Language and Society

Dell Hymes argued that it was essential to incorporate social and cultural factors into the linguistic
description. In his view, Chomsky’s notion of the child internalizing a set of rules which enable her/him
to produce grammatical sentences doesn’t go far enough: the child learns not just grammar but also a
sense of appropriateness. It is not sufficient for the child to be linguistically competent in order to
function in the real world, s/he must also have learned when to speak when to remain silent, what to
talk about- and how to talk about it in different circumstances.

Communicative competence shifted across time as there are a lot of new technologies influencing it.
Spoken language is related to the oral culture that we can see in verbal interaction and how social
structure is constructed, so the two media of audio and visual modes of interaction.

Sosiolingusitics

Sociolingusitics is concerned with investigating the relationship between language and society with the
goal being a better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in
communication (wardaugh, 1998). Sociolinguistics takes as its primary task to map linguistic variation on
to social conditions. This mapping helps understand not just synchronic variation, but also diachronic
variation or language chance.

Code Switching

Sociolinguistics use the term “code” to refer to a language or a variety of a language used by a person or
group of people in communication (Wardhaugh, 1998) Unlike the terms dialect, style, pidgin, Creole and
some other terms, which are inclined to arouse emotion, the term “code” is quite neutral since it can be
used to refer to any kind of system that two or more people employ for communication. A person might
use different code when he/she talks to different people.

Dialect

Terralingua (1998) mentions that dialects are defined as varieties of language which are spoken in
different geographical or social areas that are mutually understandable. In general, dialect can be
differentiated according the geographical areas of the speakers (regional dialect) and the socio-
economic status of the speakers (social dialect).

Language Variation

Variety is a specific set of “linguistics items” or “human speech pattern” (presumably sound, words,
grammatical features, etc) which we can uniquely associate with some external factors (presumably, a
geographical area or socio groups) (Wardaugh, 1998:21-55)

Sociolinguistics and language Teaching

A source of intercultural miscommunication highlighted by the findings of cross-cultural studies is
sociolinguistic transfer. Sociolinguistics transfer refers to the use of the rules of speaking of one’s own
speech community or cultural group when interacting with members of another community or group.
English as Lingua Franca is used by people with various linguistic background, not necessarily between
non-natives and natives, but even between non-natives only.

Sociolinguistics Reseach

A theory tells us which facts count as data. The ways for sociolinguists at work to obtain data for
collecting natural speech samples to study the microlinguistic variation and for research:
1. Clandestine Recording, this way is largely abandoned because usually noise and requires very
expensive processing.
2. Interview, in this way, the sociolinguist talks to the subject, attempting to elicit examples of various
kinds of speech.
3. Questionnaire, this way is to obtain statically analyzable data about attitudes and behaviors.