Sociolinguistics 1.pdf

course of sociolinguistics of pr BENAMAR

1. Department of English
Tetouan
Academic year: 2020-2021
Sociolinguistics
Pr. Benamar

2. Syllabus
•Introducing sociolinguistics
•The scope of sociolinguistics
•Sociolinguistics and language
•Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language
•Sociolinguistic phenomena
•Varieties of language
•Speech communities
•Language and dialect

3. Syllabus
•Standard languages
•Regional dialects and isoglosses
•Social dialects
•Types of linguistic items
•Registers and dialects
•Diglossia
•Mixture of varieties

4. Syllabus
•Code-switching
•Borrowing
•Pidgins
•Creoles

5. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Micro Linguistics is mainly concerned with the
study of phonetics, Grammar, syntax,
morphology etc.
•Macro linguisticsdeals with comparative
studies among languages, language families,
large influences on language development and
so on and so forth.

6. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Linguistics and Sociolinguistics
•In pure linguistics, the object of the study is the
language alone, independent of the speakers and
other social factors. It is about learning the
grammar and how the language works.
•So to be more precise, Sociolinguisticsis the
study of the complex relationship between
language and society. For Hudson (1996: 1): “the
study of language in relation to society”

7. Introducing sociolinguistics
•The language we use is strongly affected by
some social factors. Such as:
•The social background
•The relationship between the speaker and
receiver
•The context and manner of interaction
•These factors have significant effects on how
we use language in our daily life.

8. Introducing sociolinguistics
•What is language? and what is society?
•Societyis any group of people who are drawn
together for a certain purpose or purposes.
•Languageis what the members of a particular
society speak.

9. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Language and its social side
•The term 'language' is generally accepted to
refer to a system of arbitrary symbols used for
human communication.
•For de Saussure, the concrete data of language
(what he called parole) are produced by
individual speakers, but 'language is not
complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly
only within a collectivity' (1959: 14).

10. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Chomsky and Sociolinguistics
•Chomsky (1965: 3) argued that linguistic
theory should be concerned primarily with an
ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
homogeneous speech community, who knows
its language perfectly and who is unaffected
when applying his knowledge of the language
in actual performance.

11. Introducing sociolinguistics
•The Chomskyanapproach focused on what
could be generated in language and by what
means.
•The social approachtries to account for what
can be said in a language, by whom, to whom,
in whose presence, when and where, in what
manner and under what social circumstances
(Fishman 1971, Hymes1971, Saville-Troike
1982).

12. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Dell Hymes(1971) was the principal objector
to the dominance of Chomsky's
characterization of what constituted the study
of linguistic competence.
•Hymescoined the term communicative
competenceto denote the human ability to
use language appropriately in different
settings.

13. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language
•Sociolinguistics is part of the terrain mapped
out in Linguistics, focusing on language in
society for the light that social contexts throw
upon language.
•Sociology of Language is primarily a sub-part
of Sociology, which examines language use for
its ultimate illumination of the nature of
societies.

14. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Sociolinguistics and language variation
•Sociolinguists are interested in the different
types of linguistic variation used to express
and reflect social factors.
•Vocabulary or word choice is one area of
linguistic variation. But linguistic variation
occurs at other levels of linguistic analysis too:
sounds, word-structure (or morphology), and
grammar (or syntax) as well as vocabulary

15. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Knowledge of Language
•Speakers can communicate using one code/language or
more. They may switch between two or more codes
depending on the context and the communication
needs dictated by various circumstances.
•Speakers of the language/s usually have a good
mastery of the grammar…
•Anyone who knows a language knows much more
about that language than is contained in any grammar
book that attempts to describe the language.

16. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Extinct/ dead languages
•Anextinct languageis a languagethat no
longer has any speakers,especially if the
language has no livingdescendants.
•Latin or Sanskrit. However, in such cases we
should note that it is the speakers who are
dead, not the languages themselves, for these
may still exist, at least in part.

17. Introducing sociolinguistics
•Sociolinguistics: empirical or theoretical?
Empirical: based on collecting data and doing
fieldwork.
Theoretical: based on introducing theories and
concepts that can be based on individual
experience of language or on analytical findings
built on data and experiments