Sociolinguistics lane 422

Language and society

• Language has a social function: it helps us to establish and maintain relationships.• Convey information about the speaker.

• Language vs. dialect regional vs. social• Dialect vs. accent• no clear-cut boundaries: dialect continuum• Language continuum, eg. German and dutch

spoken along the Netherlands-Germany frontier

Criteria to Language

• Linguistic criteria Mutual intellegibility & language, e.g Dutch and German

• Political and cultural criteria1. autonomy and heteronomy (German and Dutch:

non-standard dialects in Germany, Austria and Switzerland)

• Discreteness and continuity• Dialect: grammar, vocabulary and

pronuciation

• Language is closely tied p with the social structure and value systems of society; therefore different dialects and accents are evaluated in different ways.

• e.g. non pre-vocalic /r/: car, cart England, not prestigious

New York, prestigious

• Value judgments are arbitrary, and based on social connotations

• Subjective attitudes towards language are important for the study of language change, explain why dialects change and how, e.g. /r/ in New York (Labov)

• The use of non pre-vocalic /r/ by upper middle class in New York• Labov’s study of Marth’s Vineyard, house , mouth/∂u/ ,/au/ subjective attitudes towards the native linguistic form: favorable or

unvavorable Linguistic change is not always in the direction of a prestigious form.

• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis• The effect of society on language: how

physical environment is reflected in language• the social environment, kinship terms.• The values of society affect language, e.g

taboo words, the word but not the concept.• Language is variable, is not used in the same

manner by all people in all situations.

Key sociolinguistic concepts• Variety: a neutral term to refer to any form of language

(languages & dialects)

• Speech community: controversial concept:

a community of people who share a linguistic variety as their own and share social norms.

• shared linguistic norms , shared communicative competence and shared social norms. (can be a city, neighborhood, region, nation)

• Communicative (Sociolinguistic) competence:

speaker’s underlying knowledge of rules of grammar and rules for their use in socially appropriate circumstances. (learned through socialization), e.g. please, thank you. Greeting formally, informally.

• Social knowledge is essential for membership in speech community.

• boundaries between speech communities are social rather than linguistic. speech community language community: e.g Papua New Guinea mutual intelligibility

• Gaelic\English communities in Scotland (rely on their communicative: the shared norms of interactions in the community.

• Can we claim the existence of a homogenous speech community with the attested heterogeneity in cities and countries?

Variation and Language

• The variable : an abstract representation of the source of variation, realised by two or more variants, e.g ‘think’ // : [], [f].

• the variants are the actual realization of a variable

• Constraints on variation: linguistic & social factors determine the use of variants.

• Free variation• Variation is predicable but not with 100 % certainty

Fischer’s 1958 study of the use of (ng) in New England. (ng)singing vs. singin’

Variation Studies Fischer’s 1958 study of the use of (ng) in New

England. • 12 boys, 12 girls aged 3-10.

• Interview

Concusions:

• Boys used more [in] than girls.

• The use of [in] increases with the formality of situations. The use of [in] increased when relaxed.

• [in] is used more with verbs that describe everyday activities ,e.g ‘hit’ ; [ing] is used with formal verbs, e.g ‘criticize’.

2 .Labov (1966) study of (r) in New :York

•To investigate the incidence of final and post-vocalic /r /

While most American accents are rhotic, New York (and Boston) have distinctive non-rhotic accent

–Post-Depression, such urban accents lost prestige, and rhotic midwest accent emerged as standard

•Labov showed that rhotic use of /r/ reflected social class and aspiration, and was more widespread in younger speakers

Labov (1966) study of (r) in New :York

•Method:•He needed to quickly elicit possible /r/ pronunciations in

both spontaneous and careful speech–Walked around 3 NYC department stores, asking the location of

departments he knew were on the fourth floor–By pretending not to hear, he got each informant to pronounce the

two words twice, once spontaneously, and once carefully•3 stores catering for distinct social groups :

–Saks (upper), Macy’s (middle), S. Klein (lower)•Informants were shop workers at different grades, giving a

further possible stratification

Use of [r]

0

20

40

60

80

100

Saks Macy's S Klein

store

%

never

sometimes

always

•Use of [r] corresponded to higher class of store

Results

first and second utterances

0102030405060708090

100

Saks Macy's S Klein

store

%

fourth I

fourth 2

floor I

floor 2

• use of [r] increases in careful speech

Results

Pronunciation and style

[r] pronunciation by class and style

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

casual careful reading word list minimalpairs

style

%

0

1

2,3

4,5

6,8

9

Adoption of prestige form increases with formality of style, in each case with a higher usage by higher classesEXCEPT in one case

[r] pronunciation by class and style

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

casual careful reading word list minimalpairs

style

%

6,8

9

middle class outperform upper middle class on word lists and minimal pairsthis cross-over due to hypercorrection (according to Labov)not sure whether results are statistically significant

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. Mandarin, Tamil and Malay are official languages.

• 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?

•Motivations \functions for a switch between codes?

•Attitudes towards code switching\ mixing. Stigmitaized or favorable (ethnic identity)

Sociolinguistic research• An hypothesis is a specific statement of prediction. It describes in concrete

(rather than theoretical) terms what you expect will happen in your study.

• Your prediction is that variable A and variable B will be related (you don't care whether it's a positive or negative relationship). Then the only other possible outcome would be that variable A and variable B are not related. Usually, we call the hypothesis that you support (your prediction) the alternative hypothesis, and we call the hypothesis that describes the remaining possible outcomes the null hypothesis.

• hypothesis formation: one might formulate a hypothesis before beginning the research project, based on available literature, or one’s observations in the course of collecting, processing, and/or analyzing data might lead to an interesting, testable hypothesis.

• Not all studies have hypotheses. Sometimes a study is designed to be exploratory

Sociolinguistic research

• Empirical research

• Sampling: target population: define the sampling universe, determine the sample size

• Stratified sample by age, sex, region, etc.

• random, judgment sampling (snowball sampling)

• Methods of data collection

• Questionnaire

• Face-to-face interview, telephone interviews

population, tape recorded, agreement to participate.

Sociolinguistic research

• The analysis of variation: The quantitative method

• Define your linguistic variables and social variables

• Transcription, coding, counting tokens, percentages

• Excel or word for tables and graphs

Sociolinguistic research

• Interpretation of data, Look for pattern, correlation between linguistic variable and social variable.

Sociolinguistic research

• Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism

• Linguistic Constraints on Codeswitching and Codemixing of Bilingual Moroccan Arabic-French Speakers in Canada

www.cascadilla.com/isb4.html

• Code Switching Between English and Arabic : An Empirical study on Saudi Female Students

Sociolinguistics project

• DESCRIPTIVE STUDY. If you choose to do a descriptive study, it will have the following components:

• (1) A description of the speech community, giving enough information to contextualize the sociolinguistic variables.

• (2) A description of the sociolinguistic variables embodied in this speech community, and an indication of how they have been identified (e.g. personal observation, previous studies, general community knowledge, jokes and stereotypes, etc.).

• (3) A review of relevant literature concerning this particular speech community or sociolinguistic configuration. At least 5 sources must be cited.

Sociolinguistics project

• An analysis of the chosen sociolinguistic situation within a broader context. How does this fit in with the general study of sociolinguistics? Do the data from your study offer anything new to sociolinguistics? Would a thorough and complete analysis of the chosen community require resources or models not currently contemplated in sociolinguistics?

• (5) Suggestions for future research. This can be brief and can be appended to the analysis in point (4). Every linguistic study should suggest new directions, unanswered questions, and future research. Mention the most promising possibilities.

QUANTITATIVE STUDY• 1)  A description of the speech community, giving enough

information to contextualize the sociolinguistic variables.

• (2)  A description of the sociolinguistic variables embodied in this speech community, and an account of how the data have been obtained (data collection, number of speakers, coding of tokens).

• (3)  A review of relevant literature concerning this particular speech community or sociolinguistic configuration.  At least 5 sources must be cited. 

• (4)  A working hypothesis about the sociolinguistic importance of the chosen variables, that will be tested against the data.

• (5). A brief interpretation of the quantitative results with respect to the working hypothesis.  Do the quantitative results support or disconfirm the hypothesis? 

• (6)  Suggestions for future research. Be sure to add any suggestions for improvement of the study (data collection, quantitative analysis, interpretation of results).

Style, context and register

• Style, in the most general sense, refers to the distinctive way of speaking or writing. People adopt different styles in different contexts.

• The influence of the addressee on the speaker’s language: solidarity (social closeness) between participants is an important influence on speech style.

• Casual, relaxed, vernacular forms with friends

• Standard forms with strangers

• Many factors affect social distance\solidarity between people

Factors affecting speaker’s style• Age of addressee: child, elderly vs. adult: simpler vocabulary

and less complex sentences, ‘we’ vs. ‘you’ example 4, p.225

• Social background of the addressee, example 6 p. 228

• Peter Trudgill interviewing people in Norwich, use of [t] in better, bet. Glottal stop used up to 98% with lower class interviewees (100%). With higher class (25%), Trudgill’s use dropped to 30%. He was accommodating to his interviewees.

• Relative status and solidarity between speaker and addressee

• Colloquial style: vernacular

• social dialect survey in New York Labov elicited the vernacular: the style in which minimum attention is given to the monitoring of speech

• Observer’s paradox can be overcome by manipulating the topic of interview

Register

• Occupational style: a jargon which a group of specialists develop to talk about their specialty, eg. Journalese, legalese, sport commentators.

• Example 23

Speech accommodation theory• The notion of accommodation developed from the work of

Howard Giles and his associates.

• Speakers tend to change the way they are speaking depending on who they are talking to.

• Speakers may Converge (modify their speech to sound similar)or diverge (maintain linguistic distinctiveness to distinguish themselves from interlocutor e.g. some minority ethnic groups).

• Motivation: in the case of convergence to express solidarity or reduce social distance, polite speech strategy, sarcastic effect.

• Upward convergence, downward convergence

• Short-term accommodation vs. long term accommodation which may lead to permanent linguistic changes.

• Dialect contact zones.

• Reactions to speech convergence and divergence depend on the reasons people attribute for the convergence or divergence.

• Deliberate divergence will be heard as antagonistic or uncooperative.

Language contact and dialect levelling

• Reduction of differences distinguishing regional dialects or accents.

• The result of mobility, in the 20th century social changes affected the local dialect diversity which characterised regions for hundred of years.

• Immigration, urbanization, new towns.

• The outcome of close daily contact: levelling out of differences

Outcomes of Language contact• All variation and change can be viewed as the

outcome of some form of contact between different individuals or members of different groups: bilingualism, bidialectlism, code switching, dialect levelling (e.g. the use of London variants (ay) PRICE, MOUTH (aw) by young children in Milton Keynes; stops [t] and glottal [] in Reading (close to London) and Hull (far from London, no immigration or contact with London or south east speakers. The Fens).

Contact-induced change: pidgins and creoles

• pidgins and creoles are languages that emerge out of the contact between speakers of more than two different languages.

• Social conditions associated with the contact• Limited social contact: speakers may only be in

contact in a reduced set of social interactions, such as trading or work. Limited access to native speaker’s model of each other’s languages.

• Lack of motivation to acquire native-speaker like skills in the other language.

• How they are learnt.

• Pidgin: a contact language that is not nobody’s first language, no native speakers. Arise in the conditions of trade and labor related contexts.

• Restricted social functions

• A creole a contact language which has native speakers, may be added the community repertoire resulting in bilingualism.

• A creole serves most of the or all of the functions that any natural human language must serve; everyday interaction, telling stories, jokes, games, etc.

Functional definition of pidgins and creoles• Any variety used for business or limited to work place may be

considered a pidgin.

• Russenorsk used between Russian and Norwegian sailors in The Bering Sea during fishing season of the northern summer.

• Francais tiraillou ‘torn French’ used in the military parts of the French colonies in Africa.

• Once a variety is used a as vehicle for all types of communication, it has become a creole.

• Once it acquires its native speakers, it becomes a creole (nativization).

• Creolisation: the process by which a pidgin becomes the first language of group of speakers. Exansion of a pidgin into a wider range of social functions.

• Vernacularisation: the process by which a contact variety becomes used with the full range of social functions of the language of the home.

Characteristics of Pidgins

• Ps have structural norms & must be learned

• Pidgins distinct from Input languages by:– Structural reduction, typically in morphology– Lack many semantic and grammatical distinctions– Few stylistic resources (=conventional variation]– Lexical reduction, derivation from dominant groups– 00• 1. Simplification of superstrate (dominant language)

grammatical structure

2. Retention of substrate (less dominant) grammatical structures

Tok Pisin (talk pidgin)

• Orait yu yet killim bikinini bilong me• Alright 2s focus kill child poss 1st

• ‘all right you’re the one who killed my child’

Gulf Pidgin Arabic (Næss, Unn Gyda (2008)

• Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) used as a communication tool between local citizens and the large Asian immigrant population in the area for at least 30 years.

• Example Asian immigrants in the Omani border town of Buraimia developed separate language variety rather than as a collection of individual attempts of mastering Gulf Arabic.

• three grammatical features of this variety, possession, negation and the verbal system. to document systematic reductions and greater regularity in the grammar of GPA compared to that of Gulf Arabic, as well as the development of a light verb system unparalleled in Arabic, but similar to several of the main substrate languages of GPA such as Urdu.

• GPA grammar and phonology also display several of the characteristic features of other well-documented Arabic-based pidgins and creoles such as Juba Arabic, Nubi and Turku in Arabic-speaking Afr

Language shift• Language (dialect) shift: when a community who

share a native language abandon it, and collectively shift to speaking another one instead.

• Language shift is always preceded by multilingualism• What effects does language shift have on the

structures of the languages involved?

• Language shift can happen raidly or slowly.• Caribbean Creole languages developed within a

century, even less, from African and European languages. Most African languages were lost in 1-2 generations under the catastrophic conditions of slavery

• Language shift is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for all of recorded history. Whenever two cultures/populations with different languages come in intense contact, shift is a possibility.

• Typically those who shift are the weaker group, but

• sometimes it is the more powerful one who shifts.

• Vikings who speak Old Norse invaded in the British isles in 787 kept their language for centuries, then shifted to the evolving English language. Vikings went to Northern France became bilingual then shifted to French.

• Historical: Language shift to Arabic by Berber population in North Africa (Morocco) following the Muslim conquest

• Language shift to Arabic by Armenians in Jordan.

 

Language death (attrition)• Language death is the complete disappearance of a

language. (Latin is not a dead language)

• An old phenomenon as old as the recorded history of the languages of the world.

• Often death comes by in a situation of dialect contact and shifting bilingualism.

• Most commonly a gradual process spanning several generations.

• Sudden death: when the last speaker of a language spoken by a very small and isolated group dies, the death of Ishi the last wild Indian in North America.

• Radical language death: Sometimes a result of genocide, the sudden elimination of an entire population.

• Example of language death by genocide: Australian Aboriginal languages

• Over 350 languages were spoken when Capt. Cook landed in 1770. 200 years later, only 90 survived as viable languages.

• Only 10% of Aboriginal people still speak native languages.

• Bottom-to-top death: sometimes death affects first the lower registers of the language leaving for last the most formal register (Latinate pattern).

• Speakers typical of language death situations:

1.Semi-speakers: imperfect speakers with partial command of the productive skills, but perfect command of receptive skills.

2. remembers: speakers who may have been at an early stage fluent speakers, but have lost most of their earlier linguistic ability. Typical of advanced stage of language death, found in conditions of isolation.

The effects of language death on language structure

• Loss of registers and language forms associated with them: the most widespread case is the loss of higher registers

• Lexical Loss • Loss in phonologt• Loss in morphology• Loss in syntax

Language and gender

• ‘Gender’ has replaced ‘sex’ in sociolinguistics.• Sex: biologically or physiologically based

distinction between males and females.• Gender: a social and cultural notion. It

indicates the social identity that emerges or is constructed through social action, and adherence to certain cultural norms and proscriptions.

Gender exclusive and gender preferential features

• Gender exclusive features:

• Some linguistic features are used exclusively by (or to) speakers of a particular sex. e.g. kinship terms

“My Auntie Kath”, grandson, niece, cousin,

• Cultural differences. You in English vs. Arabic

• Such (gender exclusive) linguistic features that directly index sex, or exclusively used by one sex rather than another are rare.

Gender preferential features

• Some social dialect studies showed that some linguistic forms are more used by men or the opposite.

• Generalizations made about preferential gender differences in relation to the use of standard variants.

Principles of Gender and Variation (Labov 1990,2001)

• Principle I. : In stable sociolinguistic variation, women use the standard more than men

• Stable variation vs. change in progress

• Examples of sociolinguistic variation

• (ing) variable: [in], [I]

• (dh) variable : fricative or stop [d] ‘this’

• (th) variable: fricative or stop [t] ‘thin’

• Negative concord: ‘didn’t do nothing anything’

Men’s and women’s use of the alveolar variant [In] in three speech styles and two socio-economic classes in Norwich, England. (source Trudgill 1972)

Explanations for gender differences

• Trudgill: in Western society, men are evaluated more on what they do, and women on how they appear.

• Eckert: women rely on symbolic resources, eg. Speech, dress, make-up, to establish their position in their social groups.

• Women are aware of what is proscribed (prohibited) and therefore avoid it more than men.

• Principle I a. In change in progress above the level of awareness, women use the standard more than men.

• Women use innovative and positively evaluated variants more then men.

• Example: the use of (r) in final pre-consonantal position in New York city. Used more by higher class, within each class women used it more than men. Some exceptions.

• New Yorkers talked about [r] presence and absence and preferred or valued r-full speech than r-less pronunciation.

• Example: the use of glottal stop [] in place of /t/ is one of the phonological changes in progress in British English. It is gaining ground in the cities.

• Attitudes towards the glottal stop:

Teen agers show overt awareness of this feature: “my parents don’t like me missing letters out, like if I say w’er”

Teen agers are aware of the spread of the glottal stop and that it is not a non-standard form.

• Principle I and Ia are not always applicable. Figure 10.4. many factors interact in any variation.

Principle II:• Women use more of the incoming variant form

in changes in progress above the level of conscious awareness.

• Women lead in the use of incoming non-standard variants if people are not aware of the variation involved and therefore do not talk about them.

• Example: changes in the vowel system in English,e.g central vowel [] in ‘bus’, is pronounced as ‘boss’. Eckert (2000): this change is restricted to the speech of a group known as burnouts, and within the group the use was advanced among the girls than it was among the boys.

• Figure 10.6• Figure 10.8• In the Arabic speaking world, men use more

standard Arabic than women.

Language and social class

• Sociolect (or social dialect): a socially distinct variety.

• Speaker A speaker B ‘I done it yesterday’ ‘I did it yesterday’ ‘He ain’t got it ‘ ‘He hasn’t got it’• Grammatical, phonetic, phonological

differences give us clues about their social background.

• Social class accents

• Why do we have these differences?

• Physical barriers and distance

• Regional dialect boundaries coincide with geographical barriers, mountains, swamps, rivers, e.g. ‘house’ [hu:s] north of the river Humber vs. [haus] (diphthong) south of the river.

• Social barriers and distance

• The diffusion of a linguistic feature through a society may be halted by social factors including social class.

• A linguistic innovation that begins in upper class may reach the lower class last, if at all.

Social stratification• Any hierarchical (ranking) ordering of groups

within a society in terms of power, wealth and status.

• In the industrialized societies of the West, social stratification takes the form of stratification into social classes and gives rise linguistically to social-class dialects.

• Social class is a controversial concept, no general agreement as to the exact nature or definition or existence of social classes.

• Social class stratification is not universal, e.g. India caste system (hereditary). Rigid separation into distinct groups, therefore, social distance is more differentiating than the geographical distance in India.

• Unlike the situation in India, in the class societies of the English speaking world, the linguistic situation is more complex.

• Social classes are not clearly defined,

• aggregates of people with similar social and economic characteristics.

• Social mobility is possible, the movement up or down the social hierarchy.

• In the beginning linguistic complexity was ignored by focusing on idiolect, or speakers in rural areas (dialectologists, dialect surveys).

• It is only after the Second World War, linguistic realized that confining dialect studies to rural areas, they missed important information about the majority of people who live in towns.

• Urban dialectologist faced the problem of describing fully and accurately the speech of large towns and cities with heterogeneous populations.

• In 1966 the American linguist William Labov published The Social Stratification of English in New York city, a large scale survey, tape-recorded interviews with 340, by random sample

• Representative sample therefore accurate description of all the varieties in the area.

• Labov also developed techniques to elicit normal speech from people in spite of the recorder.

• Developed methods for quantitative measurements of linguistic data.

• Labov showed that variation is not free in the speech of New Yorkers, e.g ‘guard’, ‘beard’, and ‘bad’.

• Variation is not random, but determined by extra-linguistic factors in a predictable way.

Social and regional dialect variation

Social variation

highest class: standard dialect

lowest class: most localized non standard

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

social variation higest class :RP

lowest class: most localized variant

Table 3‘Home’ 27 variants, three accent forms, in 7 cities London RP houmInermediate hum um

Most locaized aum

• 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.

• Experiment carried out in the USA, tape recordings of two different sets of speakers.

• Two types:• Language as a defining characteristic of the

ethnic group membership, common world wide,e.g. multilingual Africa, Canada. People will identify themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic group on the basis of their language.

• Separate identity of ethnic groups is signalled by distinct varieties of the same language,e.g.Jewish, Italians in New York.

• Ethnic groups are fluid entities whose boundaries change through history.

• Example: Yugoslavia, in the centre of the country the language was Sebo-croat. Different ethnic groups who speak the same dialects. With the breakup of Yugoslavia, the government in Zagreb calls its national language Croation, Latin alphabet, the government in Belgrade calls its language Serbian, Cyrillic alphabet. Moslims of Bosnia calls their language Bosnian

• They stress their separate nationhoods and ethnicities by focusing on lexical differences.

• Ethnic groups in New York. Jewish, Italian.• Ethnic groups tend to form separate

communities within the city.• Differences are due to the influence of

substratum varieties, languages spoken before they become speakers of New York English. Yiddish or Italia accent accent of the first generation would lead to hypercorrection of foreign features by the second generation. The use of high vowels in ‘bad’, ‘bag’ by Italians because their fathers used more open vowel than the English sound.

AAVE

Language and social networks• Linguistic variation can be analyzed in terms of

social networks: the grouping of people based on the frequency and quality of interaction.

• James and Lesley Milroy’s 1985 study of Belfast.

• The relationships individuals contract with others--- through social and geographical space linking many individuals.

• Social networks are defined by who your friends are, who live near, who you work with.

• Network analyses ask how often the members of these groups are the same and how often they are completely different.

• The diffusion of Linguistic change happens fast and efficiently along horizontal channles ( within one age and a social cohort). On the other hand vertical channels (across generation, social classes) are comparatively slow and inefficient with regard to the transmission of a linguistic innovation.

• How can you identify a social network?• Observe who interacts with who in a community

• Note how they are interacting with each other.

• Patterns of interaction constitute individuals’s social networks.

• Let the people define their own social networks. Ask ‘who are your best friends?’

• ‘Name all the people you had conversation with yesterday”

• A researcher can build a network from all the answers.

Dense and Loose social networks

• A dense social network is one where all members know each other. If you ask five people, each one should mention the other four.

• Loose social network: not all members know each other

• Dense networks slow down or inhibit change. Members police each other’s behaviour (consciously or unconsciously) because of the intensity of their contact

• Because in dense networks contacts with outside the network are comparatively superficial, there is less chance of being exposed to innovation from outside.

• Loose networks make people more open to change. The ties that individual members have to other networks provide an opportunity for them to be exposed to and pick innovations from outside their network.

Multiplex and uniplex ties within networks

• Net works can be distinguished in terms of the quality of the ties between individuals.

• Uniplex tie: if the network tie between two individuals is based on one relationship, e.g. the two people work together, or are family members, or have children in the same club.

• Multiplex tie: if two people know each other in several different roles, e.g best friends, and thy take the same courses at niversity, work together on weekends. (A three-way tie)

• A loose network based on uniplex ties is going to be more open to the introduction and transmission of innovations than dense networks where members share multiplex ties.

Language & power/ language & politeness

• The social relationship between the speaker and the hearer is indicated by his/her linguistic choices.

• (T/V) distinction: the choice between Tu (familiar form) and vous (the polite form) forms in languages, e.g. Latin, French, Italian German, Greek, (English once had thou/you distinction.

• According to Brown and Gilman (1960) it started as a sing. And plural difference. By medieval times, the upper classes began to use V with each other to show mutual respect…

• The asymmetrical T/V usage came to symbolize power relationship.

• Symmetrical V usage became polite usage, spread downward but not to the lowest classes.

• Symmetrical T usage to show intimiacy or solidarity (strong common interest).

• This mutual T came to replace the mutual V of politeness because solidarity is more important in personal relationships.

Address terms

• How do you name or address another? By title (T), first name (FN) by last name (LN), nickname, by combination of these or by nothing at all.

• What factors govern the choice you make?• Is the address process asymmetrical? Mr.

Smith leads to John, or symmetrical?• Family relationships• Use of kinship terms for use as address terms

Politeness markers• Politeness is prescribed, rules, norms.

• The concept of politeness is associated with Goffman (1967) study on face.

• Brown and Levinson (1987) define face as “the public self image that every member wants to claim for himself”

• They distinguished between Positive face vs. negative face.

• Positive face the desire to get the approval of others.

• Negative face the desire to be unimpeded by others in one’s actions. Freedom of actions and freedom form impositions.