Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 14 Anglistics Study

  • Slides: 35
Download presentation
Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 14 Anglistics Study Programme www. singidunum. ac. rs/admission

Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 14 Anglistics Study Programme www. singidunum. ac. rs/admission

Anglistics Study Programme • Gerard Van Herk’s “What is Sociolinguistics” Chapters 12 Attitudes and

Anglistics Study Programme • Gerard Van Herk’s “What is Sociolinguistics” Chapters 12 Attitudes and Ideologies and Chapter 13 Language as a Social Entity

Anglistics Study Programme • Every time speakers use one linguistic form over another they

Anglistics Study Programme • Every time speakers use one linguistic form over another they draw on their attitudes toward those forms and the people that they think use them. Here we have the unquestioned nature of many of our language attitudes-though we may not want to acknowledge it, we tend to think that there are two kinds of language-the ‘normal’ kind that we have or wish we did, and the ‘wrong/odd’ kind which is what other people have. This can sometimes be euphemized using terms like appropriate and inappropriate.

Anglistics Study Programme • How do we go about investigating language attitudes? Attitude surveys

Anglistics Study Programme • How do we go about investigating language attitudes? Attitude surveys to track changing perceptions of non-standard varieties. Ex. Declining status of Arvanitika, an Albanian dialect of Greek, among Arvanites-steady decline of respondents who liked to speak the language, thought speaking it was a good thing and an advantage. Unusual: younger speakers more likely to agree it was necessary to speak it to be one, even if actually less likely to speak it or enjoy speaking it. Similar to Louisiana Cajuns.

Anglistics Study Programme • Well known work on attitudes toward regional varieties-Dennis Preston, cultural

Anglistics Study Programme • Well known work on attitudes toward regional varieties-Dennis Preston, cultural geography, showed Americans have a strong shared sense about which areas of the country are linguistically distinct. • Southern speech described as casual, friendly, polite • Northern speech-normal, fast, smart, absence of marked traits-no drawl or twang • See map (Preston 2002) about descriptions of areas and how they are perceived

Anglistics Study Programme • But though it is useful to know how people feel

Anglistics Study Programme • But though it is useful to know how people feel about a language variety as a whole, it could be more useful for sociolinguistics to know about attitudes towards individual features of a particular variety-to provide clues as to how features are deployed by speakers when they build their sociolinguistic identity. It seems that speakers can actually identify different varieties by the features that are used-ex. AAE, Chicano English, Standard American English

Anglistics Study Programme • Another study: how strongly listeners respond to a single speech

Anglistics Study Programme • Another study: how strongly listeners respond to a single speech features-Labov and the highly stigmatized New York English feature of r-deletion-for occupational suitability people’s ratings dropped according to missing r’s. • Another study: people’s claims of local use of the NEAR vowel with their actual use of it-women overreported their use of British Standard English pronunciation, men over-reported their rates of use of the local pronunciation. From this the influential concept of covert prestige came about-men were attracted to the working-class, local, non-school connotations of the non-standard variant.

Anglistics Study Programme How much of people’s language attitudes actually reflect their responses to

Anglistics Study Programme How much of people’s language attitudes actually reflect their responses to linguistic input? How much results from completely non-linguistic beliefs or expectations? Remember the studies in which people hallucinated hearing foreign accents on a recording when presented with a picture of a non-white speaker at the same timethe same tendency toward hallucination appears to surface with non-ethnic distinctions.

Anglistics Study Programme • Look at ex. of MOUTH vowel and Detroit/Canadians. Two conclusions:

Anglistics Study Programme • Look at ex. of MOUTH vowel and Detroit/Canadians. Two conclusions: nonlinguistic information can have a huge influence on what people hear, or think they hear; and weirdness is usually associated with other people (Canadians in this particular case)

Anglistics Study Programme • Matched guise test– Canada-tries to get past people’s professed viewpoints

Anglistics Study Programme • Matched guise test– Canada-tries to get past people’s professed viewpoints to gauge deeply held language attitudes. Ex. Both English and French speakers rated French-guise recordings lower in intelligence-these studies have fairly consistently shown a split between status and solidarity (closeness, intimacy, shared status). Status measures-seen as more competent, smarter, even taller! Non-standard measures seen as warmer and friendlier. See about matched guise studies in the USA. Likert scale -rating method for people in recordings according to various personal traitsfriendliness, intelligence, competence, honesty, industriousness.

Anglistics Study Programme • The matched guise test can have real-world applications as well-examples

Anglistics Study Programme • The matched guise test can have real-world applications as well-examples of callers using African American, Hispanic, or Southern American English accents to rent an apartment.

Anglistics Study Programme • Language myths– certain languages lack grammar, English can be spoken

Anglistics Study Programme • Language myths– certain languages lack grammar, English can be spoken without an accent, French is more logical than English, parents teach their children to speak, primitive languages exist, English is degenerating, language standards are slipping, pronunciation should be based on spelling-some are widespread-especially the idea that some language varieties have tiny vocabularies or are incapable of expressing complex or abstract ideas. Opposite notion is also popular. Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

Anglistics Study Programme • The problem is that these language myths can serve to

Anglistics Study Programme • The problem is that these language myths can serve to reinforce the higher status of the standard at the expense of other varieties, presumably reassure those who want to dismiss those particular language varieties or limit their domains of use. The very idea of a standard language means that it is the default against which other stuff is measured-and legitimizes marginalization.

Anglistics Study Programme • How is the concept of the standard ‘sold’? Through the

Anglistics Study Programme • How is the concept of the standard ‘sold’? Through the language coordination process: • Language is mystified • Authority is claimed • Misinformation is generated • Non-mainstream language is trivialized • Conformers are praised • Non-conformers are vilified • Promises are made • Threats are made

Anglistics Study Programme • Studies of minority and immigrant groups show big differences in

Anglistics Study Programme • Studies of minority and immigrant groups show big differences in the degree to which different groups show convergence to the local mainstream. • The public conversation – discourse – about language and attitudes goes on all the time. • Anti-languages are ways of speaking that reverse or twist the standard meaning of words for social or political ends • Political correctness

Anglistics Study Programme Language as a Social Entity • We’ve mainly focused on the

Anglistics Study Programme Language as a Social Entity • We’ve mainly focused on the linguistics part of sociolinguistics-but society can also treat language the same way it treats immigration, the arts, business-something to be debated and regulated. Let us consider how societies approach language as a social object-the sociology of language.

Anglistics Study Programme • How do societies (and their members) decide which language is

Anglistics Study Programme • How do societies (and their members) decide which language is theirs? Which will survive, become abandoned, become repressed? This hasn’t much to do with the details of the language itself, since a language variety can change its social or political status over the course of a generation-even overnight independent of any alteration of its linguistic content.

Anglistics Study Programme • How languages survive: language maintenance (happens at the individual level,

Anglistics Study Programme • How languages survive: language maintenance (happens at the individual level, but in response to social, political, and economic forces) • How government and other institutions affect the role and status of languages: language policy and language planning (happen at the societal/political level-assume an even more overt choice-long-term evaluation of available alternatives, and the conscious choice of one of them.

Anglistics Study Programme • Ethnolinguistic vitality of languages-how likely they are to survive. There

Anglistics Study Programme • Ethnolinguistic vitality of languages-how likely they are to survive. There a number of factors that can influence language retention: • Institutional support • Power and prestige of languages • Demography • Community choices • Together, these lead to language shift-the gradual replacement of one language by another (usually takes 2 -4 generations)

Anglistics Study Programme • Sometimes large groups of refugees maintain their home language because

Anglistics Study Programme • Sometimes large groups of refugees maintain their home language because they believe or hope they’ll return to their country of origin. Sometimes there are enough speakers of a particular language who move to a new place that allows them to maintain their original language for hundreds of years, especially in cases of social isolation. Sometimes newcomers to a place have no intention of learning the majority language (like in colonial situations) and have the political, economic, and military power to force the locals to learn their own language.

Anglistics Study Programme • Consequences of losing your language, or that of your heritage?

Anglistics Study Programme • Consequences of losing your language, or that of your heritage? Not a total nightmare-for some, identity doesn’t require you to speak the language-similar to Yiddishkeit. Jewishness-not required to speak the language to be a part of the community. • But many languages are losing speakers-mostly small numbers of people who don’t wield much political or economic power-they face the prospect of language deatha complete shift in which the original language is no longer used by anyone, anywhere. Particularly dire situation for many indigenous languages of the Americas and Australia, where fewer than 100 native speakers are left. 52% of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 10, 000 people. A language dies when its last speaker dies.

Anglistics Study Programme • Language shift doesn’t usually happen when individuals entirely change languages

Anglistics Study Programme • Language shift doesn’t usually happen when individuals entirely change languages during their lifetime-there are two incremental processes. At the societal level -community starts using old language in fewer and fewer institutional contexts (domains)-made up of particular combinations of people, places, topics, situations-family, friendship, neighborhood, transactions, education, government, employment.

Anglistics Study Programme • At the individual-or family-level, shift happens because languages are not

Anglistics Study Programme • At the individual-or family-level, shift happens because languages are not transmitted from one generation to the next-easy to see in the case of immigrant languages. For the most part, the first generation speaks the old country’s language, the 2 nd generation is bilingual, the third speaks only the language of the new country. • Different immigrant groups shift at different rates, however-in Australia competence tended to be down to 2% after three generations, but some groups from the Balkans and southeast Asia upheld it 60 -80%-likely due to the fact that acculturation to the new society wasn’t absolute-depends much on what the host and immigrant society think, and how much pressure is put

Anglistics Study Programme • Now though language shift and decline is a macro-level (society-wide)

Anglistics Study Programme • Now though language shift and decline is a macro-level (society-wide) process, it results from a series of microlevel (individual) choices-it is the individual speakers who decide what language(s) they (and sometimes their children) will use in a given situation. • Real people respond to local situations, not big international forces. When people make choices about what language to speak it’s determined by their perceptions of the ethnolinguistic vitality of the languages involved-if people speak a language with low perceived EV they will generally be more likely to use the dominant language, leading to language shift.

Anglistics Study Programme • Some languages are also just more dominant than others-communities are

Anglistics Study Programme • Some languages are also just more dominant than others-communities are rarely equal when it comes to financial or political power, and globally a handful of languages have spread far beyond their original borders through colonization and conquest. The top 10 spoken languages account for almost half of the world’s population! • English is particularly seen as a ticket to participating in global culture and the global economy-seen by some as (neo)colonialist, and by others as a bottom-up process.

Anglistics Study Programme • Either way, English is powerful enough to afford to borrow

Anglistics Study Programme • Either way, English is powerful enough to afford to borrow words from other languages, increasing its already expressive range, it is the language of several powerful, wealthy countries and their cultural exports, and often the supposedly neutral choice when speakers of two languages meet either in person or online.

Anglistics Study Programme • But what does that mean for the world’s smaller languages?

Anglistics Study Programme • But what does that mean for the world’s smaller languages? Depends on how far along the path to extinction they are-most seem to be on stage 6 of an 8 stage Graded Intergenerational Dislocation Scale-GIDS-a domain-based description of where and how languages are used. See the GIDS table in the book to learn more.

Anglistics Study Programme • Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -the way a particular language describes the world

Anglistics Study Programme • Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -the way a particular language describes the world affects its speakers’ view of reality. The idea is that each language or language variety encompasses a worldview shaped by the collective experiences of its speakers.

Anglistics Study Programme • Language policy-overall viewpoint that a government or some other organization

Anglistics Study Programme • Language policy-overall viewpoint that a government or some other organization has concerning the use of languages. Tends to reflect the language ideologies of the organization or those with power within it. • Language planning is the way that language policy gets put into effect.

Anglistics Study Programme • Who can do ‘plan’ a language or affect its status

Anglistics Study Programme • Who can do ‘plan’ a language or affect its status and shape? All sorts: • Governments • Non-government commercial or professional groups • Churches • dictionary-makers • Pundits • Writers • Educators • Printers, publishers, editors • Independent political and social groups • individuals

Anglistics Study Programme • Since there are more languages in the world than there

Anglistics Study Programme • Since there are more languages in the world than there are countries, somebody’s language will be overpowered at some point, politically, demographically, socially, economically. Most of the world’s countries put language policy at the heart of their political being by including language provisions in their constitutionslargely intended to manage diversity and dissent.

Anglistics Study Programme • Four typical language planning ideologies: • Linguistic assimilation • Linguistic

Anglistics Study Programme • Four typical language planning ideologies: • Linguistic assimilation • Linguistic pluralism • Vernacularization • Internationalization

Anglistics Study Programme • How to go about with language planning? Two main kinds:

Anglistics Study Programme • How to go about with language planning? Two main kinds: • Status planning– also known as language determination- concerned with choosing between available languages or language varieties and promoting one over the other. Often includes the declaration of an official language - that of a particular region or country as a result of legislation.

Anglistics Study Programme • The other kind of planning is corpus planning – language

Anglistics Study Programme • The other kind of planning is corpus planning – language development – the internal structure of the language, choosing between available variants within that language in order to build up the language to the point where it can be used for all the requirements of a modern society. • The typical steps involved include: • Selection • Codification • Elaboration (modernization) • Implementation

Anglistics Study Programme Language elaboration can include borrowing from other languages, as well as

Anglistics Study Programme Language elaboration can include borrowing from other languages, as well as coining – creating new words, often through compounding. Does this process work? Can you think of any endangered languages in your part of the world?