Sociolect

11 Key excerpts on "Sociolect"

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  Discovering Sociolinguistics

  From Theory to Practice

  • Dick Smakman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The term can be used generically to avoid unwanted distinctions between less codified and more codified lan-guages (‘dialects’ and ‘standard languages’ are all ‘varieties’, and so are, for instance, occupational varieties involving jargon). Some of the terms include the syllable ‘lect’, which refers to a set of linguis-tic phenomena that can be recognised as an entity. A ‘Sociolect’ is a variety defined on the basis of social grounds and is associated with a group of people who share certain qualities. For instance, in a Tamil-speaking region in India there are two Sociolects, namely Mudaliyar and Iyengar. Mudaliyar is spoken by a lower caste than Iyengar, as the latter caste is associated with scholarli-ness. This is a social (rather than a regional) difference between the groups. There are also internationally known Sociolects, like so-called ‘Valley speak’, or ‘Valspeak’, as well as ‘Surfer talk’, which are typical of younger speakers in Southern California in the United States (Macías et al. 2018 ). ‘Hyperlect’ is a name sometimes used for a certain Sociolect, namely posh speech (Honey 1985 ). Poshness refers to a Sociolect that is characterised by distinctive word choices and ways to pronounce certain sounds and certain words. A ‘regiolect’, which often has a name, is defined on the basis of geographical criteria. Latgalian, as spoken in Eastern Latvia, is a regiolect. An individual’s unique language sys-tem, i.e., one’s personalised variety, is often referred to as an ‘idiolect’. The term ‘idiolect’ is closely related to the word ‘vernacular’, which refers to the language used for everyday communication, i.e., a spontaneous language that comes naturally. The latter term is often also used to refer to a group’s indigenous language, especially if that deviates from a wider language norm. ‘African American Vernacular English’, an urban vernacular from the United States, fits that particular meaning of the term.

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  The Routledge Companion to Linguistics in India

  • Hemalatha Nagarajan(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  Sociolinguistics

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003099024-7

  What is your good name, please? I am remembering we used to be neighbours.

  R. Parthasarathi (1998)

  Module 1: Language and Society and Language Varieties

  Language is not spoken in a vacuum. Apart from individuals who convey their thoughts, ideas, and feelings through the medium of language, language also forms an integral aspect of any society or culture, governed by its norms and practices. The branch of linguistics that deals with how language is used in a society or culture and is governed by factors like gender, race, class, caste, etc., is called sociolinguistics.

  The English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor defined culture as something that is “acquired by man as a member of society” and language too forms an integral part of it as much as the food we eat; the types of clothes we wear; or the traditions, festivals, and practices we follow. We all need food to survive, a roof over our head, and clothes to protect us from ravages of weather. However, the type of food we consume, the type of houses we live in, and the kinds of clothes we wear are dictated by our culture. Likewise, there are a number of aspects of language that are universal. However, in this chapter, we explore those aspects of language which are conditioned by culture, region, class, caste, and other aspects of society.

  Language Varieties

  Any important aspect of social structure and function is likely to have a distinctive linguistic counterpart. People belong to different social classes, perform different social roles, and carry on different occupations (David Crystal 1995 : 3)

  One’s language can be conditioned by certain static factors and by some dynamic factors. The static factors are aspects like region, class, caste, gender, etc., of the speaker, which remain unaltered in all circumstances.1 There are also some dynamic factors that condition our language use. These are factors like the subject matter, the medium of communication (spoken or written, e-mail, or text message), and the addressor–addressee relationship, fashions in language use, etc. The static factors mostly lead to dialects, and the dynamic factors contribute to differences in registers

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  Introducing Linguistics

  Theoretical and Applied Approaches

  • Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  PART 5 LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OVERVIEW The goal of the present chapter is to familiarize you with key concepts and findings in sociolinguistics. More specifically, you will: • learn about language and society; • acquire concepts needed to study variation in the use of language; • discover factors relevant for how different people speak; • discover factors relevant for how individuals vary their speech; and • explore variation in bilingual societies. 9.1 What Is Sociolinguistics? The branch of linguistics which seeks to examine and explain the everyday variation that characterizes human languages is sociolinguistics. Linguistic variation not only refers to the fact that many different languages in the world are spoken by humans, but also refers to the variation within a given language and even within speech communities of that language. In other words, linguistic variation happens at many levels: between languages, within a language, and within individuals who speak those languages. We don’t always express the same information in the same way. You probably already have noticed just by being human that how people speak is based on factors like: • where they are from (regional variation); • who they are (age, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.); • the situation they are in (formal, informal); • their linguistic profile (bilingual, monolingual). Sociolinguistics studies the (often quantitative) relationships that exist between dif- ferent linguistic forms, and social and situational categories. Another way to understand what sociolinguistics investigates is to contrast it with other approaches to language, like structural and prescriptive perspectives. 9 Sociolinguistics Language in Society Terry Nadasdi 328 Sociolinguistics: Language in Society Structural approaches are interested in the invariable properties of language (i.e., what is and isn’t possible in a given language).

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  Learning about Linguistics

  • F.C. Stork, J.D.A. Widdowson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  dialect is most often used in respect of differences which result from geographical situation, but sociological features are equally important and they play a particularly dominant role in varieties of English. A dialect is a variety of language, which is either regional or social in origin (or a combination of these)  which is spoken by certain members of the speech community.

  In England there are many regional dialects which have an equally long history going back to Old English times and the coming of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the fifth century A.D. In fact the modern regional dialects have all evolved from the four regional dialects of Old English. In everyday language the term dialect is often thought of as being concerned with rural uneducated speech. Dialectology, however, as a branch of linguistics is concerned with all regional types of speech in towns and cities as well as in villages and in rural communities. The so-called ‘standard language’ itself is nothing more than a regional dialect which has taken on its prestigious role as a result of various geographical, cultural, political and social pressures. Regional dialects can differ from each other in three principal ways:

  (1)  phonology (2)  grammar (3)  lexis

  In the twentieth century the most important distinctions between regional varieties of speech in English are to be found on the phonological level. Some dialectologists make a useful distinction between ACCENT , which is a variety of language differing from other varieties merely on the level of phonology, and DIALECT which differs from other varieties in grammar and lexis as well as phonology.

  In the British Isles geographical and social factors overlap in the various dialects. As a general rule speakers of high social or educational status from all parts of the country tend to modify their speech towards the norms of Southern British English. The term standard English is often used to refer to written forms of the language which conform to the patterns and grammatical norms of the socially accepted speech variety based on Southern British English. On the phonological level the pronunciation of educated speakers from that area is also taken as the standard and is often referred to as RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (RP) . Both standard English and Received Pronunciation refer to those kinds of English which are typical of educated speakers from London and the south east and are free from other regional variations. They are also used as models for teaching English to non-native speakers. What is regarded as ‘standard’ or ‘received’ cannot be defined in absolute terms, not least because it is the nature of language to be in a constant state of change. It is therefore impossible to legislate for what is acceptable or unacceptable for more than a brief period of time. Even in those countries where there is an Academy or other official body for laying down standards of language (e.g. L’ Académie Française in France)  the everyday speech of the people is scarcely influenced by its prescriptive pronouncements. English has no such official body and what is regarded as standard is based on a consensus of opinion among its educated speakers. There are therefore varieties of standard English which vary from place to place and from time to time. Educated people from areas outside the south east may speak modified forms of standard English which might be called regional standards. Such regional standards, however, are largely a question of accent: i.e. they differ from each other mainly on the phonological level. The speech of BBC announcers from Bristol may include the West Country [r] sounds and an announcer from Manchester may use the northern [a] and these minor variations alone mark their pronunciation as different from RP

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  Issues in Sociolinguistics

  • Oscar Uribe-Villegas(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In both cases, there are certain contributing sociolinguistic processes such as: (a) linguistic learning and unlearning, (b) linguistic drift (which was already mentioned by the first linguists) and (c) linguistic pressure and resistance. Thus, in reality, communication is achieved thanks to the interaction 26 Oscar Uribe-Villegas of various idiolects which, although diverse, contain groups of codes which have certain common features, with which they create a minimum uniform code (Sociolect) which functions within a community (a homo-geneous speech community). And, although the Sociolect is an abstraction, it has reality for the speakers who can distinguish between the different deviations which fall into it (idiosyncracies) and the others which are outside it (which are socially significant) and which, for this very reason, mark the fact that the speaker belongs to a different social group than that to which the listener belongs. Sociolinguistics has to identify the Sociolects, study how they grow and how they function; it has to delimit social dialects and identify registers, as well as determining the linguistic competence achieved by the indi-vidual thanks to the appropriate use of these registers, and not only their use of phonology and grammar. In the establishing of categories that must be used in sociolinguistics, Fishman, as we stated before, has contributed by pointing out some fundamental concepts, such as that of 'situation', of 'domain' and of 'competence'. But not only is it necessary to enrich the conceptual battery or the whole unit of categories that sociolinguistics disposes of, it is also neces-sary to make a rigorous definition, in view of new needs, of concepts and categories which were already used in traditional linguistics.

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  Language and Society

  • Rowela S. Basa(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Linguistic variation is generally associated with geographical areas. This chapter discusses some concepts of geographical variation in linguistics. This chapter also covers the significance of linguistic variation in English language essay. Finally, it discusses about linguist diversity and its complexity. 7.1. INTRODUCTION Language is not just a mode of communication between people. It is also considered as a social phenomenon. The whole branch which talks about language and society is known as sociolinguistics. It basically tries to reflect that how our language is affected by different factors like class, gender, race, etc. Anthropological linguistics is a subset of this area. It is basically concerned with different forms and usage of language in a different culture. It also talks about the influence of cultural environment in the development of language. Sociolinguistics is the branch which studies about the interconnection between language and society and the different ways people uses the language according to the social situations. Its inquiries about the basic question, “How does the social nature of human beings are affected by language, and how does language is affected by social interaction? There is a great variation of depth and detail in the languages whether we have studied the dialects across the different regions or when we analyzed the way men and women communicate in different situations. An author Raymond Hickey who wrote a book named as language and Society. He basically gave a statement about sociolinguistics which is basically the study of language and society is that this term is coined in the middle of the twentieth century. Before the twentieth century also, there were many authors who passed a comment that how usage of language was affected or indeed directed by social factors like profession, age, class or The Linguistic Variations and the Society 171 gender.

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  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

  • Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Languages, Communities, and Contexts Part I An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Eighth Edition. Ronald Wardhaugh and Janet M. Fuller. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/wardhaugh8e 2 We stated in the introductory chapter that the concept of language is considered by many sociolinguists to be an ideological construct. Further, we noted that all languages exhibit internal variation, that is, each language exists in a number of varieties and is in one sense the sum of those varieties. We use the term variety as a general term for a way of speaking; this may be something as broad as Standard English, or a variety defined in terms of loca- tion and social class (e.g., ‘working-class New York City speech’), or something defined by its function or where it is used, such as ‘legalese.’ In the following sections, we will explore these different ways of specifying language varieties and how we define the terms ‘lan- guage’ and ‘dialect’ (regional and social). We will also address how the associations between language and social meaning develop and are used in communicating in different speech contexts. What is a Language? What do we mean when we refer to a language or, even more important, the idea of mixing languages? As we will discuss further in chapters 8 and 9, recent research has coined many new terms to describe what has traditionally been called multilingualism – ‘(trans)lan- guaging,’ ‘metrolingualism,’ ‘heteroglossia.’ These terms reflect the idea that languages are ideological constructs; while we (usually) have names for different ways of speaking and can describe their features, in practice linguistic boundaries may be fluid.

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  Studying Dialect

  • Rob Penhallurick(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  semantics. Currie uses the term in his article ‘A projection of socio-linguistics: The relationship of speech to social status’ (1952), which deals with the variation of speech according to social register (Koerner, 1991, p. 65). Apparently Currie had used the word at a conference in 1949 (Hymes, 1979, p. 141; Joseph, 2002, p. 109). By the mid 1960s, the term was starting to become the favoured name for a new branch of linguistics. Its scope was wider than that of dialectology, and its aims, thinking, methods, and even terminology differed in significant ways from dialectology.

  For example, to a sociolinguist the term phonology means something quite different from what it meant to A. J. Ellis. To Ellis, the term referred to the study of sounds in a language or dialect, in particular their history and the accurate description of their articulation. To a sociolinguist the term refers generally to the functions that sounds have and the place that they occupy in the relational sound system of a language or dialect (a rather more abstract viewpoint), whereas the description of their production and acoustic perception belongs to phonetics. Sociolinguistics belongs to modern structuralist linguistics, in which there is an emphasis on investigating the function and place of linguistic features in the context of the (structural) networks or systems which they form, so that the account of, for example, a given sound-feature is concerned with its function considered alongside (the functions of) other sound-features in a dialect or language. To use a simple illustration, the sounds represented by the letters b and p in the English words bit and pit are phonetically very similar, but the small phonetic contrast between them ([b] is voiced, [p] is not) is used phonologically in English to distinguish words and meanings, as evidenced by bit and pit, giving two structural units or phonemes, /b/ and /p/. The Finnish language, alternatively, has no phonological distinction based on the phonetic difference between [b] and [p]. Different languages and different dialects of the same language can make use of the array of possible consonant and vowel sounds to create different phonological or phonemic systems. Conventionally in notation a phoneme is enclosed between forward slashes, for example, /b/ and /p/, and /r/, and so on. Actual phonetic realizations or performances of sounds in utterances are transcribed between square brackets, for example, [r], meaning a ‘rolled’ or ‘trilled’ articulation of /r/, distinguished from an approximant [ɹ ] or retroflex [ɽ ] or flapped [ɾ ] articulation of /r/, and so forth. (For a rolled articulation the tip of the tongue taps the upper teeth-ridge several times quickly; for a flapped articulation it does so once; for an approximant the tip of the tongue is curled back slightly but does not touch the roof of the mouth; for a retroflex articulation it is curled back much more.) Each of these in the English language is a phonetic variant of the /r/ phoneme. Each of these variants is different in sound, but the sound-differences do not distinguish word meaning. They do not perform that phonological function. We use these phonetic transcriptions for the actual sounds of speech, but we use the phonemic symbols for the functional elements of sound systems, that is, the elements whose contrasts affect meaning. (And we use the term phonological variable

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  Studying Dialect

  • Rob Penhallurick(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  A language such as English varies according to its geography. At the same time, it will vary according to social class – not all speakers from the same locality will speak the same dialect of English uniformly if those speakers vary in social class. The speech of the locality as a whole can vary along a non-standard to standard continuum that correlates largely with social stratifica-tion. Similarly, the local speech may vary in regular patterns that become apparent when the linguistic data is matched with information about the age, sex, and ethnicity of speakers. What is more, each individual dialect speaker will tend to vary his or her own speech according to the social situation, in relation to such factors as the perceived informality/formality of the context and the social class of the other interlocutors. We each may pronounce any given word differently not only in comparison to other speakers but also according to whether we are speaking to friends or to strangers, whether we are in a bar or at home or in work or in a classroom, and so on. If the inves-tigator of dialect ignores such social and stylistic correlations, then it is likely that the data will appear to contain what looks like quite random or ‘free’ variation. But when the sociolinguistic correlations are made, this random variation might assume regular patterning, and its causes are revealed. The variation then appears not random but structured. What we see is ‘orderly’ or ‘structured heterogeneity’, to use the terms first developed by Weinreich, Studying Dialect 184 Labov and Herzog (1968) in a paper given at a conference at the University of Texas in 1966. For as long as dialectologists focused on the speech of one class (rural working class) and one age-group (elderly), it was to some extent defensible to neglect these correlations. However, when the focus expanded it was time for the methods, aims, and general approach to evolve in new direc-tions.

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  Three essays on linguistic diversity in the Spanish-speaking world

  The U.S. Southwest and the River Plate Area

  • Jacob Ornstein-Galicia, Frederick Gerald Hensey, David William Foster, Jacob Ornstein-Galicia, Frederick Gerald Hensey, David William Foster(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  There is need for elaborating 'mini-models' based on the experience of the investigators described above. These would frankly aim at undertakings by individuals or small groups who could, albeit gradu-ally, fill the innumerable sociolinguistic gaps present today. This would of course call for more openmindedness toward such limited efforts. Let it be remembered that perfectionistic strivings often write the epitaph of sound but modest projects. 39 Labov, Contraction, Deletion and Inherent Variability of the English Copula, 758-59. 24 JACOB ORNSTE1N C. THE SOUTHWEST AS A SOCIOLINGUISTIC AREA - LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL FACTORS 1. The Linguistic Dimension 40 To look at the American Southwest sociolinguistically is somewhat different from merely discussing the languages used in this area and their surface features. As our brief review thus far may have indicated, sociolinguistics attempts to examine several axes of the speech situation - the language(s) used and the social context. First of all, let us point out that, as far as languages themselves are considered, the Southwest is the nation's largest area of linguistic diversity - only equalled by the ethnic group concentrations in large cities (also present here). Of vital concern to us are the relationships of the languages as they serve the needs of the communica-tions networks in this region as a whole, and in the various communities and 'small groups' to which individuals belong. These relationships are, as is the case virtually in every multilingual area of the globe, marked by balance and equilibrium, where more or less satisfactory accomodations and adjustments have evolved. When this does not occur, overt conflict may result. One fact must above all be recognized in sociolinguistics : that there is rarely, if ever, absolute equality of function and prestige in any bilingual situation, even where this is officially proclaimed.

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics

  • Rajend Mesthrie(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  A number of import- ant concepts and findings have emerged from this work on class and the use of language which now form part of the basic currency of the discip- line. Accordingly, we will begin this section with a rapid survey of some of these basic notions. One of the most fundamental is the concept of the speech community . This is the basic unit or object of study for a linguistics that is cognizant of the social setting of language. It has been given many different defini- tions by linguists going back to Bloomfield 1933 and beyond, but these generally converge on two main defining characteristics: density of communication and shared norms. By density of communication is meant simply that members of a speech community talk more to each other than they do to outsiders; the boundaries of communities will normally fall at troughs in the pattern of communication. This is a commonplace observation in dialect geography: mountain ranges, dense forests, and other barriers to communication are often the boundaries of dialect regions. The other, equally important, criterion – shared norms – refers to a common set of evaluative judgments, a community-wide knowledge of what is considered good or bad and what is appropriate for what kind of (socially defined) occasion. Such norms may exist for all aspects of social behavior, but our interest of course is in linguistic norms. One reason that shared norms form part of the definition of the speech community is that they are required to account for one of the principal sociolinguistic findings regarding variation by class and style, namely that the same linguistic variables are involved in the differen- tiation of social classes and speech styles. Study after study has shown that variables stratified by class are also the object of style-shifting: a variant favored by high-status speakers is used more by everyone in the community in their careful styles.

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