Language And Society

The connection between language and society is tightly anchored. The relationship of the two is
deeply rooted. Language performs various functions in the society and the society does the same
way. If one will not exist, the other one will be affected.

Language is the primary tool for communication purposes, for establishing peace and order in
our society, for showing authority and power, and for attaining goals and objectives. But, it can
also destruct the society if it will use inappropriately. It must follow the conformity governing
the society to avoid conflict s and to meet the boundary of individual differences.

Society however controls our language by giving us preferences as what are acceptable and not,
because each one of us has our own perception or point of view. A group of people may accept
our language, but for others, it could be kind of offence or insult. We must know how, when and
where to say it and for what purpose.

Social changes produce changes in language. This affects values in ways that have not been
accurately understood. Language incorporates social values. However, social values are only the
same as linguistic values when the society is a stable and unchanging one. Once society starts
changing, then language change produces special effects.

Language exerts hidden power; like a moon on the tides  

   Language is the heart and soul of a human society. It is the medium through which we
communicate to one another, expressing who we are and what we think. Conveying our
thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, language is central to our identity as an individual and as a
member of a social group. It is the glue that binds us to each other as human beings and binds us
to our particular cultures. Language and society are so intertwined that it is impossible to
separate one from the other: Society cannot exist without language, and language cannot exist
without society. When we talk about this relationship, we define society simply as a group of
people who are drawn together for a certain common purpose. Depending on certain social and
cultural factors, over which we often have no control—our age, our sex, our ethnicity, our race,
our sexual orientation, or our geographical region—we derive a repertoire of social identities
from our memberships in many social groups. The particular speech variety that we, the
members of the society, share is our language.
   Language takes different forms in different societies depending on the situation, participants,
and topics. We shift our identities freely, easily, and naturally, not speaking the same way all the
time. The use of a particular language variety not only identifies each of us as belonging to a
particular social group, it also differentiates us from others who are not members but are seen as
outsiders. We control many different styles of speaking, each and every style as important and
worthy as the next.
 
   Sociolinguists, scholars who study the relationship between language and society, hope that by
closely studying language in social interaction, we can increase our awareness of the language
we use, our responses and reactions to others who are not part of our speech community, and the
attitudes associated with language and linguistic variation. Language specialists hope that as
speaking human beings, we will look beyond the surface and appreciate each other for the
diversity that exists within us and respect the many different social and ethnic groups that exist in
the world today.
 
   With an increasing emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity in the world today, it is our
responsibility to be aware of how fundamental language is to our day-to-day existence. Language
shapes our cultural and personal identity too. It provides lively discussion on issues that are
considered necessary reading in language studies classes, works that bring back childhood
memories, and essays that provoke us into thinking about language differently.

The sociolinguistics deals with explaining why we speak differently in different social context
and factor such as, class, ethnicity, age, and sex. This study is concerned with the identifying the
social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning. Sociolinguistics is
also the study about dialects, languages in contact, language and education, and language in use.
Chaer explains that sociolinguistics is “the study about sociology and linguistics.

Spolsky describes that sociolinguistics is the study the relation between language and society,
between the uses of language and the social structures in which the user of language live. It can
be concluded that sociolinguistics is the branch of linguistics and deals with the relation of
society and language. The sociolinguistics cannot be separated from the social meaning and of
language use. This study concerns when and for what purpose does somebody speak what kind
of language or what variety with whom.

1. Discussion

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”.
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.

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.

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.

4. Language and Education

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.

Conclusion

Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between language and society. There are some
sociolinguistic factors such as, social factors, social dimensions, and explanation factors. Every
person has a unique way of speaking called as idiolects, and dialects which are grammatically
(and perhaps lexically) as well as phonologically different from other varieties.