LECTURE ONE ENG 205: SOCIOLINGUISTICS Definitions; ➢ Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics that studies all aspects of the relationships between language and society. ➢ Sociolinguistics studies such matters such as the linguistics identity of social groups, social attitudes to language, standard and non-standard forms of a language, the patterns and needs of national language use, social varieties and levels of language, the social basis of multilingualism and bilingualism, etc. ➢ It is the study of language as it affects and is affected by social relations. It examines a broad range of concerns like dialect, idiolect, accent, bilingualism, multilingualism and levels of diction in light of social distinction among people. ➢ Sociolinguistics is the study of the sociological aspects of language. It attempts to isolate the linguistic features used in particular situations that mark the various social relationships among the participants and the significant elements of the situations. Factors influencing the choice of sounds, vocabulary and grammatical elements may include; age, gender, education, religion, ethnic identity, occupation and peer group identification. ➢ Sociolinguistics is descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society including cultural norms expectations and context of the way language is used and the effect of language use in the society. It differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics Is, the effect of the society on the language. Sociology of language focuses on the language’s effect on the society. Perspective of sociolinguistics: macro-linguistics and micro-linguistics a) Micro-sociolinguistics explores the way in which society influences the speaker’s idiolect, that is the specific language of a person and how people communicate with different social variables or factors. b) Macro-sociolinguistics focuses more on society as a whole with reference to language. It studies what societies do with their languages ie the attitudes and attachments that accounts for the functional distribution of speech forms in society, language shift, language maintenance and replacement as well as the interaction of the speech communities. ❖ According to Nabor (1970), this area of study (macro-linguistics) deals with large scale social factors and their mutual interactions with languages and dialects. ❖ Coulmas (1997) says that micro-linguistics investigates how social structure influences the way people talk and how language varieties and patterns of use correlates with social attributes such as social class, sex and age. Interaction of language and society ▪ Language is one of the most powerful emblems of social behavior. It is the study of the relationship between language and society with the goal of bringing a better understanding of the structure of language and how languages functions in communities that bring out the interaction between language and societies. Society cannot be created until a group of people has some values in common. These values require a language to articulate them. ▪ It is language that brings people together and keeps them together. ▪ Language always precedes society eg in a political discussion group, the people come together because they already have or want to learn a political language. There are several possible relationships between language and society i. The age grading phenomenon whereby young children speak differently from older children and in turn children speak differently from mature adults. ii. Regional, social or ethnic origin. iii. Gender or sex influences the way language is used in the society. LECTURE TWO CONCEPT OF SPEECH COMMUNITY ❖ A speech community is a concept that describes a more or less discrete group of people in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves. This is sometimes referred to as *speech bund*. ❖ Members of a speech community will always develop slang or jargon to serve the group’s special priorities and purposes. ❖ Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students, football fans or even tight knit groups like family and friends. Types of speech community 1. Soft shelled speech communities 2. Hard shelled speech communities ▪ An informal typology of speech community as soft shelled versus hard shelled may be distinguished on the basis of the strength of the boundary that is maintained by language. ▪ The soft hard communities have stronger boundary allowing minimal interaction between members and those outside. This provides maximum maintenance of language and culture. ▪ A speech community speaking a language in more limited distribution will more likely to be hard shelled because relatively few people outside the community learn to use it eg Italian. ▪ The soft-shelled community has a weaker boundary and allows interaction between members and those outside. ▪ Speech community which primarily use one of the world languages eg English are more likely to be soft shelled because it will be known as a second language by many others, consequently, the interaction across the boundary will be relatively easy in both directions. LANGUAGE VARIATIONS ➢ Language variation focuses on how language varies in different context. Context refers to things like ethnicity, social class, gender, age, geography etc. ➢ A study of language variation is concerned with social constrains determining language in its contextual environment. ➢ Study of language variation is an important part of sociolinguistics to an extent that it requires reference to social factors such as ; 1. Accent • This refers to the phonological variation ie variations in pronunciation therefore if we talk about a southern accent we are talking about a generalized property of English pronunciation in the southern part of US. Accent is a part of dialectal variation. 2. Idiolect • It is individual’s use or choice of language. The choices may be the use of statement instead of questions. It is also manifested in a person’s accent, vocabulary. 3 .Dialect • It is the collection of attributes (phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, morphological, pragmatic and semantic that makes one group of speakers of the same language. • Therefore, dialect usually differs from all linguistic levels. it is the product of individual’s geographical and class origin. 4.Sociolect • These are language varieties that are used by particular social strata. Language varies according to social distribution as well as geographical distribution. 5.Jargon • It is a set of vocabulary items used by members of a particular profession ie their technical terms. 6.Diaglossia • It’s a situation in which two varieties of a language are allocated higher and lower or formal and informal status. A diaglossic situation in a society has two codes which show two functions. Those situations in which the language will be used are called domains. A typical diaglossic distribution of Kiswahili ➢ High variety of Kiswahili is used in speech in parliament, news broadcast, summon in church. ➢ Low variety of Kiswahili is used in personal letters, lectures, instructions to waiter etc. ➢ Generally, the high variety is used for literary purposes ie used in education and those who cannot master it are socially marginalized. ➢ It is also used for official or formal use in church, school, parliament, political, newspapers and editorials. ➢ It has features like; • it is prestigious in that it carries with it a prestige of a great tradition of religion. • It is more stable being protected from change by its association of written text and by an education system • It’s normally associated with power • It is likely to be used over a wide region and thus can serve some fine purpose. ➢ Low variety is used for informal conversation and daily use eg, in home situations, giving instructions to those of lower class and cartoons. Features • The grammar is simpler. • It is more localized and shows dialectal variation. • It is a marker of membership of a peer/ethnic group. LECTURE THREE CODE SWITCHING AND CODE MIXING The term code can be used to refer to a language or a dialect in a general sense. Code switching. ➢ Hymes (1972) defines code switching as the alternative use of two or more languages, varieties of two language or even speech styles. ➢ Bokamba(1989) says code switching is the mixing of words, phrases and sentences from two distinct grammatical sub systems across sentence boundaries within the same speech event. ➢ Code switching is not a display of deficiency in language knowledge. Instead, it is a phenomenon through which its users express a range of meanings. ➢ By code switching which occurs mostly in conversation, the choice of speech alerts the participants of the interaction of context and social dimension within which the conversation is taking place. ➢ Gumperz (1982) says that code switching is the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems Code mixing ➢ Bukamba (1989) views code mixing as the embedding of various linguistic units eg affexes (bound morphemes, words, phrases and clauses) in a sentence eg utado? ➢ Pfaff (1983) says it’s a random alteration of two languages within a sentence. This language behavior is governed by linguistic and socio-linguistic factors. It occurs in a sentence made of elements of languages A and B. ➢ It is usually the infusion of single words or items from one language say A into the language B construction.