RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

Language is central to social interaction in every society, regardless of location and time
period. Language and social interaction have a reciprocal relationship: language shapes social
interactions and social interactions shape language.
Language is a tool for interact with other human. So language can’t separated with human.
Through language we can related and interact with other human and created communicative in
the community
Sociolinguistics is the study of the connection between language and society and the way
people use language in different social situations. It asks the question, "How does language
affect the social nature of human beings, and how does social interaction shape language?" It
ranges greatly in depth and detail, from the study of dialects across a given region to the analysis
of the way men and women speak to each other in certain situations.
The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that language is variable and ever-changing. As a
result, language is not uniform or constant. Rather, it is varied and inconsistent for both the
individual user and within and among groups of speakers who use the same language.
People adjust the way they talk to their social situation. An individual, for instance, will
speak differently to a child than he or she will to their college professor. This socio-situational
variation is sometimes called register and depends no only on the occasion and relationship
between the participants, but also on the participants’ region, ethnicity, socioeconomic status,
age, and gender.
One way that sociolinguists study language is through dated written records. They
examine both hand-written and printed documents to identify how language and society have
interacted in the past. This is often referred to as historical sociolinguistics: the study of the
relationship between changes in society and changes in language over time. For example,
historical sociolinguists have studied the use and frequency of the pronoun thou in dated
documents and found that its replacement with the word you is correlated with changes in class
structure in 16th and 17th century England.
Sociolinguists also commonly study dialect, which is the regional, social, or ethnic
variation of a language. For example, the primary language in the United States is English.
People who live in the South, however, often vary in the way they speak and the words they use
compared to people who live in the Northwest, even though it is all the same language. There are
different dialects of English, depending on what region of the country you are in.
Sociolinguists study many other issues as well. For instance, they often examine the
values that hearers place on variations in language, the regulation of linguistic behavior,
language standardization, and educational and governmental policies concerning language.

1.      Discussion
In society’s life language function traditionally can be said as means of verbal
communication used by the society to communicate. But the language function is not merely a
means of communication. Chaer (2004:15) said that function that become a sociolinguistic
problem is from the speaker, listener, topic, code, and testament side.
The means from the statement that the point is that language is different if we see from
different aspec as mentioned above. Explanation from language function as follow :
1.      Listener side
 From listener side, language function directive. Language is not just make listener do something,
but do anything conform what speaker want.
2.      Speaker side
From speaker side, language function personally or individually. It means that speaker explain
about his attitude to what he speak.
3.      Topic side
From topic side, language function reference. In this matter the language function as instrument
for explain about object or happening in the sorrounding speaker or in the culture.
4.      Code side
From code side, language function metalingual or metalinguistic.It’s language used to talk about
language itself.
5.      Message side
From the speech side that’s give, language function imaginative. It’s the language can be used to
convey think, idea, and feeling.
In verbal reportaire has society’s own, society language has different by three, they are :
1.      Monolingual society (One language)
2.      Bilingual society (Two language)
3.      Multilingual society (More than two language)

In this part of the discussion, the writer will describe sociolinguistic factors, the dialects,
languages in contact, language and education, and language use (Holmes, 1992; Fromkin, 2011).
1. Sociolinguistic factors
a. Social factors
The social factors are including the users, participants, social settings and functions. The
users divide “who is talking to whom (e.g. wife-husband, teacher-student). The setting and social
context are also relevant such as, at home, hospital and class. The function describes “why are
they speaking” and another factor is topic which describes “what are they talking about”.
b. Social dimensions
The relationship between the participants is one of the factors of the social dimension.
The factors like the social distance (intimate-high solidarity), status scale (high-low status), the
status, formality (formal-informal) and functional scale (topic of interaction) are really
influenced the sociolinguistics.
c. Explanation factors
This factor is to identify clearly the linguistic variation such as, vocabulary, sounds,
grammatical construction, dialects, languages and the different social which lead the speakers to
use one form rather than another such as, participant, setting or function of the interaction.
2. Dialect
All speakers can talk to each other and pretty much understand each other. Between one
and another do not speak alike. It can be influenced by age, sex, social situation and where and
when the language was learned. The language of an individual speaker with its unique
characteristics is referred to as the speaker’s idiolect. When there are systematic differences in
the way groups speak a language, it says that each group speaks a dialect of that language.
Chambers (1980:5) noticed that dialect on the other hand, refers to varieties which are
grammatically (and perhaps lexically) as well as phonologically different from other varieties.
The example when the two speakers are say I done it last night and I did it last night, they are
saying different dialects.
 3. Language in contact
Sometime the user of language finds the speaker of language that speaks different
language. It can be seen clearly in some part of the world that the speaker of bilingual
communities, you may not have to travel very far at all to find the language disconnect. To make
the user understand about this situation, they need a language that can communicate each other.
In this part, lingua franca, bilingualism, pidgin and creole, are the kinds of language in contact.
The details are explained below.
Lingua Franca is the language that is used by common agreement of the people who
speak diverse language. English has been called lingua franca of the whole world.
Pidgin and Creole
Pidgin is a mixed language that arises in situations where speakers of different languages
are unable to understand each other’s native language and, therefore need to develop a common
means of communication (Bussman, 1998:905). Pidgin is used to communicate among the
people who have no common language (Todd, 1974:1). Creole is defined as a language has
evolved in a contact situation to become the native of generation of the speaker (Fromkin,
2011:458). It can be said that creoles are the pidgin that has a native speaker.
Bilingualism is the ability to speak two or more languages, either by an individual
speakers, individual bilingualism, or within a society, societal bilingualism. The kind of
bilingualism is code-switching which is described as the a speech style unique to bilingual, in
which fluent speakers switch languages between or within sentences or in whole code.
4. Language and Education
Second-Language Teaching Method has two approaches: the synthetic approach
(teaching grammatical, lexical, phonological, and the functional units of language step by step)
and analytic approach (topics, texts or tasks) which has concern in content based instruction.
5. Language in Use
The language in use can be described in style and jargon. Style is the various languages
that are used by the speaker in the situation dialects. Everybody has at least formal and informal
style. In an informal style, the rule of constructing are used most often, the syntactic rules of
negation and agreement may be altered, and many words are used that do not occur in the formal
style. Jargon is the language that is used by the conceible science, profession, trade, and
occupation uses specific slang terms. The examples of linguistic jargon for Introduction to
Linguistics are phoneme, morpheme, lexicon, phrase structure rules and so on.