marking of occupational

terms and the non-parallel treatment of boy and girl", p. 24.

Meyerhoff, M. (2006). Introducing Socilinguistics. New York: Routledge .

Subon, F. (2013). Gender Differences in the Use of Linguistics Forms in the Speech of
Men and Women in the Malaysian Context. IOSR Journal Of Humanities And
Social Science (IOSR-JHSS), 67-79. Vol.13

Wardhaugh, R. (2006). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Yang, X. (2010). Address Forms of English: Rules and Variations . Journal of Language
Teaching and Research, 743-745. Vol. 1, No. 5

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