SOCIOLINGUISTICS/ LANGUAGE
IN SOCIETY variety (“L”) is the language of
An Introduction to Language (9e, 2009)
by Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman
and Nina Hyams
Dialects
 The language of an individual
speaker with its unique
characteristics is called an idiolect
 Every speaker has an idiolect
Factors of their idiolect
 Age, Sex, Social institutions,
and when they learned the
language are the
 Dialects: mutually intelligible
forms of a language that differ in
systematic ways
 A language is a collection of
dialects
 Everybody speaks at least one
dialect of at least one language
 Dialects are mutually intangible
forms of language that differ in
systematic ways.
 When dialects become mutually
unintelligible, then they become
separate languages
 In sociolinguistics, diglossia is a
situation in which two distinct
varieties of a language are spoken
within the same speech
community. It is a linguistic
phenomenon in which a language
has two varieties often labeled as
a high variety (“H”) and a low
variety (“L”).
 Bilingual diglossia is a type of
diglossia in which one language
variety is used for writing and
another for speech.
 In diglossic communities, the low
home, friends and informal
interactions. The high variety
(“H”) is, however, held in high
esteem and rules the sphere of
politics, education and translation.
 But, it can be difficult to draw the
line between dialects and separate
languages
 Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian
are mutually intelligible, but are
considered different languages
because they have some
systematic grammatical
differences and are spoken in
different countries
 Hindi and Urdu are considered
separate languages, but are about
as intelligible as Australian and
American English
 Mutually unintelligible languages
in China, such as Mandarin and
Cantonese, are referred to as
dialects of Chinese because they
have a common writing system
and are spoken within one country
 Dialects merge into each other,
forming a dialect continuum
 Dialect leveling refers to
movement toward greater
uniformity and less variation
among dialects
 Despite the ease of travel and
mass media found today, dialect
leveling is generally not occurring
 In fact, dialect differences may be
strengthening in urban areas as
different groups strive to maintain
their group identity and
distinctness
Regional Dialects Boston: tonic Los Angeles: soda
 A dialect of British English Los Angeles: freeway
spoken in southern England
New York: thruway
systematically deleted [r] before
consonants and at the end of a New Jersey: parkway
word
England: motorway

 Commercial ties between major
cities in New England and
England were close, and Southern
families were sending their
children to England to be educated
 This [r] dropping spread to the US
and can now be found in dialects
of the South, Boston, and New
York
Phonological Differences
 There are systematic
pronunciation differences between
American and British English
 For example, Americans put stress
on the first syllable of a
polysyllabic word, and British
speakers put the stress on the
second syllable in words like
cigarette, applicable, formidable,
laboratory
 Americans may pronounce the
first vowel in data as [e] or [] but
vast majority of British speakers
would only use [e]
Lexical Differences
 Regional may also differ lexically
British: lift American: elevator
Dialect Atlases
 Dialect maps and dialect atlases
plot dialect differences
geographically
 Dialect areas can be seen by
concentrations of linguistic
differences
 The lines drawn on these maps to
separate the areas are called
isoglosses
 When you cross an isogloss, you
are going from one dialect area to
another
 Bundles of isoglosses can define a
regional dialect
Social Dialects
 Dialects can also stem from social
divisions, which are called social
dialects
 The social divisions that can lead
to different social dialects include
gender, socioeconomic status,
religion, race and ethnicity, and
country of origin
 Christians, Muslims, and Jews all
speak different varieties of Arabic
in Baghdad
 In India, people often speak
different dialects based on social
caste

British: pants American: underpants

Language Purists
 Standard American English (SAE) Banned Languages
is the dominant (or prestige)
 Sometimes languages are banned
dialect in America
because of the false notion that
 Nobody actually speaks SAE (it’s
some languages are better than
an idealization), and it is not
others, or for political control
defined precisely
 Cajun English and French were
 When a standard is the dialect of
once banned in Louisiana
the wealthy and powerful, people
 Many American Indian languages
may be required to speak that
were once banned in the US
dialect in order to get ahead
 Korean was banned in Korea
 Ross (1954) noticed differences
during the Japanese occupation
in the speech of British upper class
 Faroese was once banned on the
(U) and non-upper class (non-U)
Faroe Islands
speakers
 Sign languages were banned in
 Non-U speakers wanted to sound
many places in the world
U, and U speakers wanted to avoid
(including the US)
non-U speech
 Non-U speakers often
hypercorrected, or deviated from African American English
the norm thought to be “proper
 African American English (AAE)
English”
is a social dialect spoken by a
 Every dialect is equally
large population of Americans of
expressive, logical, complex, and
African descent
systematic
 This dialect is based on social
 All dialects represent a set of rules
groups, not genetics
or lexical items in the minds of
o A child will learn the language
speakers, and any value judgments
spoken around him or her
on dialects are social judgments
regardless of race and ethnicity
 British received pronunciation
 This dialect has been stigmatized
(RP) omits r in certain
because of prejudicial ignorance
environments and is considered
the standard pronunciation
 In the American northeast, dialects
that omit the r are considered to be
“substandard” and the prestige
dialect maintains the r
 What is considered a prestige
dialect has a social basis, not a
linguistic one

Chicano English
Syntactic Differences between
AAE and SAE
 Multiple Negatives: AAE allows
multiple negatives (such as He
don’t know nothing), as does
French and Italian
 Deletion of “Be”: AAE speakers
may delete the word “be”; the
deletion rule corresponds to the
contraction rule in SAE
Phonological Variables of ChE
 Habitual “Be”: AAE has rules to
mark habitual states syntactically
by using the uninflected form of
be
 “There” Replacement: Some
AAE dialects may replace there
with it’s in positive sentences and
don’t or ain’t in negative
sentences
 Chicano English (ChE) is a dialect
of English spoken by many
Mexican Americans
 It is not English with a Spanish
accent, but is a rule-governed
dialect of English that differs from
SAE in systematic ways
 Sociolinguistic variables are
linguistic differences that vary
with the social situation of the
speaker
 Many ChE speakers (and AAE
speakers) are bidialectal, which
means they can speak ChE (or
AAE) or SAE depending on the
situation
 The ChE vowel inventory may
include the 5 vowels found in
Spanish but not the additional 6
vowels used in English
 This results in word pairs that are
homophonous in ChE but not in
SAE: ship and sheep are both
pronounced as [ip]
  ChE also has word-final style, and that contrary to popular
consonant cluster reduction so that belief, mixed gender conversations
start may sound like star, he loves are dominated by men
her may be pronounced as he love  In Japanese there are distinct
her, and fast may be pronounced words for female and male
[fs] speakers
 Word-final alveolar-cluster
reduction has become widespread
in SAE as well
 Many ChE speakers will add a
vowel before words that begin
with an /s/ cluster so that school  Japanese has honorifics and
would be pronounced as if it were formal and informal verbal
spelled eschool inflections
 Spanish does not allow words to  Women use the formal verbal
begin with /s/ clusters forms and the honorifics more
frequently than men
Syntactic Variables of ChE
 ChE uses multiple negatives, like
AAE and like standard Spanish
 ChE: I don have no money.
 SAE: I don’t have any money. Sociolinguistic Analysis
 ChE: I no want nothing.
 SAE: I don’t want anything.  Labov set out to study [r] deletion
as a social variable based on
 There are also some lexical
socioeconomic class
differences:
 ChE: borrow SAE: lend  He asked employees questions to
 ChE: barely SAE: just get them to direct him to the
fourth floor of three department
stores catering to three classes
Genderlects  Sak’s Fifth Avenue (upper class)
 Macy’s (middle class)
 Lakoff (1973) identified several
 S. Klein (working class)
linguistic features that were used
 He analyzed how each employee
by women more than men:
pronounced fourth floor the first
 Hedges (might, maybe)
time and when he pretended not to
 Tag questions (don’t you think?)
understand
 Politeness words (please, thank
 This allowed him to gather natural
you)
data of both casual utterances and
 Use of intensifiers (so, extremely,
utterances that were more
very)
carefully planned
 It has also been found that women
 Labov found that pronunciation of
use a more conservative speech
[r] was different at each store, and
 therefore pronunciation of [r] was
socially stratified
 Sak’s Fifth Avenue: 62% [r] use
 Macy’s: 52% [r] use
 S. Klein: 21% [r] use
 Labov’s findings demonstrate that
systematic differences among
dialects are not restricted to just
the presence or absence of a rule,
but can also be described in terms
of statistical frequency of rule
application
Lingua Francas
 A lingua franca is a language
common to speakers of diverse
languages that can be used for
communication and commerce
 English is considered a lingua
franca for international academic
conferences
 Russian is the lingua franca in the
countries of the former Soviet
Union
 Swahili is a lingua franca for trade
in eastern Africa
Contact Languages: Pidgins and
Creoles
 When speakers of different
languages come together for trade,
or through colonization or
immigration, they may create a
new language to serve as a
rudimentary lingua franca
 This created communication
system is called a pidgin
 Pidgins are rule-governed but have
simplified grammatical systems
and lexicons
 Most of the vocabulary of a pidgin
comes from the dominant
language (the superstrate or
lexifier language)
 The other languages are the
substrate languages and contribute
to the grammatical system
 Many linguists believe that
pidgins have a life cycle:
 First the pidgin has no native
speakers, is strictly a contact
language reserved for special
functions, and has very few
clear grammatical rules and
few words
 Later, if need for the pidgin
continues, the pidgin becomes
stabilized
 If children begin to learn this
stabilized pidgin as a native
language, then it becomes a
creole
 Pidginization involves a
simplification of some
language and a reduction of
the number of domains of use
 Creolization involves the
expansion of a lexicon and
grammar and an increase of
the number of contexts of use
 Pidgins are somewhat
rudimentary, but do have rules
 Phonemes may have multiple
allophonic pronunciations
 Pidgins typically lack function
morphemes
o Auxiliary verbs,
prepositions, articles,
tense, case endings,
plurals, etc.
 Reduplication and compounding
are very common in pidgins to
 expand an otherwise small
lexicons (data from Komtok):
 Syntactically, people may create
sentences based on the word order
of their native language until the
pidgin becomes stabilized
Creoles and Creolization
 A creole is a language that has
evolved in a contact situation to
become the native language of a
generation of speakers
 Where a pidgin is simplified, a
creole is just as expressive and
complex as any human language
 Creoles may have inflections,
more complex pronoun systems,
and the number of compounds
may be reduced
o For example, wara bilong skin
(“sweat”) becomes skinwara
Bilingualism
 Bilingualism refers to the ability
to speak two (or more) languages
 Individual bilingualism: within
one person
 There are various degrees of
Bilingual Education
bilingualism and various situations
under which a person may become
bilingual
 Societal bilingualism: within a
society
 Canada and Switzerland are two
examples of nations that recognize
more than one official language
Codeswitching
 Codeswitching is a speech style in
which fluent speakers switch
languages between or within
sentences
 I mean, c’est un idiot, ce mec-là
(French-English)
 Women zuotian qu kan de movie
was really amazing (Mandarin-
English)
 Chigum ton-uls ops-nunde, I can’t
buy it (Korean-English)
 Codeswitching reflects the
grammars of both languages
simultaneously and occurs
wherever groups of bilinguals
speak the same languages
 Codeswitching does not constitute
“broken” English and is not a
language disability in which
bilinguals try to cope with
incomplete mastery of either
language
 Codeswitching has its own
grammatical structure. For
example, codeswitching follows
the word order rules of both
languages
o My mom fixes tamales verdes
o *My mom fixes verdes tamales
o Mi mamá hace green tamales
o *Mi mamá hace tamales green
 There are several bilingual
education programs in American
schools for immigrant children:
 Transitional Bilingual Education
(TBE): students receive
instruction in both their native
language and English, with the
 native language support being
phased out over the years
 Bilingual Maintenance (BM):
students remain in bilingual
classes for their entire education
 Dual Language Immersion: native
and nonnative speakers are
enrolled in bilingual education, the
goal being to have all students
become bilingual
 Research indicates that immigrant
children benefit from instruction
in their native language
 Bilingual classes allow children to
first acquire school-related
vocabulary and speech styles
while in their native language
 Bilingual classes also allow them
to learn content and keep up with
English-speaking children while
they master English
 Students in bilingual programs
outperform students in English-
only programs and students in BM
programs outperform students in
TBE programs
 Despite these findings, bilingual
education has been under attack
since the 1970s and in some states
have been replaced by Sheltered
English Immersion programs
“Ebonics”
 Children who speak a dialect of
English that differs from SAE,
such as AAE or “Ebonics” may be
at a disadvantage in schools
because of linguistic differences
between AAE and the SAE valued
in schools
o One approach to tackling this
issue is to discourage students
from speaking AAE and to tout
SAE as superior
o This has been criticized as
psychologically damaging and
impractical
 Another approach is to encourage
bidialectalism
o Encourages children to take
pride in their dialect and use it
in certain contexts and teaches
them SAE to use in other
contexts
o This approach works well in
Switzerland, Italy, and
Germany
Styles
 Styles, or registers, are different
ways of speaking based on the
context
o For example, people usually speak
differently with friends than they
do in a job interview or when
speaking to small children
 Informal styles are rule-governed
o For example, questions can be
shortened by deleting the subject
you and the auxiliary verb, or just
the auxiliary verb, but not by just
deleting the subject:
 Running the marathon?
 You running the marathon?
 *Are running the marathon?
 Some languages have social rules
that govern style, for example,
Thai has three words meaning
“eat” that are used based on the
social status of the speaker and
listener
Slang considered scientific, but the
Anglo-Saxon words for the same
 Slang is something that nearly concepts are considered taboo:
everybody uses and can recognize vagina/cunt, penis/cock, feces/shit
but nobody can precisely define
 Slang introduces new words into a Euphemisms
language by recombining new
 A euphemism is a word or phrase
words (right on), introduces
that replaces a taboo word or to
entirely new words (barf), and can
avoid unpleasant subjects
ascribe entirely new meanings to
o For example, because death is
old words (rave)
feared, people often speak of
 Some slang words may gain
passing on or passing away rather
widespread acceptability and thus
than dying
cease to be slang
 Words have both a denotative
o dwindle, freshman, glib and mob
meaning and a connotative
are former slang terms
meaning that reflects attitudes and
value judgments
Jargon and Argot
Language and Sexism
 Jargon or argot = the specialized
 There are many, many words for
terms used in various occupations
women that have abusive and/or
o Linguistics jargon: phoneme,
sexual overtones:
morpheme, lexicon, allophone,
o dish, piece, piece of ass, piece of
ideolect, etc.
tail, bunny, chick, pussy, bitch,
 Jargon is used partly for clarity of
doll, slut, cow, and whore to name
communication and partly for
a few
speakers to identify themselves
 There are words to refer to men in
with people with shared interests
negative and/or sexual overtones,
Taboo but not as many and the terms that
are used are not as negative as
 Nothing about a particular string those for women
of sounds makes it intrinsically o boy toy, stud, hunk, jock
clean or dirty, yet all societies
have taboo words Marked and Unmarked Forms
 Words relating to sex, sex organs,
 In many languages that have
and bodily functions can be taboo
male/female forms of words, the
in many languages
male form is the unmarked form
 Often there are multiple terms
 In English, the male form is
with the same meaning, with one
unmarked and the female form is
being accepted and one being
derived by adding a suffix:
taboo
o heir/heiress, hero/heroine,
o For example, words borrowed
Robert/Robert
from Latin into English are
  The unmarked form of the 3rd
person singular pronoun is male
(he, him, his) to represent a
generic human being
 Which may lead people to think of
the male sex as predominant
Secret Languages and
Language Games
 Throughout history and all over
the world people have invented
secret languages and language
games to identify with a group and
to prevent outsiders from
understanding
 Nushu was a secret written
language used by women in
sexually repressive imperial China
 The Walbiri in Australia play a
language game in which nouns,
verbs, pronouns and adjectives are
replaced by semantically
contrastive words
o Those men are small would mean
This woman is big