SOCIOLINGUISTICS—AGAIN

Now what does this mean for sociolinguistics?

The inter-relationship of language and culture is continued in the process of socialization. That is language is used to transmit culture from one generation to the next. Culture is transmitted verbally. In fact language is our medium for learning most things. We learn our cultural history through language, our cultural concepts, morals and values, and in particular, our social norms and constraints.

CONCLUSION:
It is at this point that we can begin to discuss again, what sociolinguistics really is. Sociolinguistics deals with the processes of socialization and social interaction—with the relationships between language and society.

What are the possible relationships between language and society?

Here is a list:

There are several possible relationships.

1. First, Social structure (i.e.social classes) may either influence or determine linguistic structure and or behavior.
2. Second, linguistic structure and or behavior may either influence or determine social structure. This is the view behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
3. A third possible relationship is that language and society influence each other, that the relationship is what is called dialectical.

***DRAW ON BOARD

Social structure Þ Linguistic structure

Social structure Ü Linguistic structure

Social structure Û Linguistic structure

LANGUAGE DEFINITION part II.

Language is a code with a set of consciously and unconsciously known rules about sounds, words, syntax and grammar used to communicate between people that is culturally/socially influenced OR influences our culture/society OR both.

We must therefore be prepared to look into various aspects of the possible relationships between language and society. Sociolinguistics aim is to move towards a theory which provides an account of the way language is used in a community and of the choices people make when they use language.

END

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Lecture 2: Linguistic Variation

TOWER OF BABEL STORY:

***PUT UP PICTURE OF THE TOWER OF BABEL

Engraving The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré (1865),

There is a famous story in the Bible (Gen. Ch. 11) called the Tower of Babel where a united humanity speaking only one language decided to build a giant tower to reach God in the heavens. God viewed this as an act of definance and scattered the people across the world, giving them all many different languages so that they could never again work together to build a tower to heaven. I’ve mentioned this story because it is part of our shared culture, we all know it, and because it is interesting to see how people even in the ancient past viewed the many differences in languages. Even then, they wondered why the world speaks so many strange and different languages.

Today’s topic is linguistic variation.

Language has changed over time and some language change has led to new languages being created. For example, Latin was the original source language for many of the modern romance languages including Italian, French, and Spanish.

Language change is the manner in which the phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of a language are modified over time. All languages are continually changing. All languages have internal variation. At any given moment the English language, for example, has a huge variety within itself. And since it is the language you have been studying, I will try to draw most of our examples from the English language in this and the remaining lectures.

Sociolinguists are interested in the origins of language change and want to explain how society and changes in society influence language.

Most linguists distinguish between linguistic change and linguistic variation as follows: Linguistic change occurs over time; for example, the differences in spelling and pronunciation between Middle English niht and Modern English night represent linguistic changes that developed between (roughly) the fourteenth and the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.

***WRITE ON BOARD NIHT and NIGHT

In contrast, linguistic variation exists at one given time.

For example, one variety is represented by the different pronunciations of a word like barn. An Eastern New England American English speaker might say bearn and while a speaker of the Great Lakes Northern dialect of American English who might say something more like, born.

Another example is the difference between the chief British and American meanings of the noun vest.

vest / B vest / noun [count]

1 BRITISH a piece of underwear for the top half of your body. American undershirt

2 AMERICAN a WAISTCOAT

2a. a piece of clothing with no sleeves or collar worn over other clothes, for example for protection:

a bulletproof vest

Or for that matter, we might take for example the different British and American words for the same meaning such as:

One last example is simply the slang a Californian surfer might use:

Yo, what’s up dude! You just got a new board? Way cool! Let’s hit the waves! Hang-ten!

In fact all of the following are language variations: Standard English, Cockney, London English, the English of football commentators, lower-class New York speech, Oxford English, legalese, and cocktail party talk. They are NOT all dialects—but some of them certainly are. They do ALL show variation in language.

Today we will be talking about: PUT ON BOARD

· Language variation

· Deciding what is a language and what is a dialect

· Talking about what makes a dialect

· Talking about regional dialects

· Talking about social dialects

· Talking about linguistic variables

· Accents

· And speech communities

SLIDE#1

Sociolinguistic variation is the study of the way language varies and changes in communities of speakers and concentrates in particular on the interaction of:

Social factors (such as a speaker's gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their community, etc)

and

Linguistic structures (such as sounds, grammatical forms, intonation features, words, etc).

Let’s discuss linguistic variation in more detail.

WHAT IS A VARIETY?

SLIDE#2

Variety is when people who speak the same language speak it differently.

[Read SLIDE]

A specific variation within a language is called a dialect.

SLIDE #3

Let’s first discuss the difference between language and dialect.