Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Language in Society
Language in Society
Use of [r]
100
80
60 never
%
sometimes
40
always
20
0
Saks Macy's S Klein
store
100
90
80
70 fourth I
60 fourth 2
50
%
40 floor I
30 floor 2
20
10
0
Saks Macy's S Klein
store
higher usage by 60 1
2,3
50
higher classes
%
4,5
40 6,8
EXCEPT in one case 30 9
20
10
0
casual careful reading word list minimal
pairs
style
middle class [r] pronunciation by class and style
outperform upper
middle class on word 100
lists and minimal pairs 90
this cross-over due to 80
hypercorrection
70
(according to Labov)
not sure whether 60
6,8
results are statistically 50
%
9
significant 40
30
20
10
0
casual careful reading word list minimal
pairs
style
Multilingulaism
• Multilingualism: the use of more than two languages, e.g.
Nigeria, India, and Philippines have hundreds of languages.
• Canada, USA.
• How multilingual nations develop? migration, imperialism,
federation
• Diglossia: A situation in which two forms of the same
language co-exist in a complementary relationship in a
society. High variety, low variety. Both forms are
grammatically distinct, don’t overlap.
Classical Arabic
• Each variety has its domains, e.g Arabic vernaculars
(dialects)
• The term is extended to refer to any two languages, even
related ones, that has this kind of social and functional
distribution.
• Triglossia ,Tunisia
• Polyglossia: several H and L languages co-exist in a complex
multilingual society, e.g. Singapore L,H, M varieties,e.g.
• Which languages will be officially or nationally
recognized in a multilingual society?
• Vitality: demographic, social and institutional
strength of a language and its speakers.
• Language planning, language policies, in
multilingual communities.
• Deliberate, Official government policies in
relation to language
• Singapore (Hokkeien)
Code switching\mixing
• The alternation between two varieties across
sentences or clause boundaries.
• It implies some degree of competence in the two
varieties even if bilingual fluency is not yet stable.
• What determines code switching?
• Domain-based or situational code switching.
Domain (social and physical setting), addressee
(interlocutor),
• Constraints : switching takes place between
languages with similar structure?
Spanish/Englishbetween determiners and nouns,
Subjects and verbs, but not nouns and adjectives.
•Code mixing: alternations within a clause or
phrase, e.g. Spanglish, Franglais, ‘arabizi?
• Code Switching Between English and Arabic : An Empirical study on Saudi Female
Students
Sociolinguistics project
regional variation
Standard English:
• He’ a man who likes his dog
• He’ a man who likes his dog
• Regional non-standard variation is greater than social
variation.
He’ a man who likes his dog
He’ a man who likes his dog
He’ a man at likes his dog
He’ a man as likes his dog
He’ a man what likes his dog
He’ a man he likes his dog
He’ a man likes his dog
Social and regional accent variation
Table 3
‘Home’ 27 variants, three accent forms, in 7 cities
London
RP houm
Inermediate hum
um
• Sociolinguistic studies showed how RP, and
the intermediate and the most localized
accents are related to social class.
• To measure linguistic and social phenomena.
• Assign individuals a numerical index score on
the basis of income, education, other factors,
then group them with others who have similar
indexes.
• In east Anglia and in AA Detroit the 3rd p.suffix –s is
not present in the speech of some people:
• She like him very much
• He don’t know a lot, do he?
• It go ever so fast
• Since –s is standard, and since standard English is
associated with higher classe, we may suspect that
there is a correlation between the usage of –s and
social class
• Tape record, listen, transcribe, count , Table 4.
• Norwich (%) Detroit (%)
• MMC 0 UMC 1
LMC 2 LMC 10
UWC 70 UWC 57
MWC 87 -
LWC 97 LWC 71
• Correlational sociolinguistics
• Like regional dialects, social-class dialects are
not distinct entities, they merge into each other
• Popular stereotypes of social dialects are
misleading. The Detroit African American
dialect has no third person marker. Detroit
African Americans of all classes use both
forms, it is only proportions that differ.
Language and ethnicity
• Ethnic-group differentiation in a mixed
community is a particular type of social
differentiation and has linguistic
differentiation associated with it.