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English Studies
Semester 6/Linguistics
Module /Sociolinguistics & Psycholinguistics

Introduction

1
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The fact that people organize themselves into various types of groups has been
highlighted by the American linguist Dwight Bolinger (1975, p
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”
One concept which is highly relevant to the study of language in society is the concept of
identity and how it can be constructed by means of language
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This term is defined in a variety of ways in the social sciences
and in ordinary lay discourse
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Identity
1
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The property of belonging, or feeling that one belongs to, a society or a group within a
society
An individual has both a personal identity as in (1) and a social identity as in (2)
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Speakers’ personal identities are
conveyed through their idiosyncratic speech habits, i
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through their idiolects
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It includes the unique characteristics of the
language of an individual speaker
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So, we can say that a language contains as many idiolects as the number of its speakers
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Speakers possess not only a personal identity but also a social identity, the need to belong to a
group
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Groups can be formed on the basis of
socioeconomic class, gender, language background, and age
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The groups can be long-lasting or temporary, large or small, close-knit or casual,
and formally or informally organized
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Speech community
A regionally or socially definable human group, identified by the use of a shared spoken
language or language variety
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Social network
The variety of groups within a speech community that we interact with and that defines our
social identity; we may adopt different speech styles according to which group we are
communicating with
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Networks are not fixed; people belong to different networks of different strengths
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Loose
networks: people you know and interact with do not also know and interact with one another
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g
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Networks create cohesion and solidarity
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Community of practice
2

An aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagements in some common
endeavour
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Practices emerge in the course of their joint activity around their
common endeavour
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Jargon
Speech or writing used by a community of practice, i
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a group of people who belong to a
particular trade, profession, or any other group bound together by mutual interest, e
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the
jargon of law, medical jargon
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People may have various relationships
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To understand these
relationships, we need several concepts that have been put forth by social scientists
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Power can be defined as possession of control, authority, or influence over others
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Solidarity can be defined as the relationship between interlocuters of equal status, with its
consequent effect on the language used
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So, power and
solidarity can be enacted through Forms of address
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g
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Forms of address encode various relationships that people may have within groups
or in interaction, such as power, solidarity, intimacy, distance, and politeness
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Examples include the use of familiar and polite
pronouns (such as tu vs
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Terms of endearment
Forms of address used between people who mutually perceive their relationship to be one of
intimacy (e
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dear, honey, darling, mate)
T/V forms
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Alternative pronoun forms expressing different kinds of orientation to the addressee
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A mutual use of T
encodes intimacy and social closeness; a mutual use of V encodes respect and social distance
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1
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We follow Ward Goodenough in taking culture as socially acquired knowledge:
a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in
a manner acceptable to its members …Culture, being what people have to learn as distinct
from their biological heritage, must consist of the end-product of learning: knowledge, in a
most general … sense of the term
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167)
Such knowledge is socially acquired: the necessary behaviours are learned and do not come
from any kind of genetic endowment
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The key issue addressed here is the nature of the
relationship between a specific language and the culture in which it is used
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One is that social
structure may either influence or determine linguistic structure and/or behaviour
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For instance, given the evidence of the agegrading phenomenon (i
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young children speak differently from older children, and, in turn,
children speak differently from mature adults), we could argue that the social organization of
age groups influences the language used in these groups
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In both cases it might be that social structures (age group, region, social class,
ethnic group) account for – possibly even determine – linguistic structure (language varieties
of various kinds)
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This is the view that is behind
the Whorfian hypothesis, the claim that the structure of a language influences how its
speakers view the world
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There is a relationship between the
grammatical and semantic categories of a language and the way its speakers see and
experience the world
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The weaker version (linguistic relativity): the distinctions
encoded in one language (both lexical and grammatical) are not found in any other language
and that cultures vary in line with how languages talk about and classify experience
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A third possibility is that the influence is bi-directional: language and society may influence
each other
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A variant of this
possibility would be to say that, although there might be some such relationship, present
attempts to characterize it are essentially premature, given what we know about both
language and society
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6 Research design and methodologies for sociolinguistic research
Methodology refers to the body of methods of investigation used in sociolinguistics
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Sociolinguistic
investigations have a twofold concern: 1) they must ask interesting questions and 2) they
must find the right kinds of data that bear on those questions
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e
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Speech patterns regularly change when another person (especially a stranger) enters the
conversation
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The
‘paradox’ is that an investigator has to be present to collect speech samples, but their
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presence affects the samples they are trying to collect
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Methods of inquiry
Sociolinguistics, being an empirical science, is founded on an adequate data base
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The empirical methods used in data collection
can be either quantitative or qualitative
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Qualitative methods collect
data by directly observing naturally occurring speech events via participant observation or
ethnographic methods
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e
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Participant observation is a form of ethnography which seeks to obtain a greater
understanding of a phenomenon through the submersion of the researcher into the lives of
their research subjects
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It is a means of gathering qualitative data rather than
quantitative data
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Researchers spend long periods of time working and/or living with the people whose speech
they are interested in, and they hope by doing this they will eventually achieve insider status
themselves
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It studies a
group from the inside
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Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language
Some investigators draw a distinction between sociolinguistics or micro-sociolinguistics and
the sociology of language or macro-sociolinguistics
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The equivalent goal in the sociology of language is trying to discover how social structure
can be better understood through the study of language
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There is a very large area
of overlap between the two
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Both micro-sociolinguistics and macro-sociolinguistics are needed to
contribute to a better understanding of language as a necessary condition and product of
social life

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