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Lecture 1
Sociolinguistics (ENG-506)
Lecture 1
Sociolinguistics (ENG-506)
Lecture 1
1. Social structure may either influence or determine linguistic structure and/or behavior.
(Age-Grading)
2. Linguistic structure and/or behavior may either influence or determine social structure.
(Whorfian hypothesis)
3. Language and society may influence each other. (Marxist View)
4. There is no relationship at all between linguistic structure and social structure.
(Chomsky)
Correlational relationship between Language and Society:
Gumperz (1971, p. 223) has observed that sociolinguistics is an attempt to find correlations
between social structure and linguistic structure and to observe any changes that occur.
Such studies do not exhaust sociolinguistic investigation, nor do they always prove to be as
enlightening as one might hope.
Correlation not Causation
Specific points of connection between language and society must be discovered.
Sociolinguistics and Sociology of Language
There is a distinction between sociolinguistics or micro-sociolinguistics and the sociology of
language or macro-sociolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in relation to society, whereas the sociology of
language is the study of society in relation to language. (Hudson 1996)
Coulmas (1997, p. 2) says that micro-sociolingustics investigates how social structure
influences the way people talk and how language varieties and patterns of use correlate with
social attributes such as class, sex, and age.
Macro-sociolinguistics, on the other hand, studies what societies do with their languages, that is,
attitudes and attachments that account for the functional distribution of speech forms in society,
language shift, maintenance, and replacement, the delimitation and interaction of speech
communities.
Sociolinguistics (ENG-506)
Lecture 1
Trudgill (1978) tries to differentiate those studies that he considers to be clearly sociolinguistic in
nature from those that clearly are not and do not have any linguistic objective.
Languages, Dialects and Varieties
It is difficult to define Language and Dialect; hence, as a starting point, a neutral term variety
can be used to refer any system of verbal communication between people of a society.
The term variety is a particularly useful one to avoid prejudging the issue of whether a given
entity is (in popular terms) a language or a dialect.
Hudson (1996, p. 22) defines a variety of language as a set of linguistic items with similar
social distribution
This definition also allows us to treat all the languages of some multilingual speaker, or
community, as a single variety, since all the linguistic items concerned have a similar social
distribution.
A variety can therefore be something greater than a single language as well as something less,
less even than something traditionally referred to as a dialect.
Hudson and Ferguson agree in defining variety in terms of a specific set of linguistic items or
human speech patterns (presumably, sounds, words, grammatical features, etc.) which we can
uniquely associate with some external factor (presumably, a geographical area or a social group).
Language and dialect have a number of conflicting senses:
Ancient Greece was actually a group of distinct local varieties (Ionic, Doric, and Attic)
descended by divergence from a common spoken source with each variety having its own
literary traditions and uses. (Haugen 1966)
Sociolinguistics (ENG-506)
Lecture 1
Later, Athenian Greek, the koin or common language became the norm for the spoken
language as the various spoken varieties converged on the dialect of the major cultural and
administrative center.
The distinction the French make between un dialecte and un patois.
(Gumperz 1982) says that socio-historical factors play a crucial role in determining boundaries.
Hindi and Urdu are the same language, but one in which certain differences are becoming more
and more magnified for political and religious reasons.
In India, it appears that the boundary between the spoken varieties of Hindi and Urdu is
somewhat flexible and one that changes with circumstances.
Gumperz (1971: 7) speaks of a chain of mutually intelligible varieties from the Sind (in the
north-west) to Assam.
Sociolinguistics (ENG-506)
Lecture 1