RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND

SOCIETY
Language is central to social interaction in
every society, regardless of location and time
period. Language and social interaction have a
reciprocal relationship: language shapes social
interactions and social interactions shape
language.
Language is a tool for interact with
other human. So language can’t
separated with human. Through
language we can related and interact
with other human and created
communicative in the community
Sociolinguistics is the study of the connection
between language and society and the way people
use language in different social situations. It asks
the question, "How does language affect the social
nature of human beings, and how does social
interaction shape language?" It ranges greatly in
depth and detail, from the study of dialects across
a given region to the analysis of the way men and
women speak to each other in certain situations.
The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that
language is variable( changes quite often, no
fixed pattern for this changes) and ever-
changing. As a result, language is not uniform or
constant. Rather, it is varied( consist of different
sizes or quantity and inconsistent for both the
individual user and within and among groups of
speakers who use the same language.
 People adjust the way they talk to their social
situation. An individual, for instance, will speak
differently to a child than he or she will to their
college professor. This socio-situational variation is
sometimes called register and depends no only on
the occasion and relationship between the
participants, but also on the participants’ region,
ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, and gender.
One way that sociolinguists study language is through dated
written records. They examine both hand-written and printed
documents to identify how language and society have
interacted in the past. This is often referred to as historical
sociolinguistics: the study of the relationship between changes
in society and changes in language over time. For example,
historical sociolinguists have studied the use and frequency of
the pronoun thou in dated documents and found that its
replacement with the word you is correlated with changes in
class structure in 16th and 17th century England.
Sociolinguists also commonly study dialect ( form of
language that is spoken in a particular area), which is
the regional, social, or ethnic variation of a language.
For example, the primary language in the United
States is English. People who live in the South,
however, often vary in the way they speak and the
words they use compared to people who live in the
Northwest, even though it is all the same language.
There are different dialects of English, depending on
what region of the country you are in.
Sociolinguists study many other issues as well.
For instance, they often examine the values
that hearers ( the one who are listening) place
on variations in language, the regulation of
linguistic behavior, language standardization,
and educational and governmental policies
concerning language.
In society’s life language function traditionally can
be said as means of verbal communication used by
the society to communicate. But the language
function is not merely a means of communication.
Chaer (2004:15) said that function that become a
sociolinguistic problem is from the speaker, listener,
topic, code, and testament side.
The means from the statement that the point is
that language is different if we see from different
aspect as mentioned above. Explanation from
1. Listener side
From listener side, language function directive ( official
instruction that is given by someone in authority). Language
is not just make listener do something, but do anything
conform what speaker want.
2. Speaker side
From speaker side, language function personally or
individually. It means that speaker explain about his attitude
to what he speak.
3. Topic side
From topic side, language function as reference (act of
consulting someone). In this matter the language
function as instrument for explaining about object or
happening in the surrounding speaker or in the culture.
4. Code side
From code side, language function metalingual (talking
about the language itself )or metalinguistic ( branch of
linguistics that studies language and its relationship to
other cultural behaviors. It's language used to talk about
language itself.
5 Message side
.
From the speech side that’s give, language function
imaginative (original, creativity , inventive), . It’s
the language can be used to convey think, idea,
and feeling. In verbal repertoire ( a list or supply of
capabilities) has society’s own, society language
has different by three, they are :
1. Monolingual society (One language)
2. Bilingual society (Two language)
a. Socialfactors
The social factors are including the users, participants, social settings and
functions. The users divide “who is talking to whom (e.g. wife-husband,
teacher-student). The setting and social context are also relevant such as,
at home, hospital and class. The function describes “why are they
speaking” and another factor is topic which describes “what are they
talking about”.
b. Social dimensions
The relationship between the participants is one of the factors of the social
dimension. The factors like the social distance (intimate-high solidarity),
status scale (high-low status), the status, formality (formal-informal) and
functional scale (topic of interaction) are really influenced the
sociolinguistics.
c. Explanation factors
This factor is to identify clearly the linguistic variation such as, vocabulary, sounds,
grammatical construction, dialects, languages and the different social which lead the
speakers to use one form rather than another such as, participant, setting or
function of the interaction.
2. Dialect
All speakers can talk to each other and pretty much understand each other. Between
one and another do not speak alike. It can be influenced by age, sex, social situation
and where and when the language was learned. The language of an individual
speaker with its unique characteristics is referred to as the speaker’s idiolect. When
there are systematic differences in the way groups speak a language, it says that
each group speaks a dialect of that language. Chambers (1980:5) noticed that dialect
on the other hand, refers to varieties which are grammatically (and perhaps lexically)
as well as phonologically different from other varieties
The example when the two speakers are say I done it last night and I
did it last night, they are saying different dialects.
3. Language in contact
Sometime the user of language finds the speaker of language that
speaks different language. It can be seen clearly in some part of the
world that the speaker of bilingual communities, you may not have to
travel very far at all to find the language disconnect. To make the user
understand about this situation, they need a language that can
communicate each other. In this part, lingua franca, bilingualism, pidgin
( grammatically, simplified form of language , used for communications
between people not sharing common language )and creole ( a mother
tongue formed from contact of two languages ), are the kinds of
language in contact. The details are explained below.
Lingua Franca is the language that is used by common agreement of
the people who speak diverse language. English has been called lingua
franca of the whole world.
Pidgin and Creole
Pidgin is a mixed language that arises in situations where speakers of
different languages are unable to understand each other’s native
language and, therefore need to develop a common means of
communication (Bussman, 1998:905). Pidgin is used to communicate
among the people who have no common language (Todd, 1974:1).
Creole is defined as a language has evolved in a contact situation to
become the native of generation of the speaker (Fromkin, 2011:458). It
can be said that creoles are the pidgin that has a native speaker
Bilingualism is the ability to speak two or more languages,
either by an individual speakers, individual bilingualism, or
within a society, societal bilingualism. The kind of bilingualism is
code-switching which is described as the a speech style unique
to bilingual, in which fluent speakers switch languages between
or within sentences or in whole code.
4. Language and Education
Second-Language Teaching Method has two approaches: the
synthetic approach (teaching grammatical, lexical, phonological,
and the functional units of language step by step) and analytic
approach (topics, texts or tasks) which has concern in content
based instruction
5. Language in Use
The language in use can be described in style and jargon. Style is
the various languages that are used by the speaker in the
situation dialects. Everybody has at least formal and informal
style. In an informal style, the rule of constructing are used most
often, the syntactic rules of negation and agreement may be
altered, and many words are used that do not occur in the
formal style. Jargon is the language that is used by the conceible
science, profession, trade, and occupation uses specific slang
terms. The examples of linguistic jargon for Introduction to
Linguistics are phoneme, morpheme, lexicon, phrase structure
rules and so on.