1.

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL CLASS

Variables of Social Class

• Power – the degree to which a person can control other people.

• Wealth – objects or symbols owned by people which have value attached to them.

• Prestige – the degree of respect, favorable regard, or importance accorded to a

person by members of society.

• Social class – a status hierarchy in which individuals and groups are classified on the

basis of esteem and prestige acquired mainly through economic success and

accumulation of wealth. Social class may also refer to any particular level in such a

hierarchy.

• Class Structure in the U.S.

• Two upper classes

– Upper upper: Old money

– Lower upper: New money

• Three middle classes

– Upper middle: Professional

– Middle class: White collar and entrepreneurs

– Working class: Blue collar

• Two lower classes

– Upper lower: Unskilled laborers

– Lower lower: Socially and economically disadvantaged.

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• Social classes - not clearly defined or labelled entities but simply aggregates of

people with similar social and economic characteristics;social mobility – movement up

and down the social hierarchy – is perfectly possible.

• Social stratification - any hierarchical ordering of groups within a society especially in

terms of power, wealth and status.

2. LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

• Language - a means of communicating information.

• Two aspects of language behaviour very important from a social point of view:

1. communicate information

2. establish social relationships;

• The term dialect refers to differences between kinds of languages - vocabulary,

grammar as well as pronunciation;

• The term accent refers solely to differences of pronunciation.

• Standard variety is that variety which is usually used in print and which is normally

taught in schools and to non-native speakers learning the language, e.g. Standard

English.

• Sapir-Whorf's hypothesis - the Sapir-Whorf's hypothesis is concerned with the

possibility that human beings' views of their environment may be conditioned by their

language.

• Taboo - behaviour which is believed to be supernaturally forbidden, or regarded as

immoral or improper; prohibited or inhibited in an apparently irrational manner.

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• Sociolinguistics is a part of linguistics which is concerned with language as a social

and cultural phenomenon. It investigates the field of language and society and has

close connections with the social sciences, especially social psychology, anthropology,

human geography, and sociology.

3. LANGUAGE AND CONTEXT

• The totality of linguistic varieties used in this way by a particular community of

speakers can be called verbal repertoire.

• Language varieties that are linked to particular occupations or topics can be termed

registers.

• Registers are usually characterized by vocabulary differences: either by use of

particular words, or by the use of words in particular sense. Registers are an example of

a particular kind of language being produced by a particular kind of social context.

• Vocabulary which is at the extremely informal end of the continuum is known as slang.

E.g., we could make the given sentence even more informal by substituting slang words

such as bushed or whacked for tired.

• Casual speech may occur outside the context of the interview, as in conversation with

other members of the family who might be present, or in breaks for a coffee or beer.

• Diglossia is a particular kind of language standardization where two distinct varieties

of a language exist side by side throughout the speech community, and where each of

the two varieties is assigned a definite social function.

• The high variety is used in sermons, formal letters, political speeches, university

lectures, news broadcasts, newspaper editorials and 'high' poetry.

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• The low variety is used in conversation with family and friends, radio serials, political

and academic discussions, political cartoons and 'folk' literature.

4. LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION

• Code–switching - rapid switching form of language switching, e.g. in English-Spanish

bilingual communities, it is a very widespread phenomenon (Spanglish).

• Language switching– a speaker switches completely from one language to another.

• Directness is something that speakers in all cultures tend to be very careful about,

e.g. How much money do you earn? How old are you?

• Indirectness is used as a conversational strategy much more frequently in some

cultures than others, e.g. instead of ‘Who is that person standing over there?’, you can

say ‘I’ve never seen that person who is standing over there before.’

• Basic types of social interaction

(According to Goffman)

• Exchange

• Competition

• Cooperation

• Conflict

• Coercion

5. LANGUAGE AND NATION

• State-nations: conquering territory; claiming people within it a nation, seeking

homogenisation (e.g. linguistic) through centralization, education.

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• Nation-state: homogenous population with common language and culture, seeking to

acquire territory.

• Nearly all European countries contain indigenous linguistic minorities – groups of

speakers who have as their native variety a language other than that which is the

official, dominant or major language in the country where they live.

• A lingua franca is a language which is used as a means of communication among

people who have no native language in common. (Hausa)

• Status: the relative prestige a language has due to its place in society (i.e. which

language to be used, and where). The role of national government - selecting a national

language. Once selected, the language may have to be established, developed and

standardized.

• Corpus: the ‘body’ of these languages - which alphabets to use, correct usage,

modern terminologies, etc.

• Acquisition: how to get the population to learn (acquire) these languages.

6. LANGUAGE AND GEOGRAPHY

• A linguistic innovation – a new word, a new pronunciation, a new usage – occurs at

a particular place, and subsequently spreads to other areas.

• Increased geographical mobility during the course of the 20th century led to the

disappearance of many dialects and dialect forms through a process called dialect

levelling.

• Dialect mixture – situation in the USA when settlers from different parts of Great

Britain came (England, Scotland etc.) bringing their different dialects).

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• A linguistic refuge is an area where a language is insulated against outside change

by virtue of remoteness, or the remains of a locale where a once widespread language

continues to be spoken.

• Toponymy, the study of place names, may provide diverse geographical insights.

Toponyms may tell us something about where the settlers came from, who used to live

here, and what language the settlers spoke.

7. LANGUAGE AND SEX-GENDER

• Sex – biological; being born as male or female.

• Gender – social; the very process of creating a dichotomy by effacing similarity and

elaborating on difference.

8. LANGUAGE AND ETHNIC GROUP

• Ethnicity is a social construction that indicates identification with a particular group

which is often descended from common ancestors. Members of the group share

common cultural traits (such as language, religion, and dress) and are an identifiable

minority within the larger nation-state.

• African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is generally used to refer to

nonstandard English spoken by lower-class African-Americans.

• Grammatical features of AAVE; Different grammatical features:

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1. Many AAVE speakers do not use –s in 3rd person sing present tense form, e.g. He

go, she like etc. This form is also typical of English based pidgins and it is found in the

English based Caribbean creoles.

2. the absence of the copula – the verb to be – in the present tense, e.g. She real nice.

They out there.

3. the so called 'invariant be': the use of the form be as a finite verb form. E.g. He

usually be around. Sometime she be fighting. She be nice and happy. They sometimes

be incomplete.

• Pidgin is a reduced, regularized, mixed language evolved for trading purposes by

speakers with no common language.

• The term creole is applied to a pidgin language which has become the native

language of a speech community, and has therefore become expanded again, and

acquired all the functions and characteristics of a full natural language.

9. LANGUAGE AND HUMANITY

• Communities go through a process of language shift- a particular community

gradually abandons its original native language and goes over to speaking another one

instead.

• Language death may manifest itself in one of the following ways:

- gradual language death (speakers of one language become bilingual in another

language)

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- speakers of some languages, e.g. regional or minority languages decide to abandon

their languages due to economic or utilitarian grounds, in favor of languages having

greater utility or prestige (bottom-to-top language death).

- radical language death: linguicide (sudden language death, language death by

genocide, physical language death)

• A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered

moribund.

• Language revival is the revival, by governments, political authorities, or enthusiasts,

to recover the spoken use of a language that is no longer spoken or is endangered.

(E.G. HEBREW)

• Reversing language shift is an activity which requires considerable sociolinguistic

expertise and knowledge as well as hard work and large sums of money.

10. LANGUAGE AND CONTACT

• Simplification – getting rid of irregularities, e.g. irregular verb forms, or redundancies,

e.g. grammatical gender in lingua franca.

• Reduction – language used for doing business, but not in other situations, which

leads to reduced vocabulary, stylistic devices etc.

• The process whereby reduction is ‘repaired’ by expansion is known as creolization.

• Lexifier - the language that has provided most of the vocabulary (i.e., lexicon) to a

pidgin or creole.

• Substrate - the languages other than the lexifier that are present in pidgin or creole

formation.

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