Language, Society, and New Media

Sociolinguistics Today

Marcel Danesi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048766
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

This book presents an interdisciplinary approach to the scientific study of the relation between language and society, language and culture, language and mind. It integrates frameworks from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology and emerging strands of research on language and new media, in order to demonstrate how language undergirds human thought and social behaviors. It is designed as an introductory textbook aimed at students with little to no background in linguistics. Each chapter covers the main aspects of a particular topic or area of study, while also presenting future avenues of study. This edition includes discussions on:

? social media and the creation of identity;

? gestural communication;

? emoji writing;

? multimodality;

? human-computer interaction.

Discussions are supported by a wealth of pedagogical features, including sidebars, as well as activities, assignments, and a glossary at the back. The overall aim is to demonstrate the dynamic connections between language, society, thought, and culture, and how they continue to evolve in today's rapidly changing digital world. It is ideal for students in introductory courses in sociolinguistics, language and culture, and linguistic anthropology.

1 Sociolinguistics

From the dawn of history, humans have used a unique ability—language—to think, to classify the world, to communicate with one another beyond the instinctual use of body signals, to encode and transmit knowledge to subsequent generations, and to carry out an infinite array of intellectually sophisticated activities. Civilization is built on language. Each word is, at once, an instantiation of time-specific knowledge, an act of human consciousness, a memory capsule, and an implicit principle of cultural organization and social structure. Cumulatively, the repository of words of the world’s languages constitutes humanity’s collective knowledge system. The Greek philosophers saw language as a manifestation of lógos, which meant both “word” and “mind.” Jumping forward a couple of millennia to the nineteenth century, a discipline called linguistics emerged to study lógos scientifically. Subsequently, in the twentieth century, linguists developed theoretical models, precise methods of research, and various branches of their discipline in order to answer the overall question of what language is and what it allows humans to accomplish. One of the branches is sociolinguistics, the investigation of the relation of language to social systems, ideas, and behaviors; another one is linguistic anthropology (originally called anthropological linguistics), the study of how language, mind, and culture interact to produce people’s beliefs and worldviews. These two branches are typically considered to be separate today, even though they share a considerable domain of research interests. So, while sociolinguistics proper is the primary focus of this textbook, many aspects of linguistic anthropology will be incorporated into its overall presentation.

Humans have always been curious about language. Already in the 400s BCE, an Indian scholar named PĀn˔ini described the Sanskrit language he spoke with a set of about 4,000 rules. His work, called the Ashtadhayayi, is considered to be one of the first grammars of any language on Earth. PĀn˔ini showed that many words could be decomposed into smaller meaning-bearing units. In English, for example, the word incompletely is made up of three such units: in + complete + ly. Two of these (/in-/ and /-ly/) recur in the formation of other words and are thus structural units of English grammar; complete is, instead, a non-decomposable unit, part of a collection of units called a lexicon. PĀn˔ini also described with precision how Sanskrit words were pronounced, looking forward to the modern-day study of sound systems. Moreover, he argued that Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary provided an indirect historical record of how a particular society emerged, developed, and shaped the beliefs of its speakers.

This chapter will provide an introductory overview of what the systematic study of language, culture, and society is fundamentally about. The contemporary sociolinguist focuses on how language units such as those described by PĀn˔ini underlie and reveal details of social and cultural systems. The ideas presented here are discussed in a schematic way. Many of these will be developed and illustrated in subsequent chapters.

1.1 Language

Defining language is an exercise in circular reasoning, because we need words to do so, and language is, in a reductive sense, a collection of words. The English term language comes ultimately from the Latin word lingua, meaning “tongue.” So, a working definition of this phenomenon is the use of the tongue and other organs to create words. But the more appropriate term for this definition is speech—the physical means that are (or can be) used to deliver or express language. Language is a faculty of the brain that is expressed as physical speech in some way.

From the dawn of history, the lengths to which some have gone to throw light on the origin of language are quite extraordinary. It is reported by the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) that in the seventh century BCE the Egyptian king Psamtik devised an “experiment” to determine the original language of humanity. The story goes that he gave two new-born babies of ordinary people to a shepherd to nurture among his flocks. The shepherd was commanded not to utter any speech before them. The children were to live by themselves in a solitary habitation. At the due hours the shepherd was instructed to bring food to them to eat, to give them their fill of milk, and to carry out all the necessary tasks to ensure their survival. After two years, the shepherd brought the babies raised in the prescribed manner before Psamtik. The first word uttered by the two sounded like becos—the ancient Phrygian word for “bread.” The ecstatic Psamtik immediately declared Phrygian to be the mother tongue of humanity. It is unlikely that Psamtik’s “experiment” ever took place. But even if it had, it certainly would not have proved anything. The babbling sounds made by the children—in probable imitation of something they had heard—were interpreted, or more accurately misinterpreted, as sounding like the word becos by Psamtik.

Language allows humans to refer to, and think about, objects, states, ideas, feelings, and events that are felt to be important by a particular society at a point in time. A certain kind of plant thus becomes a tree or a flower, if the given society makes these distinctions; otherwise it remains an unnamed generic plant. When we come across something for which we have no name, but which we want to identify and encode into our language in some way, then we employ several ingenious strategies—we can make up a new word, we can use paraphrases (other words) to describe it, or we can borrow a word from another language that seems to fill in the gap that exists in our own language. Language is an adaptive tool that we employ to name the world around (and within) us so that we can carry it around in our minds, so to speak, in the form of words and other structures.

Wherever there are humans living in groups, there are languages. Animals communicate with their innate signaling systems. Humans also use signals (body language and facial expressions). But verbal language is a unique evolutionary endowment. Unlike signaling systems, which tend to be stable and largely uniform across time and space, language varies and fluctuates according to where it is used and to the time period of its usage. Different languages emerge in accordance to the specific experiences and needs of the people who speak them. There is no better or worse language. All languages serve human needs equally well, no matter if the language is spoken by millions of people (like Mandarin Chinese) or a small handful (like some indigenous languages of America); and no matter if it is the main language of a nation-state or used by a small community of people. Each language allows people to solve common problems of knowledge, understanding, and social organization.

There are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. There are a little more than 200 languages with a million or more speakers. Of these, around 20 have 50 million or more. More than half of the languages spoken today are expected to disappear in the next century—a tragedy that parallels the corresponding loss of natural species and resources on earth. Diversity (biological, intellectual, linguistic, cultural) is a principle of life. If we lose linguistic-cultural diversity, we are at serious risk of losing diversity of thought, which is a critical resource for human knowledge making. Languages in danger of extinction include the indigenous ones of America (North and South), Australia, and Siberia. Preserving endangered languages is an objective of many sociolinguists and anthropologists today. Language loss (known technically as language attrition) is a worldwide problem.

1.1.1 Language Classification

Languages are classified in two main ways (Campbell and Poser 2008; Song 2011). One is in terms of families, that is, groups of languages that have split off from a common ancestor language. For example, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit are all part of the language family called Indo-European, established by the fact that they share phonetic, grammatical, and vocabulary patterns that are traceable to that ancestral source. Over time, each of these produced “linguistic offspring” of its own. As a concrete example, consider the presence of certain Latin cognates in Italian, French, and Spanish, the linguistic offspring of Latin—cognates are words having the same linguistic root or origin (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 The Development of Latin Words into Italian, French, and Spanish

Latin source	Italian	French	Spanish
nocte(m)(night)	notte	nuit	noche
tectu(m)(roof)	tetto	toit	techo
lacte(m)(milk)	latte	lait	leche
factum(m)(fact)	fatto	fait	hecho

A close examination of the cognates makes it evident that a specific pattern of phonetic correspondences exists among them. The tt in the Italian words corresponds to it in the French words and to the ch in Spanish words (pronounced more or less like English ch in the word church). Clearly, these correspondences are phonetic derivatives of the original Latin consonant cluster ct = /kt/. Many other patterns, phonetic, grammatical, and lexical, can be established among these languages. As such, they are said to belong to the same language family, known as the Romance languages. The use of cognates to determine membership in a language family is known technically as genetic classification. There are around 15 major language families that have been identified by using this method.

Another method is called typological; it involves classifying languages according to how they construct their words. Agglutinative or synthetic languages typically use so-called bound morphemes, or elements that are combined to make up words; isolating languages, in contrast, tend to form each word with a single morpheme. An example of a language classified as agglutinative is Turkish: the word evlerinizden, which means “of/from your houses” consists of four morphemes: ev + ler + iniz + den = “house + plural + your + from.” Mandarin Chinese is classified instead as an isolating language. Its version of the same phrase, “from your houses,” consists of four distinct words: Cóng ni˘ de fángzi (从你的房子). Needless to say, there is no such thing as an exclusively agglutinative or isolating language. It is a matter of degree—of more or less.

Edward Sapir (1921) developed one of the first typological systems for classifying languages. He took into consideration both the number of morphemes used in word formation and the degree of synthesis in the formation process. For example, the English words goodness and depth are similar in that they are composed of a root morpheme (good and deep) and a suffix (‑ness and -th). The word depth, however, shows a greater degree of synthesis, since it has evolved from a complete fusion of the root and suffix morphemes, while in the case of goodness the suffix is added to the root without the same type of fusion. The American linguist Joseph Greenberg (1966) further elaborated Sapir’s technique, introducing the concept of “morphological index” as a means to establish the degree of synthesis mathematically. The index is calculated by taking large, representative samples of the words in a language, and then dividing the number of morphemes (M) by the number of words (W):

$$\text{I=M}÷\text{W}$$

In a perfectly isolating language, the index is equal to 1, because there would be a perfect match between number of words (W) and number of morphemes (M), or M = W. In agglutinating languages, M is greater than W. The greater it is, the higher the index, and thus the higher the degree of agglutination. The highest index Greenberg discovered with his method was 3.72 for a Native American language. He suggested that:

• languages in the 1.0–2.2 range should be classified as analytic
• languages in the 2.2–3.0 range should be classified as synthetic (agglutinative)
• languages in the 3.0 and above range should be classified as polysynthetic.

The main weakness in classifying languages in this way lies in the lack of a definitive criterion for determining what constitutes a word in one language or another. The typological classification of languages has, nevertheless, gained wide acceptance because of the central role of words in language structure. Generally, linguists use a combination of both genetic and typological methods to classify languages today. Although the two methods often coincide in classifying certain languages consistently, they also produce results that contrast with each other. The use of computers and algorithms to compile and organize relevant data has greatly enhanced classification efforts today.

1.1.2 Features of All Languages

All languages share a basic set features. The main ones are as follows:

1. Languages have a finite set of distinctive sound units and a finite set of grammatical units (such as /in-/ and /-ly/, seen earlier in the word incompletely) for constructing words; the former ar...