Language and Social CultureLanguage and Social Culture

Chapter 7

Language Varieties • Variety is a generic term for a particular

coherent form of language in which specific extralinguistic criteria can be used to define it as a variety.

• For example, a geographically defined variety is known as a dialect, a variety with a social basis as a sociolect, a functional variety as a jargon or a sublanguage, a situative variety as a register.

• David (1992: 76) defines variety as a system of linguistic expression whose use is governed by situational variables, such as regional, occupational or social class.

Language Varieties

• A language is typically composed of a number of dialects. • The language differences associated with

dialect may occur on any level of language, thus including pronunciation, grammatical, semantic, and language use differences.

Language Varieties

• A regional dialect refers to the language variety used in a geographical region. When people are separated from each other geographically, dialectal diversity develops.

• When enough differences give the language spoken in a particular region, for example, the city of Chicago or New York its own "flavor”.

• A regional dialect differs from language in that the former is considered a distinct entity, yet not distinct enough to be regarded as a different language.

Language Varieties

• The term social dialect is used to describe differences in speech associated with various social groups or classes.

• Whereas regional dialects are geographically based, social dialects originate among social groups and are related to a variety of factors such as gender, age, ethnic group, religion, and class.

• In India, for example, caste, one of the clearest of all social differentiators, quite often determines which variety of a language a speaker uses.

Register

• Register refers the functional variety of language that is defined according to the use of language in context.

• People participating in recurrent communication situations tend to use similar vocabularies and ways of saying.

• For example, a physician may use technical terms when he is talking with his fellow physicians, but he may use ordinary vocabulary when he is talking to his patients. When talking about salt, a chemist may use "NaCl" in writing, but he may use the word "salt" before a preschool child.

Ethnic Varieties

• Speech variation may come about due to different ethnic backgrounds. Ethnic varieties are used by ethnic groups and regarded as social dialects. They often cut across regional differences.

• AAVE• It has a few distinctive phonological,

morphological and syntactic features.• Consonant deletion rule is used. The

simplification approach deletes the past-tense morpheme, so "past" and "passed" are both pronounced as "pass". "Meant" and "mend" are both pronounced as "men.”

• In AAVE, the frequent absence of various forms of "be" is one of its prominent syntactic features. • Another syntactic feature is the systematic use of

the expression "it is" where Standard English uses "there is" in the sense of "there exists", for example:

• a. Is it a Mr. Harris in this office?• b. Diana's been a wonderful lady and it's nothin'

too good for her.

• Another syntactical feature is the use of double negation constructions. For example, each sentence below containing more than one negators:

• a. Cronin don't know nothing. (Cronin doesn't know anything.)

• b. I ain't afraid of no devils. (I'm not afraid of any devils.)

Language and Culture

• The language used by a speech community is closely related to the culture of that community. • Culture consists of what it is one has to know

or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves.

Language and Culture

• The close relationship between language and culture has long been the focus of linguistic study. • Many linguists have come to realize that

language and culture are inextricably related. • Language and culture is in a dialectical

relationship. Every language is part of a culture, and it serves and reflects cultural needs.

Language and Culture

• The relationship between language and culture was distinctive in the work of Sapir.

• Even though he believes that language and culture are not intrinsically associated, he believed that language and our thought-grooves are too much involved as to be impossible to untie each other, and are, in a sense, one and the same.

• The association of a specific culture with a specific language was not given by nature but was a historical coincidence.

Language and Culture

• In fact, there were and still are areas in the world where societies share a very similar cultural orientation and yet speak different languages.

• Estonians and Lapps speak related languages, but their cultures are quite different.

Language Change

• Language is in a state of constant change.• The development of English is usually divided

into three major periods. • Old English period is considered to have lasted

from 449 to 1100. • Middle English period is from 1100 to 1500,

and the • Modern English from 1500 to the present.

• The world is changing and the causes of language change are many. The following may be some of the main causes of language change.

• ● historical cause • ● social cause • ● pragmatic and psychological cause • ● scientific and technological development • ● the increase of international contact

• historical cause• Historically, English has been changing

throughout its history.

• social cause

• Language change may result from the change from one social group to another or the interaction of one social group with other groups.

• pragmatic and psychological cause• The avoidance of particular words for social

reasons seems to occur in all languages and euphemisms arise in their place.

• scientific and technological development

• Scientific and technological development can be one of the causes of language change. New technical terms keep coming into people's daily life.

• the increase of international contact • Communication with speakers of other

languages could lead to language change. • During the sixteenth century, English

borrowed many words from French and Italian because Englishmen were in contact with speakers of these languages.

Lexical Change

• New words may be added. Some words may become obsolete. And a new dimension in meaning may be attached to an existing word. • Words may become archaic or extinct. When a

new word comes into use, its unusual presence draws attention; but a word may be lost through inattention.

• Borrowing• In the area of foods and cooking, English has

borrowed a large number of words from French.

• During the Middle English period such words entered the language: dinner, supper, broil, baste, appetite, salmon, sardine, pork, beef, veal, mutton, poultry, grape, orange.

• Creation of New Words• Apart from borrowing, new words have made

their entry into English via word formation rules such as compound, derivation, acronym formation, blending, abbreviation, clipping, back-formation, and coinage, etc..• Some new words are created from the brand-

name or trade-mark of a product. For example, the invention of Kodak.

• Shifts in Meaning• By amelioration, a word is assigned to a more

favorable class of objects than previously. The word nimble comes originally from the Old English word niman, meaning "to take." It now means adroit. • The opposite of amelioration is pejoration. A

word becomes attached to a less favorable class of objects than previously. The word spinster originally means the girl who spins, but now it means an older unmarried woman.

• When a word relates to a larger class of objects than previously, it has gone through generalization. A place was originally the same thing as a plaza, and a butcher was a person who slaughtered goats.

• In the opposite direction, a word can go through specialization and refer to a smaller class of objects. A wife was originally any woman, and disease was lack of ease for any reason.

Sound Change

• Words such as table and face, which had at the time of borrowing, underwent a sound change in English during the fifteenth century. The vowel was raised and fronted to [ei].

•

Syntactical change

• A syntactic rule that has been lost from English is the rule of adjective agreement. The rule stipulated that the endings of adjectives must agree with the head noun in case, number, and gender.

Language Planning

• The term language planning refers to a deliberate attempt to affect language use in order to prevent or to solve some problems of communication.

Standard Language

• The standard language can be said to be a superposed, socially prestigious dialect of language.

• Because it functions as the public means of communication, it is subject to extensive normalization especially in grammar, pronunciation, and spelling.

• Command of the standard language is the goal of formal language instruction.

National Language and Official Language

• A national language is considered as a national identity. • An official language is the language that

is used in official situations in a nation or an institution.

• End of Lecture