Language in society Farjana Ela

Objectives Perspectives of sociolinguistics Speech community Varieties of sociolinguistics Pidgin and Creole

What is sociolinguistics?

• Systematic study of various aspects of language in

society

•William Labov is the founder of sociolinguistics

The study of the relationship between language and society is sociolinguistics; it focuses on how language is used by the individual speaker and groups of speakers in its social context

perspectives of sociolinguistics

There are three perspectives of sociolinguistics;

1.Geographic perspective - regional dialects

2.Anthropological perspective - the relationship

between Language, culture and thought.

perspectives of sociolinguistics

3. Sociological perspective- the relationship between

social relations and the use of different language

varieties.

Speech Community and

Language Variety

Speech Community

• The way people speak often serves to define them as

a group (family, village, town, region)

• Share the same language or a particular variety of a

language

Language variety

• The main tool in sociolinguistic - the concept of the

linguistic variable

• In the word form, for example, some people

pronounce the /r/ and some don’t.

Language variety

• linguistics features of the speech variety can be

found at the lexical, the phonological and in the

syntactical level

Language variety Two types of varieties—

• Dialectal Varieties

• Register

Dialect and Accent

A regional, temporal or social variety within a single

language is dialect

Accent is the way that words are pronounced when

spoken by individuals in a region or a country.

Dialectal Varieties• Regional Dialect• Sociolect• Language And Age• Language And Gender• Idiolect• Ethnic Dialect

Regional Dialect

• People living in the same geographical region.

Sociolect

• Sociolect, or social-class dialect,

• characteristic of a particular class

Language and Gender

The language used by men and women having some

special features of their own.

Language and age

Difference between old generation and the younger

generation language

Idiolect• Personal dialect of an individual speaker

• Regional, Social, Gender, And Age Variations

Ethnic Dialect

An ethnic dialect is a social dialect of a language

spoken by a less privileged population

Register

•stylistic-functional varieties of a dialect or language.

• Type of language which is selected as appropriate to

the type of situation.

Pidgin

A special language variety that mixes or blends two

or more languages for trading or business purpose.

Creole

pidgin becoming the primary of a speech community

The vocabulary enriched with new syntactic -

semantic concepts

Review

1. While language principally communicate meaning,

also establish and maintain social relationships

2. Users of the same language in a sense all speak

differently.

3.The kind of language each of them chooses to use

determined by his social background

4. Women using more standard language than men

Finally….

Language and society affect each other

Social structure may influence or determine linguistic

structure and/or behavior

Thank You