Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 2 Anglistics Study

Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 2 Anglistics Study Programme www. singidunum. ac. rs/admission

Anglistics Study Programme • Gerard Van Herk’s “What Is Sociolinguistics? ” • Chapter 2: Language and Society • When sociolinguists talk about ”language, ” we mean language as it is actually used.

Anglistics Study Programme • Mainstream linguists usually elicit translations and grammaticality judgments from native speakers of a language, after which they develop a set of rules or constraints that together make up the grammar of that language. • This is a mentalist approach-describing how language is presented in the mind (requires some abstraction)

Anglistics Study Programme • Competence-what speakers know about language • Performance-what speakers actually come out with • Issues: you’d need to filter out all the “noise” to get at people’s underlying competence; also, some linguistic constructions are so infrequent in daily speech you’d need to record them

Anglistics Study Programme • The sociolinguistic approach is the empiricist approach-we only trust evidence that we find out there in the real world. • On the whole, everyday speech is far more structured than people think (ACTUALLY, the idea that real speech is hesitant and meandering originally comes partly from studies of the language of professors!)

Anglistics Study Programme • Most of the time, we record people (especially nowadays) – we undertake detailed analysis of relatively short stretches of interaction to investigate how participants are constructing their places in the relationship – we look at frequently occurring language features in long stretches of speech - we count stuff and look for correlations – we describe our findings in terms of tendencies, or probabilities, rather than absolute rules

Anglistics Study Programme • Sociolinguistics vs. normal people: • -non-linguists generally use the term language to refer to the so-called standard variety-the language taught in school, used in formal writing, often heard from newscasters • Other varieties of language-the ones linguists would describe as non-standard variety- are often described by non-linguistics as “dialects”

Anglistics Study Programme • Many people see the standard as good, pure, clear, etc. … a ‘real language, ’ while ‘dialects’ are broken, chaotic, limited, impermanent. • As linguists, we should strive to avoid these kinds of value judgments, and as such, our approach is descriptive – (how people actually talk) – rather than prescriptive (how people “should” talk)

Anglistics Study Programme • Obviously this can cause some disagreement since we wouldn’t have been able to finish primary school had we not followed the rules of a specific type of English- • But we need to underline that certain language features are not objectively wrong, they’re just different ways of saying the same thing

Anglistics Study Programme • Linguists use the criterion of mutual intelligibility (are people speaking/understanding ”the same language” or not) –ex. Can people from Bangalore, India and Bangor, Maine understand each other? Even though there are systemic differences in speech-subsets of the same language (dialect)

Anglistics Study Programme • Then we enter the territory of what does it mean to actually ”understand” a person? There are occasions in which despite living in the same country it may be impossible to understand the interlocutor (person you are speaking with) for a number of reasons, such as social distance (the degree of intimacy or familiarity between interlocutors)

Anglistics Study Programme • If, however, people are speaking different language varieties (or dialects) and they can understand one another, that means that their varieties are mutually intelligible • Yet how do we decide what is a language and what is a dialect? For example, for the most part, speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian can understand one another.

Anglistics Study Programme • People who don’t study languages would consider the three separate and distinct because they have each their own country, because they’re found in Europe, and because of 19 th century nationalism. • A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. This means that a way of speaking is seen as a separate language when various subgroups of speakers have the political power to convince people that they are distinct.

Anglistics Study Programme • Similar situation can be found in the former Yugoslavia-mutually intelligible language, each with some distinct vocabulary and sometimes different grammatical patterns which do not prevent understanding. Since breakup, now considered different languages-reflected by different writing systems (Cyrillic vs. Latin script). • Similar case with Hindi and Urdu.

Anglistics Study Programme • Opposite shows up in Chinese-Cantonese and Mandarin are NOT mutually intelligible, yet are persistently called Chinese dialects since they are spoken in the same country and because similar characters are used.

Anglistics Study Programme • Sometimes there are invisible languages-local varieties that are distinct enough to be considered a separate language, yet when the speakers of the language are asked what language they speak they say they use the language used in formal situations (such as Hindi in India)

Anglistics Study Programme A couple more things… • Non-linguists will often refer to non-standard varieties as slang • -slang to linguists refers only to words-new to the language, or old words or phrases with new meanings • -how to know when slang is no longer coolwhen ”old” folks start using it! • Some slang doesn’t die out becomes part of the standard language-ex. mob, freshman, glib, ripoff

Anglistics Study Programme • -unlike slang, dialect is usually distinct in multiple linguistic domains, which encompasses lexicon (word choice), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), and phonology/phonetics (pronunciation)

Anglistics Study Programme • The term accent is also used sometimes by non-linguists for dialect, when they are actually referring to pronunciation, according to linguists • Dialects and accent boundaries don’t have to match-you can speak Standard English when it comes to grammar and word choice, yet use an accent that reflects their social standing or regional background-but the opposite situation may sound odd and comical to us

Anglistics Study Programme • The long and the short of it is-sociolinguists tend to use the term variety for any subset of a language. This means that we have the standard variety, the ethnic, regional, or class variety. • Other sociolinguists are reclaiming the term dialect-mentioning standard dialect, sociolect, regional dialect, ethnolect.

Anglistics Study Programme • Sociolinguists also think of language as existing at the level of the GROUP – language gets its meaning through interaction with others, as we negotiate understanding, determine how we want to present ourselves to others, and express our belonging (or nonbelonging) • Some sociolinguists might say that there is no such thing as the individual- that the way we talk stems from our belonging to a group(s)