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Introduction to linguistics

Lecture 8: Sociolinguistics 1

Sources

• Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of

language, pp. 24-25, 28-33, 38-43.

• Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams.

2003. An introduction to language.

– Chapter 10: Language in society.

•

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYHTsmvdth
c

(Social Class and Accent)

•

http://www.ello.uos.de/field.php/Sociolinguistics
/Majordialectregions

(dialects of the UK and the

USA)

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Sociolinguistics

• Studies the relationship between language

and society, that is:

– The

linguistic identity

of social groups - the sense

of belonging to a particular group speaking the
same language as you.

– Social attitudes to language.
– Standard and nonstandard forms of language.
– Social varieties of language.

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Sociolinguistics

• Language is not uniform

, but differs among

social groups and individual speakers.

• Sociolinguistics focuses on

performance

and

how it changes under the influence of:

– status,
– age,
– sex,
– religion,
– education.

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Terms

• Speech community

– a group of people who

share a set of norms and expectations regarding
the use of language (Yule 2006).

• Language area

– a place where a common

language is spoken.

• Language variety

– a specific form of a language:

– Regional and occupational varieties (e.g. London

English, religious English).

– Varieties caused by sex, age, status, etc.

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Lg varieties: accents

• Accent

– a variety of language indentified by

pronunciation.

– The term refers to pronunciation only.

• Regional accents:

– spoken by rural or urban communities within a

country (e.g.

'West Country', 'Liverpool'

)

– and national groups speaking the same language (e.g.

'American', 'Australian

).

• Social accents

– relate to the cultural and

educational background of the speaker.

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Social accents

• Social accents are believed to

reflect the

social structure of a society

.

• E.g. the British society is stereotypically

divided into these classes:

– working class, middle class and upper class.

• The way people speak a language may show

which social class they belong to.

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Social accents: RP

• In the UK, the best example of a social accent

has been

Received Pronunciation (RP)

:

– regionally neutral;
– prestigious because it is associated with the

middle (and above) classes in the South East, the
wealthiest part of England.

– Speaking RP indicates a certain educational

background, such as public school or elocution
lessons.

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Social accents: RP

• RP is also called

BBC English

or

Queen’s English

.

• However, now the accent that the Queen uses is

seen as old fashioned.

– Phoneticians call this accent

Conservative RP

.

• Todays’ discussions of social accents include the

influence of immigrants’ languages, e.g.:

– Upper-caste Indians have become a prosperous social

group – but are they speaking RP?

– What about the accent of well-educated Polish

immigrants?

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Regional accents

• In England, the upper class or prestige accent

is almost always a form of RP;

• however, some areas have their 'own' prestige

accent, different from both RP and the
working class accent of the region.

• There are plenty of regional accents there,

– many have working class or lower middle class

connotations.

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Regional accents: some examples

• The

London accent

– a working and lower middle class

accent.

• Estuary English

– a working class and lower middle

class accent from S-E England; a milder (closer to RP)

form of the London accent.

• Multicultural London English

– appeared in the late

20th c., used mainly by young, inner-city, working-class

people in inner London.

• Brummie

– the accent and dialect of Birmingham and

surrounding areas.

• Mackem

– An accent and dialect of Sunderland and

surrounding areas.

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Dialect

• Dialect

– a variety of language indentified by a

particular set of

words

,

grammar

and

pronunciation

.

– So accent is one of the aspects of a dialect.

• Examples of lexical differences:

– Pop, soda

and

coke

– refer to the same thing but

come from different dialects.

• Examples of syntactic differences:

– My car needs washed

(eastern Ohio and

Pennsylvania).

– My car needs to be washed / needs washing

(Standard English).

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Standard dialect

• Standard dialect

– a prestige variety of lg used

within a speech community.

• It cuts across regional differences and

provides a unified means of communication.

• It constitutes

a norm

which can be used in

mass-media or teaching the lg to foreigners.

• Sub-standard

(pejorative) /

non-standard

varieties

– dialects which do not conform to

this norm.

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Dialect vs. language

• Deciding what is a language and what is a

dialect is not always easy.

– There are some criteria but neither of them is

universally accepted.

• The criterion of

mutual intelligibility

:

– if speakers of two varieties can understand each

other, they speak two dialects of the same
language.

– If they don’t understand each other, they speak

different languages.

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Dialect vs. language

• However, there are counterexamples, e.g:

– Mandarin

and

Cantonese

are mutually

unintelligible, but they are considered dialects of
Chinese.

– Norwegian

and

Swedish

are mutually intelligible,

but they are considered different languages.

• A

sociolinguistic

criterion:

– Dialects become languages for political and social

reasons.

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Dialect vs. language

• When two varieties

share a writing system

, they are

dialects of the same language

.

• If communities have separate histories, cultures,

literatures and political structures, they speak different

languages

.

– E.g.:

Serbian

and

Croatian

used to be treated as dialects of

one language, Serbo-Croatian.

– Now they are spoken in separate countries, so they are

separate

languages

.

– Different writing systems: Serbian – Cyrillic script, Croatian

– Latin one.

• Poland

: uncertain status of

Kashubian

and

Silesian

.

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Dialect continuum

• In some regions there is no clear dialect

boundary but rather a

dialect continuum

(or a

dialect area

) – a chain of dialects spoken

throughout an area.

– At any point in the chain, speakers of a dialect can

understand the speakers of other neighbouring
dialects.

– People who live further away may be difficult or

impossible to understand.

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Dialect continuum

Some dialect continua in Europe:

• Continental West Germanic continuum

: modern

dialects of German and Dutch – Belgium – the
Netherlands – Germany – Austria – Switzerland.

• Romance / Italic dialect c.

(Calais/Paris – Rome).

• South Slavic dialect c.

(Croatian, Bosnian,

Serbian, Macedonian).

• North Slavic dialect c

. (Russian, Ukrainian, White

Russian, Polish, Czech).

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