Unit 4

Defining sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of the complex
relationship between language and society
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in society.
It is concerned with describing how people use
language in social contexts
It is based on real-life data of language use
Research in sociolinguistics often tries to address
social problems such as miscommunication, bias,
oppression, success and failure, effectiveness,
conflicts, professional training.

Sociology of language focuses on thelanguage's effect

on thesociety,butsociolinguisticsfocuses onthe effect of

the society on the language (Spolsky & Francis, 2007).
Importantly, the sociology oflanguage seeks to

understand the way that social dynamics are affected by

individual and grouplanguage use.
The author elaborated that sociology of language deals

carefully with who is'authorized' to use what language,

with whom and under what conditions; how an individual
orgroup identity is established by the language that
they have available for them to use

It studies how language varieties differ between groups

separated by certain socialvariables, e.g., ethnicity,
religion, status, gender, level ofeducation, age, etc.,
and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to
categorize individuals insocial or socioeconomic
classes.

It is primarily concerned with the type of

accents people use and - most importantly - the
reason why they choose to use one rather than
the other.
Grammatical structures and types of vocabulary
are also of interest here.
By and large linguists assume that speakers
use language as a means of conveying social
attitudes just like dress or leisure time activities,
i.e. people use the accent of the social group
they identify with or aspire to.

As the usage of a language varies from place to place,

language usage also varies among social classes, and it is
thesesociolects that sociolinguistics studies.
Sociolinguistics often shows us the humorous realities of
human speech and how a dialect of a given language can
often describe the age, sex, and social class of the
speaker; it codes the social function of a language.

 Sociolinguistics a relatively recent discipline

which investigates the possible reasons for
language variation are and hence to understand
more about the process of language change.
Here we can distinguish two main types of
change:
(i) internal change which takes place for
structural reasons in a language, e.g.
regularisation in grammar as with plural forms in
English or German and
(ii) external change which is triggered ultimately
by social motivation, i.e. speakers change their
language to convey a social message as when
they are showing their identity with a sector of
the society they live in.

 There are various kinds of speech community

depending on how a society is organised linguistically.
Diglossia involves a division of languages according
to function: one language/variety is used at home
and another in public as in Switzerland.
A bilingual community has two languages without
such a functional distribution, e.g. in Canada with
French and English.
The social development of a language can lead to
split where what was formerly one language becomes
two or more, compare the historical development of
Latin into the modern Romance languages.
The split may involve major varieties of the same
language as with the divergence between British and
American English.

The varieties of language examined by sociolinguists are

usually urban and in particular take account of the factors
class, age and gender.
The central element in a sociolinguist study is the linguistic
variable - some item of language (phonological,
morphological, syntactic or semantic) - which is suspected of
varying systematically in correlation with the factors such
mentioned.
Sociolinguists collect data directly from speakers and do not
use descriptions in books as their primary source.
Various methods have been developed in sociolinguistics for
ensuring that one's data is random and objective.
Speakers can be recorded (on tape, for instance) in which
case they are aware of this or by memory (where the linguist
later on writes down what was said).
The latter type of investigation is used when speakers are not
supposed to realise they are being observed.

Languages may be introduced into a society through

various processes: language contact by invasion or
emigration.
Immigrant languages may be maintained in a host
society or may be abandoned depending on the
attitudes of the speakers of following generations.
Language contact usually leads to a linguistic influence
of one language on another, e.g. that of French on
English in the Middle Ages or of English on German
today.
Contact may be direct when speakers interact or indirect
when there is an influence of the written language, e.g.
that of English on so many other languages today, often
through various media like television, science,
technology, music.

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense

first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the
1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early
1900s, but none received much attention in the West
until much later.
The study of the social motivation oflanguage change
has its foundation in thewave modelof the late 19th
century.

The first attested use of the termsociolinguistics was in 1939.

Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was
pioneered by linguists such asWilliam Labovin the US andBasil
Bernsteinin the UK.

Methods in sociolinguistics
In a way it is true to say that sociolinguistics arose
out of dialectology. Those linguists involved in this
area in the last century and the beginning of the
present century were interested in registering
language use and as such were half on the way to
being sociolinguists. However, many aspects of
dialectological research are unacceptable to modern
sociolinguists

The chief deficiency of the dialectological approach is that

older, male, rural speakers were given preference as
informants. This went against the basic principle of all
sociolinguists, namely that the choice of informants be
random and thus unbiased by the field worker. Characteristic
of sociolinguistic methods are the following features:

1)The prior definition of one's area of investigation

2)The impartial choice of informants
3)The choice of optimal methods of investigation (e.g. tape
recording rather than questionnaire)

Sociolinguistics since the mid-20th century

The development of sociolinguistics since the War is inextricably
bound up with the activity of American linguists since the early sixties.
First and foremost of these is William Labov who in a pioneering
investigation of the English of New York city, published in 1966, arrived
at many new conclusions concerning language variety and language
change.
Labov stressed that 1) structural systems of the present and
changes in languages of the past should be investigated in relation to
each other, 2) that language change can be observed in progress in
present-day language varieties and 3) the fact that so-called free

Labov further stressed the need to collect data reliably.

The linguist must be aware that an informant will show the
following features in his/her speech:
1) style shifting (during an interview),
2) varying degree of attention, i.e. some speakers pay great
attention to their own speech (so-called 'audiomonitoring');
in excited speech and casual speech the attention paid by
the speaker is correspondingly diminished,
3) degree of formality, determined by the nature of the
interview; it can vary depending on the way the informant
reacts to the interviewer and the situation he/she is placed
in.

Methods in sociolinguistics
This term refers to the fact that the collection of data from
informants involves their being observed which in turn influences the
nature of the data the informants offer.
Labov's answer to this problem was to develop the Rapid and
Anonymous Interview in which informants were not aware they were
being interviewed by a linguist (cf. Labov's experiments in New York
department stores).
With regard to language change Labov proposed three phases which
can be summarised as follows: 1) origin, a period in which many
variants exist for one and the same phenomenon, 2) propagation, the
period in which one of the variants established itself and 3) the
conclusion in which the remaining variants are done away with.

Various external factors can accelerate the process of

language change, above all social pressure from above or
below. Additional factors are the degree of literacy in a
community, the restraining influence of a standard of a
language, etc.
All language change show a particular rate of change
which proceeds like an S-curve (slow start, quick middle
section with a tapering off at the top).

Schematically these

three phases correspond to the beginning, middle and end

of an S-curve which is frequently used as a visualization of
language change.

Methods in sociolinguistics
Labov proved his theories on language variation and language change
by investigating (in an anonymous manner) the English of various
employees in New York department stores. Here he chose stores with
differing social status. The linguistic variables he was particularly
interested in are: 1) the presence or absence of syllable-final /r/, 2) the
pronunciation of the ambi-dental fricatives (the sounds in thin and this
respectively) and 3) the quality of various vowels.

After Labov introduced his methods in America various European linguists

followed suit.
Notable among these is Peter Trudgill who started his career as a sociolinguist

with an investigation of the English of Norwich city.

His aim was, like Labov, to show that there is a correlation between language

use and social class.

Trudgill was particularly interested in seeing how stylistic variation causes

language change.
His investigations of varieties of present-day English are noted for their

methodological rigor.
He insisted on absolute randomness and used statistical devices, such as

indexing, to insure that his population is as heterogeneous as possible.

Trudgill is furthermore interested in degrees of formality and had his

informants read a text (reading style), a list of words at normal speed (word list
style) and a series of homophones. In addition he looked at various forms of
casual speech.

Insights of sociolinguistics
1) Language change can be observed. The reasons for it are ultimately
social, deriving from such factors as forms used by prestigious groups.
Any item of change starts as a series of minute variations which spread
through the lexicon of the language (lexical diffusion). The difference
between varying forms increases with time, due to a process known as
phonologisation whereby small differences are exaggerated to make
them distinct from other phonemic items in a language. Only a subset of
any existing variations in a language at any point in time lead to actual
later change. Just what variations result in change depends on their
status for the speakers of a language. This status may be conscious in
the case of identification markers or subconscious, the latter not being
any less important than the former for language change.
2) Lower middle class speakers figure prominently in language change

Insights of sociolinguistics
3) Women tend to use a more standard type of language than
their male counterparts (due to their uncertain position in
western-style societies?). But on the other hand they also
tend to be at the forefront of linguistic innovations.
4) Language change can in some cases be reversed, i.e. more
conservative (older) forms can be re-established if enough
speakers use them for purposes of conscious or unconscious
identification.

5) There is no method of predicting what features in any

language will be subject to change, i.e. which will be
picked out as prestige forms by the social elite.
However, language typology does give an indication as
to what forms are likely candidates for change and what
are not. For instance, if a language has front rounded
vowels /y, / then it is likely that if it experiences
extensive change then these elements are probable
candidates for loss or substitution by something else.

Types of language variation

Just as the methods of the dialectologists were unacceptable to
sociolinguists so was the terminology they used. For one thing
the sociolinguists wanted to get away from the use of the term
dialect. It carried with it the implication of a rural type of speech
which is particularly conservative. The more neutral term
variety was chosen which had the additional advantage that it
did not imply implicit contrast with a standard variety of
language. The term variety simply refers to a variant of a
language. It may be the standard of this language or not, it may
be a rural or an urban variant, a social or peer group variant,
etc.

One of the aspects of contact between speakers of different varieties

of a language is accommodation. By this is meant that one of the
speakers attempts, in face to face interaction, to approximate his/her
speech to that of his/her partner in conversation for a variety of
reasons, to make him feel at ease, in order to be accepted, etc. This
accommodation can be long-term or short-term and is most readily
accomplished by children.
As sociolinguistics is a study of the interrelationships of language
varieties and social structure, Language variation is a part of the
study of sociolinguistics.
Language variety is a term used to refer to many different type of
language variationany form of language characterized by
systematic features
Language variety looks at accent, dialects, idiolect, slang, jargon, etc.

Dialect
How do we know if two languages
are dialects of the same language or
two distinct languages?
Mutual Intelligibility is one criterion,
but not the only one.
A group of people speaking the same
dialect is known as a speech
community.

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct

social groups like high school students orhip hop fans.

In addition, online and othercomputer mediated communities, such as internet forums,

often constitute speech communities.

Members of speech communities will often develop a slang or jargon to serve the group's
special purposes and priorities.

In addition to this,Gumperz (1968) defines a speech community as Any human

aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body
of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates bysignificant differences in language
us age. Aspeech communityisa group ofpeople speaking a common dialect.

Though the relative importance and exact definitions of speech communities vary, some
would argue that a speech community must be a 'real' community, i.e. a group of people
living in the same location (such as a city or a neighborhood), while more recent thinking
proposes that all people are indeed part of several communities (through home location,
occupation, gender, class,
religiousbelonging,andmore),andthattheyarethusalsopartofsimultaneousspeechc
ommunities.

Similarly, what shared linguistic communication entails is also a

variable concept.
Some would argue that a shared first language, even dialect, is
necessary, while for others the ability to communicate and interact
(even across language barriers) is sufficient.
dialect is the collection of phonetic, phonological, syntactic,
morphological and semantic attributes that make one group of
speakers noticeably different from another group ofspeakers of the
same language (Lewandowski, 2010).
Dialectologists study dialect, but variation is that sociolinguists are
very much interested in looking at social variation within dialects and
examine how variation is rule governed

Prestige
No one dialect or language is better, more
correct, more systematic, or more logical than
any other.
Yet, we do make a distinction between standard
and nonstandard dialects
Generally, the standard dialect is perceived as
more prestigious because it is used by the
powerful, wealthy, and educated.
Nonstandard dialects are usually associated with
the language of the lower socioeconomic class.
The standard English dialect is SAE.

Prestige, cont.
There are two types of prestige: covert and overt
Overt prestige is when speakers perceive the standard
language as being prestigious
Cover prestige is when speakers in a speech community
perceive the non-standard language as being prestigious
Typically an expression of solidarity
More often seen in a tight-knit community

Prestige
Dialect

Standard and Non-Standard

This is one of the complex issues of sociolinguistics that

focuses on the social value, acceptability orstigmatization
reference to a certain dialect existed due to geography,
ethnicity and class. Forexample, prestigious dialects are
standard dialects which are not stigmatized in the society
where they are spoken.

Diglossia
Diglossia, an interesting concept in a
bilingual, multilingual community, as for
Lewandowski(2010), is a situation where
two languages or dialects are used
differently according to different social
situations-job interview, telling a joke,
giving a speech in a serious meeting, news
briefing,giving a speech in a birthday party,
communication at a church ceremony, etc.

Think about your native language

Do you have a standard and nonstandard dialect?
Who speaks the standard?
Who speaks the nonstandard?
What are some of the linguistic
features of each?

Variation at Different Levels of

Linguistic Structure

Phonetic
Phonological
Morphological
Syntactic
Lexical

(exercises on page 436-438)

Social Factors
Socioeconomic (Labovs study)
Age- youth tend to be trendsetters
when it comes to language
Gender- women tend to use the
standard variant; men tend to use
nonstandard
Ethnic

Examples of Ethnic Variants

African American English; Chicano English;
Lumbee English all ethnic variants found in the
US
Just because a person belongs to an ethnic group
does not mean that they will inevitably embrace
the variant
Likewise, a person who does not belong to the
ethnic group may embrace the variant
Boils down to what type of exposure the person
has had; not what type of genetics they possess

Language variation
We can discuss language variation in
terms of:
Standard vs.non standard
Regional vs. Social variation

o If we have ten dialects (1-10) in a row 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ,

each dialect is highly similarto its immediately adjacent
neighbors; conversely, when we move farther away from
each type the similarities become fewer and fewer.
o That is, dialect one 1 is very similar to 2, less similar to 3,
evenless similar to 4, and by the time we get to 8, 9 or 10,
o 1 is no longer mutually intelligible with these.
o By the criterion of mutual intelligibility, we can thus say that
dialect 1 and 10 belong to different languages.
o But if we take dialect 5, which may be mutually intelligible
with both 1 and 10, which language does 5 belong to?

Idiolect
Just as there is variation among groups of
speakers of a language, there is variation from
speaker tos peaker.
No two speakers of a language speak identically.
Each speaks her or his own particularvariety of
that language.
Hence, an idiolect is the variety of language
spoken by each individual speaker of the
language.
It is, therefore, one persons language

Sociolect
According to Lewandowski (2010), the term sociolect is
often used interchangeably with social dialect (the
latter form seems to be more commonly used and
preferred).
It is concisely defined as a variety or lect which is
thought of as being related to its speakers social
background rather geographical background (Trudgill,
2003; Grabias, 2001 in Lewandowski, 2010).
In other words, it is the language spoken by a particular
social group, class or subculture, whose determinants
include such parameters as: gender, age, occupation,
and possibly a few others for the purposes of
secrecy,professionalism, expressiveness, etc.

Regional dialects
This is linguistic differentiation based upon on membership in a
longstanding geographically-isolated or separate group.
In other words, a group of people are more or less isolated or
arepreventedfrom freely
minglingwithnearbypopulationsduetomountains,rivers,
forests,etc.,and then those populations will develop unique linguistic
characteristics which will eventually become distinguishing elements of
their regional dialects.
There are some common misperceptions about dialects.
These common misperceptions are: dialect is substandard, dialect is
incorrect and dialect is slang.
However the sociolinguistics fact is that everybody speaks a dialect.
Sometimes people get confusedto differentiate language from dialects.
There is linguistic criterion to differentiate language from dialect.
Most linguists suggested that dialect is mutually intelligible while
language is not.
For instance, American English, British and Australian English are
mutually intelligible as they are the dialects of thesame languageEnglish.

Register
According to Halliday (1978) mentioned in Lewandowski
(2010), register is a diatypic variety or variety according to
the use.
A register is what you are speaking (at the time) which is
determinedby whatyou are doing (nature ofsocial activity
beingengaged in)and expressing diversity of
socialprocess(socialdivisionoflabor).
Soinprincipleregistersarewaysofsayingdifferentthingsand
tend to differ in semantics (and hence in lexicogrammar, and
sometimes phonology, as realization ofthis).
As extreme cases, they are restricted languages, languages for
special purposes; and at typical instances, they are
occupational varieties (technical, semi-technical).
In addition, the principalcontrolling variables are field (type of
social action), tenor (role relationships) and mode
(symbolicorganization).

REGIONAL VS. SOCIAL

Social variables
Birth
Age
Gender
Caste
Religion
Economic status
Politics

In tamilnadu
Caste
Religion
Place
Education
Gender
Economic status
Age

Tamil nadu
1. Dialects of Kovai, Madurai,
Chettinadu, Chennai, Tanjavur,
Tirunelveli, Jaffna etc.
2. Dialects of the caste group
Brahmin, Pillai, Chettiar, Goundar,
Dalit etc. (this obviously a branch of
regional dialect but distinct with their
own flavour).

Kannada
There are at least 20 distinct dialects spoken in various parts of the state. The major
regional dialects are
1) Mysore Kannada - spoken mainly in south Karnataka,
2) Hubli/ Dharwad Kannada spoken mainly in north Karnataka,
3) Mangalore/ Karaavali Kannada spoken in the coastal areas.
These major regional dialects have other variant dialects within themselves!
Kodava, Badaga Urali, Holiya, Kunda, Sanketi, Havyaka, Bellary, Bangalore, Gulbarga,
Are Bhashe, Soliga, Nadavara, Belagaavi are some of the different dialects.
Not only these variant forms are very much different from each other by their accent
and style, a same word could have different meanings in two or more of them.
For instanceShirais the name of a sweet dish made in Dharwad region, the same
word is understood asheadin Mysore region.
Bhootaayiis the name of a popular fish in Mangalore area; the same is understood
asMother Earthin other parts of the state.
Bondain Mangalore region isTender coconut,the same name is given to a popular
snack made of chilies and gram dough in other parts.
Many such variations can be noticed in the usage of Kannada throughout the state.

Malayalam
The following 3 diatects of
malayalam.
Judeo-Malayalam
Mappila dialect of Malayalam
Pandy Malayalam

Standard Oriya
Mughalbandi Oriya is considered as proper or Standard Oriya due to literary
traditions. Mughalbandi Oriya is spoken inPuri, Khurdha,Cuttack,Jajpur,
Jagatsinghpur,Kendrapada,Anandapur,Dhenkanal,AngulandNayagarh
district with little variance.[16][17]
Major dialects
Midnapori Oriya: Spoken in the undividedMidnaporeDistrict of West Bengal.
Singhbhumi Oriya: Spoken inEast Singhbhum,West Singhbhumand
Saraikela-Kharsawandistrict ofJharkhand
Baleswari Oriya: Spoken inBaleswar,BhadrakandMayurbhanjdistrict of
Odisha.
Ganjami Oriya: Spoken inGanjamandGajapatidistricts of Odisha and
Srikakulamdistrict of Andhra Pradesh.
Desiya Oriya: Spoken inKoraput,Rayagada,NowrangpurandMalkangiri
Districts of Odisha and in the hilly regions ofVishakhapatnam,Vizianagaram
District of Andhra Pradesh.
SambalpuriOriya: Spoken inBargarh,Bolangir,Boudh,Debagarh,Jharsuguda
,Kalahandi,Nuapada,Sambalpur,SubarnapurandSundargarhdistricts of
Odisha and by some people inRaigarh,Mahasamund,Raipurdistricts of
Chhattisgarhstate.
Bhatri: Spoken in South-western Odisha and eastern-south Chhattisgarh.
Halbi: Spoken in undivided Bastar district ofChhattisgarhstate.