ENGLISH 3

LANGUAGE AND GEOGRAPHIC, ETHNIC AND NATIONAL

IDENTITY
LANGUAGE
- is a communication tool used by everyone in their daily life as means to convey information
and arguments to others.

FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE:
• A Medium of Expression - It provides us a way to express our feelings, thoughts,
imaginations and views.

• Keeping the Record - It is used for keeping the record of many events or we can say that it
helps us making the history.

• Connectivity - Language keeps us connected with the world. For example if we know a
language (reading and writing) then we can be known at internet through many web pages or
sites like Facebook, yahoo, hotmail etc.

• Power of Thought - The language also gives us the power of thinking, because in order to
think we need a language.

• Identity - Language gives us an identity, like in the world most of the nations have got their
names due to their language. For example France from French, England from English, and
Germany from German etc.

• Literature - It is also a tunction or language that has given birth to literature, the different
ways of expressing the feelings, emotions and thoughts. From different ways we mean the
different genres of literature like novel, drama and poetry.

• Constituent of Social Life - The language helps us build up our social life like saying
"Good Day" to people we meet, or giving respect to others by saying "Dear Sir/Madam" or
"Yours Faithfully" etc.

• Means of Conveying Information - It is also a means of conveying information.

IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE IDENTITY

Here are some examples of social identity:

Age – is a fundamental social identity that evolves throughout life. Each life stage brings its
own set of privileges and prejudices. For instance:

Young -people may face stereotypes of naivety and incompetence.

Middle-aged -individuals might find themselves unwelcome in certain youth settings.

Elderly- individuals often encounter challenges in job opportunities due to perceptions

of being past their prime.
Ability - is often invisible unless someone is labeled as "disabled." Discrimination based on
ability can lead to serious disadvantages.

Ethnicity - refers to the cultural origins of a person's family. It influences practices,

traditions, food, and religion.

Race - pertains to distinct genetic features, primarily identifiable by skin color. It plays a
significant role in shaping experiences and interactions. However, it's essential to recognize
that ethnicity and race are distinct concepts.

DIALECTS, SOCIOLECTS, AND REGISTERS

Regional dialect: A variety spoken in a particular region.

Sociolect: Also known as a social dialect, a variety of language (or register) used by a
socioeconomic class, a profession, an age group, or any other social group.

Ethnolect: A dialect spoken by a specific ethnic group. For example, Ebonics, the vernacular
spoken by some African-Americans, is a type of ethnolect, or a language-translation firm.

Idiolect: the language or languages spoken by each individual. For example, if you are
multilingual and can speak in different registers and styles, your idiolect comprises several
languages, each with multiple registers and styles.

Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a
group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers
in the world's population. Multilingualism is advantageous for people wanting to participate
in trade, globalization and cultural openness.

Registers - ways on how people use language based on who their talking to and the situation.
 Frozen – very old pieces (e.g. wedding vows and bible passage)
 Formal – people with authority
 Consultative – therapy
 Casual – friends
 Intimate – family, lover, friends
 LANGUAGE POLICY AND PLANNING

LANGUAGE PLANNING
■ all conscious efforts that aim at changing the linguistic behavior of a speech community. (Haugen,
1966)

■ Language planning occurs in most countries by their relevant governments wherein they have more
than one language within the community.

LANGUAGE POLICY
■ Language policy is sometimes used as a synonym to a language planning. However, Language
policy refers to the more general linguistic, political and social goals underlying the actual language
planning process.

In short,"language policy" is the expression of the ideological orientations and views, and "language
planning " is the actual proposal that makes up their implementation.

Societal issues that arise when more than one language is widely spoken in a country:
 Language barriers
 Discrimination
 Loss of Linguistic Diversity
 The Cost of Learning And Maintaining Multiple Languages
 Paucity of Resources And support

ROLE OF GOVERNMENTS İN ESTABLISHING LANGUAGE ESTABLISHING

LANGUAGE POLICIES:
Bilingual Education
- The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 set the precedent that students must be able to access
education equally, regardless of language barriers.
- effectively means that students receive instruction in two languages.

4 CLASSIC MODELS OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION:

1. Enrichment: The goal is to integrate a language (and its culture) into the community.
2. Heritage: The goal of this model is to revive a languishing indigenous language.
3. Maintenance: Students receive instruction in both languages solely so that they can become
more proficient in the target language; no effort is made to deepen or extend knowledge of the
native language.
4. Transitional: This model aims to leave the students’ native language completely behind and
fully embrace the target language.

3 WIDELY ACCEPTED IMMERSION MODELS:

1. Total immersion: 100% of the school day is in the target language.
2. Partial immersion: Half of the instruction is in the target language and half is in the students’ native
language.
3. Two-way immersion: Students receive instruction in both their native and target languages.

HOW CAN WE HELP SUPPORT ENDANGERED LANGUAGES?

1. Creating and Maintaining Language Resources for Every Endangered Language
2. Using Interpreting Services to Decode and Preserve Endangered Languages
3. Using Social Media to Promote Indigenous Languages
4. Taking Language Classes
 PRESCRIPTIVISM AND EQUALITY OF LANGUAGE

LINGUISTICS
 Approaching human linguistic behavior as an object of scientific study.

PRESCRIPTIVISM
 Approaching linguistics with the view that some ways of speaking are “good” and
some are “bad” and attempting to impose a “better” variety on a speech community.

The term prescriptivism refers to the ideology and practices in which the correct and incorrect
uses of a language or specific linguistic items are laid down by explicit rules that are
externally imposed on the users of that language.

Policy of describing languages as we would like them to be, rather than as we find them.

LANGUAGE PRESCRIPTION
 Linguistic prescription is categorized as the final stage in a language standardization
process.

PRESCRIPTIVISM
 Prescriptivism is the attitude or belief that one variety of a language is superior to
others and should be promoted as such. It is also known as linguistic prescriptivism
and purism. A key aspect of traditional grammar, prescriptivism is generally
characterized by a concern for good, proper, or correct usage.

PRESCRIPTIVIST
 An ardent promoter of prescriptivism.

EQUALITY OF LANGUAGES
 Language is fundamentally an arbitrary convention. There is no principled reason why
the word exists or why such word is labeled/named that way. The order that each
language follows is simply a convention that must be followed if we wish to be
understood in that language. Evaluations of better or worse don't enter into the
picture.

PIDGINS
 nobody’s native language
 reduced grammar and vocabulary
 mixing of language
 the users learn it orally as a second language

CREOLES
 native speakers exist
 has fully developed vocabulary and grammar
 mixed language associated with cultural and often racial mixture
 has a writing system

VARIETIES OF PIDGINS IN THE WORLD

18 pidgins used around the world (4 extinct and many in the process of disappearing.
  Maroon Spirit Language (Jamaica, West Africa)
 West African Pidgin (West Africa, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone)
 African Pidgin (su-su=gossip, pyaa-pyaa=sickly, koro-koro=clear vision, doti-
doti=garbage, yama-yama=disgusting you sabi do am?= do you know how to do it?

PECULIAR CHARACTERISTICS OF PIDGINS LANGUAGE:

 Simple Grammar (eg. 2 prepositions- blong=of, for, long=all the other
 Very small vocabulary (Chinglish=700 words, gras blong het=hair)

CREOLE LANGUAGE
 developed in colonial European plantation settlements in the 17th and 18th centuries as
a result of contact between groups that spoke mutually unintelligible languages.
 Since the 10930s some linguists have claimed that creoles emerged from pidgins.

THEORIES OF CREOLIZATION
 Substrate (languages previously spoken by enslaved Africans)
 Superstrate (colonial nonstandard varieties of the European languages
 Universalist (universals of language development, developed by adults according to
universals of second language acquisition)

PIDGINS/CREOLES
 Pidgins have no native speakers; creoles have native speakers.
 Pidgins have limited range of uses; creoles have considerably expanded range of uses.
 Pidgins typically evolve out contact situations; creoles evolve out of pidgins.
 Just 5 vowels in Pidgin
 Pidgins- almost complete lack of inflection in nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives.
 Nouns are not marked for a number or gender
 Negation may include a single particle no.
 Vocabulary similar to standard language.