Important sociolinguistic questions

• Sociolinguists study the relationship between language and society, examining why we speak differently in different social contexts and identifying the social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning.
• One utterance can simultaneously convey both information and express feelings.
• Sociolinguists are also interested in the different types of linguistic variation used to express and reflect social factors, including vocabulary, sounds, word-structure, and grammar.
• Sociolinguists use the term variety to refer to any set of linguistic forms which patterns according to social factors.
• The ethnography of speaking approach is particularly valuable in highlighting the unnoticed ‘rules’ that operate in any interaction.
• Speech acts such as directives and requests, compliments, refusals and apologies vary cross-culturally.
• Brown and Levinson identified three social factors which they suggested qualified as universal influences on linguistically polite behaviour: the social distance/solidarity dimension, the status dimension, and the ranking of the imposition.
• Early sociolinguists and anthropological linguists were typically outsiders in the cultures they researched and described, which had some advantages since it was often easier to identify ways of speaking and rules of interaction that contrasted with those they were familiar with.
• The ethnography of speaking (also known as the ethnography of communication since it embraces features of non-verbal communication too) is an approach to analysing language which has been designed to heighten awareness of culture-bound assumptions.
• Emblematic switching or tag switching is a type of code-switching where a linguistic tag in the other language serves as an ethnic identity marker.
• Caste dialects are characterised by linguistic differences reflecting very clear-cut social or caste divisions.
• Accent/dialect


  A: Pronounciation alone

  D: pronounctiation,vocabulary, grammar
• Regional- social dialect


  Rd: pronounciation,vocabulary and grammar according to a geographical area

  sd: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar. According to the social group of the speaker
• language vary


  overtime,physical space, socially
• new englishes


  varieties develop in post-colonial societies

  colonial power disappear but the legacy remains
• analogical creation


  speaker prefer regular patterns over patterns with many exceptions
• register


  a conventional way of using language that is appropriate in a specific context, situation, occupation, topical

  regligeous,legal,linguistic register
• dialecto mexicano/puertoriqueño


  mexicano: convierte hiatos en diptongos: kuete

  portoriqueño_ neutraliza r,l
• develop a language


  code the language

  produce a dictionary

  words available for teaching science
• embedded language


  a programming language that is designed to be used inside another host language or environment

  provides the grammatical structure of the language
• matrix's language


  use for the majority of sentence content

  lexical content of the sentence
• creoles and pidgind


  creoles: develop from pidgins. primarly language of a community. complex grammar

  pidgins: means of communication between speakers of different languages
• linguistic context


  co-text

  surrounding words

  understanding meaning in language interaction
• Domain of language use


  code choice in different speech communities

  code or codes selected in different situations
• Social factors

  1. The participants:

  (a) who is speaking and

  (b) who are they speaking to ?

  2. The setting or social context of the interaction: where are they speaking?

  3. The topic: what is being talked about?

  4. The function : why are they speaking?
• Social dimensions


  1.A social distance scale concerned with participant relationships.

  2. A status scale concerned with participant relationships.

  3. A formality scale relating to the setting or type of interaction.

  4. Two functional scales relating to the purposes or topic of interaction
• Linguistic repertoire refers to the various languages and language varieties used in different contexts.
• "domains of language use" refers to the typical contexts or situations in which particular languages or language varieties are characteristically used within a multilingual speech community.
• Lexical Borrowing:

  • Involves using a single word (usually a noun) from another language when the speaker lacks the vocabulary in the language they are speaking
  • Motivated by lexical need rather than a choice between codes
• The "equivalence constraint" suggests switches only occur at points where the grammars of the two languages match (e.g. adjective-noun order)
• The "matrix language frame" model proposes that one language (the matrix) provides the morphosyntactic frame, while the other (embedded) provides content words.
• Code-switching Attitudes


  Positive-multilingual communities

  Negative- monolingual
• When people switch from one code to another for reasons which can be clearly identified, it is

  sometimes called situational switching
• Fused lect


  Rapid swirching

  it is a sociolinguistic variety
• code meshing


  codes are integrated in a variety

  Single utterance
• intra-sentential switching


  switches only occur within sentences
• inter-sentential switching


  people who are less profi cient will tend to switch

  at sentence boundaries or use only short fi xed phrases or tags
• Language shift refers to the gradual process by which one language displaces another as the primary means of communication within a community.
• ethnolinguistic vitality’.


  the likelihood that a language will be maintained

  status,size of population, institutional support
•  linguistic landscape


  how languages are visually displayed and hierarchized in multilingual societies