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Bhumi Dangi

Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University

Semester-3 Assignment

Paper 12 – English Language teaching

‘Sociolinguistics’ by Sandra Silberstein

n  What is sociolinguistic?

People basically use language to communicate, to pass the message internally. We can think of a language as a kind of software installed in each n every social individual to get connected amongst each other. So generally, we can see that any kind of study which is related/based on the subject ‘Language’ is called ‘Linguistics’. Another term to take into consideration is ‘socio’. As we all know that a man is not just an individual but ‘A Social Individual’. We cannot take human being as a separate entity because one person is connected so well with others that s/he becomes a social individual.

Outside the world one person is connected with so many people that one has to communicate with different kind of people. And we have to play the role.

    Impact.

Sustained interest in sociolinguistics emerged in the 1960s, in part as a reaction to ‘autonomous’ linguistics. In place of latter’s idealised speaker/hearer, for whom social influences are irrelevant, the ‘hyphenated’ field of sociolinguistics sought to explore the language use of social beings. Capturing the interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise, a distinction is often made between micro-sociolinguistics & macro-sociolinguistics. Micro-sociolinguistics refers to research with a linguistic slant, often focusing on dialect and register variation. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods have been employed to explore such linguistic phenomena as phonological differences between dialects or discourse variation between male and female speakers. He refers to micro-sociolinguistics as ‘social dimensions of language’. In contrast, macro-sociolinguistics looks at the behaviour of entire speech communities,

exploring issues such as why immigrant communities retain their native language in some social contexts but not in others, or how social identity can affect language choice. With the coming-together of micro-sociolinguistics in a narrow sense and macro-sociology of language, we have tools and questions of particular interest to second language practitioners.

This section explores those aspects of socio-linguistic research that have been particularly productive when viewed through the lens of L2 teaching and learning. For convenience’s sake, this work will be discussed within three subcategories.

Language variation

Linguistic relativity

Languages in contact

1.     Language variation.

One of the earliest studies reported the work of Labov and his colleagues among inner-city youth in York City. Far from being ‘sloppy or ungrammatical’ -as was the prevailing stereotype – the language used by these speakers was shown to be as consistent and rule-governed as any ‘standard’ or ‘prestige’ dialect, the result of systematic linguistic and historical processes. The dissemination of Labov’s insights within the native language teaching profession had a profound effect. In 1979, as a result of court testimony by linguists including Labov and Smitherman, a US federal judge, in what is variously termed the ‘Ann Arbor’ or ‘King’ cases, ruled in favour of a group of parents by requiring that the school district first identify children speaking so-called black English – today more commonly termed African Vernacular English or Ebonics – and then use linguistic knowledge to teach these students how to read ‘standard English’. A significant outcome was that teachers were schooled in the origin and history of students’ native language variety and trained to recognise and address the systematic differences between this variety and standard or prestige form. Briefly pidginisation is a process that results from contact of two or more languages in a context where language needs can or must be satisfied through use of a simplified code. Examples include trading contexts or the interactions between colonised people and a conqueror. When social dominance comes into play, the

languages of subordinated groups have most of their effect on the grammar, while the socially dominant language contributes more of the vocabulary. Through the creolisation process, speakers develop an elaborated code that can accommodate the full range of life’s functions. A gradual decreolisation process can occur as speakers incorporate features from dominant language. During 1970s, a number of linguists came to argue that AAVE usage exists on a decreolisation continuum between creoles such as Gullah and a prestige from termed Standard American English. More recently, creolisation models in general have been complicated somewhat to acknowledge multidimensional linguistic influences and the dynamic virtuosity of learners’ language use. Pedagogically speaking, variation research has demonstrated the ways in which students’ home languages enrich the linguistic landscape, are fundamental to their identities and can be used to aid their learning. The examination of languages in contact and, in particular, the pidginisation model was to have an important influence on L2 studies.

For L2 researchers, the notion of a continuum between a first language and a ‘target language’ proved productive. A learner’s simplified interlanguage – a concept developed by Corder and Selinker – could be seen to result from pidginisation process. In this model, acquisition takes place through the processes of depidginisation: Schumann argued that social and psychological distance explain those learners whose speech remains simplified. A re-theorising of social distance appears at the end of this chapter.

Language variation research has focused increasingly on issues of social context, departing from early interpretations which tended to see meaning inhering in linguistic features themselves. For example, the observations of Lakoff were often interpreted to suggest that woman’s use of tag questions and hedges per se rendered them linguistically less powerful. In the area of social class, debate centred on Bernstein’s suggestion that the less ‘elaborated’, so-called ‘restricted’, code he reported for working-class students implied a cognitive deficit. Later thinking suggests a more dynamic process in which context and category reproduce each other through speech.  Tag questions of themselves don’t create a less powerful speaker, do they? And discourse styles do not necessarily imply cognitive ability. Rather, in a school context where working class students encounter middle-class teachers, or in contexts where gender relations are unequal, roles are reproduced through contextualised activities.

Perhaps one of the most important findings of contemporary sociolinguistic research is the extent to which social categories interact. Examples are studies of the commonly held stereotypes that women speak more grammatically and are more polite than men. This research shows us the extent to which social context is implicated in language use. An early study by Nichols reports a case where gender and social class interact with respect to grammatically. Working with socioeconomic group . . . exhibited more conservative linguistic behaviour than men in that group; women in the more socially mobile . . . community exhibited more innovative linguistic behaviour than . . . men. Building on this observation, Nichols underscores the contextual nature of language use when she speculates that ‘perhaps in transitional groups, or in different social situations for the same group, women will exhibit both conservative and innovative behaviour.

A wide variety of ways in which language and society intersect – in which we find social stratification of linguistic variables from phonology and syntax to discourse and narrative conversations – is documented in sociolinguistic research on:

    Age

    Ethnicity

    Gender

    Geography

    Profession

    Sexual identity

    Social class

Linguistic Relativity

Research on cross-cultural miscommunication explores communicative failures occasioned by the fact that seemingly equivalent language can function quite differently in different cultures. Thomas distinguishes between what she calls pragmalinguistic and sociopragma failure. In the former, speakers fail to convey their meaning because the message’s pragmatic force is misunderstood. A speaker might translate something from an L1 into a target language without the knowledge that the communicative conventions of the target language are quite different. For example, the pragmatic failure occurs when one does not know what to say to whom, a situation that can lead appropriately asked of newcomers and which topics are

discussed, which questions are appropriately asked of newcomers and which favours one asks differ dramatically across speech communities. For students from many locations outside the US it is odd that American hosts offer food only once and then take it away.

Hymes coined the term ethnography of speaking to describe the task of the researcher who is ‘concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking. As he says, ‘it is a question of what a foreigner must learn about a group’s verbal behaviour in order to participate appropriately and effectively in its activities’. In effect, the task of the researcher becomes the description and canale theorised four components of communicative competence: grammatical competence, discourse competence, strategic competence and socio linguistic competence. The last involves appropriate knowledge use based on knowledge of socio cultural conventions and social context. Socio linguistic knowledge involves sensitivity to issues of context and topic, as well as social parameters such as gender, age, social status.

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