SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Question

1. What are the social factors of language choice ?

2. What is the sociolinguistics concern in sociolinguistics ?
3. What are the diffrentces between language maintenance , language shift,
language loss, and language death?
4. What are the diffrentces between vernacular language, standart language, lingua
franca, pidgin and creole?
5. In wolrd English, there are three circles, explain it !
6. Explain about the steps in planning a national / official language !
7. What are the diffrences between accent, dialect, sex and gender?
8. There are five reasons for language change, explain it !
9. What did you understand about speech function, politeness and cross-cultural
communication?
10. What is your opinion about this quote “The way you speak is usually a good
indicatorof your social background” Holmes (2004 : P.146)

Answer

1. Specific social factors that can affect second language acquisition include age,
gender, social class, and ethnic identity. Situational factors are those which
vary between each social interaction

2. sociolinguistics, the study of the sociological aspects of language. The

discipline concerns itself with the part language plays in maintaining the
social roles in a community. Sociolinguists attempt to isolate those linguistic
features that are used in particular situations and that mark the various social
relationships among the participants and the significant elements of the
situation.

3. Language Maintenance : Language maintenance denotes the continuing use

of a language in the face of competition from a regionally and socially more
powerful language.

Language Shift : Generally, when the speakers of a language consider that

their own language is not really suitable to be spoken anymore, it usually
follows with the changing of the origin language to another language that is
more appropriate for them.

Language Death : Simple understandings of language death noted from the

language shifting is that when the speakers leave their mother tongue and use
other language, the mother tongue, slowly or quickly disappear
4. Vernacular Language : Vernacular languages are the everyday language
varieties used by people in their communities. Vernacular languages are often
non-standardized and may have regional, social, or ethnic variations.

Standart Language : Standard languages are the normative forms of

language that are typically used in education, government, and formal
settings.

Lingua Franca : A lingua franca is a language that is used as a means of

communication between speakers of different languages.

Pidgins : Pidgins are simplified language varieties that arise in language

contact situations.

Creole : Creoles are fully developed languages that emerge from pidgins
when they become the first language of a community.

5. English as a native language (ENL), English as a second language (ESL) and

English as a foreign language (EFL). By this classification, ENL is spoken in
countries such Britain and the USA; ESL is spoken where English plays an
important intranational role, typically in postcolonial countries such as
Singapore and Nigeria; and EFL is spoken only in class-rooms in those
countries where English has no functional use outside the classroom.

6. When the government CHOOSES a variety as a national or official language,

it does language PLANNING.

Planning a language goes under four steps:

➢ Selection: Choosing the variety to be developed.

➢ Codification: Standardising its structural or linguistic features. This

step is also called Corpus Planning.

➢ Elaboration: Extending its functions for use in new domains.

➢ Securing its acceptance: Enhancing its prestige and encouraging

people to develop pride in it and loyalty towards it.

7. The definition of accents and dialects used most often by people who work
with language is that accents are just one part of a dialect. An accent refers to
how people pronounce words, whereas a dialect is all-encompassing. A dialect
includes the pronunciations, grammar and vocabulary that people use within
a group.
8. There are five reasons for language change :

• Economy: Speech communities tend to change their utterances to

be as efficient and effective (with as little effort) as possible, while
still reaching communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore
involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.

• Expressiveness: Common or overused language tends to lose its

emotional or rhetorical intensity over time; therefore, new words
and constructions are continuously employed to revive that
intensity.

• Analogy : Over time, speech communities unconsciously apply

patterns of rules in certain words, sounds, etc. to unrelated other
words, sounds, etc.

• Language Contact : Words and constructions are borrowed from

one language into another.

• Cultural Environment : As a culture evolves, new places,

situations, and objects inevitably enter its language, whether or
not the culture encounters different people.

• Migration/Movement: Speech communities, moving into a region

with a new or more complex linguistic situation, will influence, and
be influenced by, language change; they sometimes even end up
with entirely new languages, such as pidgins and creoles.

• Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn

the adult forms imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into
a new standard. Alternatively, imperfect learning occurs regularly
in one part of society, such as an immigrant group, where the
minority language forms a substratum, and the changed forms can
ultimately influence majority usage.

• Social prestige: Language may not only change towards features

that have more social prestige, but also away from ones with
negative prestige,[7] as in the case of the loss of rhoticity in the
British Received Pronunciation accent.[8] Such movements can
go back and forth.

➢ Semantic bleaching : Semantic bleaching isn’t a particularly

significant cause of linguistic change, but it is a fun one – and one
that’s usually noticeable even when it’s happening.

➢ Synchronic Variation : Synchronic variation sounds like a

complicated term, but it’s actually quite simple. It relates to our
ability to understand that a word can have different meanings in
different contexts.

➢ Movement of people : Movement of people is the most obvious

driver of change to the English language. It was brought to this
 country through the migration of the Anglo-Saxons, altered
through exposure to the Vikings, then the Normans.

➢ Simplification : Language doesn’t have to feel the hand of history

to cause it to change. Sometimes the factors that cause language
to change are much more mundane – such as the desire to make
things simpler.

➢ Prestige : So if language tends towards simplification, then why is

English still so complicated? One reason – among many – for this
is that while we sometimes go for the laziest option in our speech
and in our writing, that isn’t always the case.

9. Speech Fungtion : SPEECH FUNCTIONS: "Our speech functions include

the communication of ideas to other people."

Politeness : politeness can be defined as the ways in which language is

employed in conversation to show consideration for the feelings and desires
of one’s interlocutors, to create and uphold interpersonal relationships (so-
called politic behavior), and to comply with the rules for what society or one’s
culture considers appropriate behavior.

Cross-Cultural : Cross-cultural communication is a field of study

investigating how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate,
in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor
to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field
of study.

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