#022 - What makes Sociolinguistics so awesome!?

#022 - In this episode Gabi explores the interplay between languages and the different dimensions of language.

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Transcript

Hi everybody my name is Gabi and welcome back to my show. First of all, I want to thank you for listening to me and I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

I took a small hiatus to spend the holidays with my family. My sister and her husband and their beautiful daughters  came over to visit us from France. They brought many gifts and received many gifts and many kisses. I hope you had a lovely time off as well with your loved ones.

Okay, let’s cut to the chase because our precious time is limited.

Today I’m gonna talk about sociolinguistics. I’m gonna discuss what we understand by sociolinguistics and why it is relevant for this podcast.

I’m also going to discuss some of the main topics in sociolinguistics. Personally, I think this is a pretty fascinating and totally awesome area of languages in general. 

Here’s a few definitions I took from different places:

1. Sociolinguistics is the study of the sociological aspects of language. The discipline examines how different social factors, such as ethnicity, gender, age, class, occupation, education, and geographical location can influence language use and maintain social roles within a community. In simple terms, sociolinguistics is interested in the social dimensions of language. 

2. the study of how language is used by different  groups in society that’s Cambridge dictionary.

3. I found a beautiful definition on Britannica: 

Sociolinguistics, the study of the sociological aspects of language The discipline concerns itself with the part language plays in maintaining the social roles in a community.

Sociolinguists attempt to isolate those linguistic features that are used in particular situations and that mark the various social relationships among the participants and the significant elements of the situation. Influences on the choice of sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary items may include such factors as age, sex, education, occupation, race, and peer-group identification, among others. 

For example, an American English speaker may use such forms as “He don’t know nothing” or “He doesn’t know anything,” depending on such considerations as his level of education, race,  social class  or consciousness.  Some languages, such as Japanese, there is an intricate system of linguistic forms that indicate the social relationship of the speaker to the hearer.

Social dialects  which exhibit a number of socially significant language forms, serve to identify the status of speakers; this is especially evident in England, where social dialects transcend regional dialect boundaries.

Ok. I think you grabbed the gist of it. As you see there are many topics and subtopics to choose from because the very nature of Sociolinguistics is huge.

So, let’s just name four of the main ones:

let's begin with Language and identity:

Languages symbolize identities and are used to signal identities by those who speak them. People are also categorized by other people according to the language they speak. We all have many social identities: we can be Danish and a Barca or Manchester supporter at the same time. 

Every social group also has its own language or variety of language: a regional language has its own ways of speaking, for example: Texan American English is very specific and has its own vocabulary, etc. The supporters of the Barca team will have their own jargon and songs which gives a sense of belonging to the group.

We often identify very strongly with the language we speak, there is a national sense of belonging to a group. Sometimes we may see that one language corresponds to one nationality but very often this is not the case. For example in Russia many different regional languages and dialects are spoken. 

Usually official languages are taught at school as a subject and obviously are used to teach other subjects. 

Sometimes the fact that only official languages of a country are encouraged to be learned means that the native language of an immigrant may be forgotten altogether or neglected and because there is a strong sense of belonging and a sense of identity between language and nationality an immigrant may forget and even start to dislike his parent’s language feeling he or she no longer belongs to that group. 

Likewise learning a new subject or even starting a new career for example in chemistry may lead a student to learn or acquire the terminology of the new subject and make them belong to a new group. Like a chemist.

Languages and varieties of language (subtle variations or major differences of pronunciation and grammar) are ways of expressing and recognizing the many social identities people have. Social id

People can talk in different ways depending on the different groups they belong to and they will tend to use one way or another of speaking when the right opportunity arises.

1. There languages and their varieties

For example, a group can be made of few or many individuals such as a married couple, or a a set of friends, and they may use a certain type of language, for example a set of words or vocabulary associated to a particular context that only they know. Typically couples create their own neologisms and expressions which are associated to a private context and private emotions that only they know. 

So you may like to call your spouse my ‘’my cute little mouse’’ within a specific frame of mind and emotions that means something typically endearing. However, if you used that same expression, my cute little mouse when performing a neurological surgery on a patient as a Neurosurgeon then that would sound very cringe to the ears of the other surgeons and medical stuff. You would probably be told to watch your language and be professional.

 Or as large as a nation, where everyone understands the allusions in their shared language (often allusions to shared history, to contemporary events, to media people of fact or fiction etc). The ‘secret’ language of the smallest group and the ‘public’ language of the national group are two ‘varieties’ of the same language.

I think this may be a good moment to point out to the fact that learning a new language doesn’t necessarily grant you an all-access pass to the feeling of belonging to that particular culture in its entirety.  

 2. Social identities

People belong to a certain group like a family, a school, a city, a football team, a minority, etc. So they identity as x and they claim to belong to X group. They can be identified and accepted by others in that group. Or they can be rejected straight away. People who belong to an other groups may identify them with a specific group and say you belong to such and such group. 

This can create a lot social tension nevertheless. If a particular group or person is taken to belong to another group that has a certain type of prejudice this may be detrimental for their well-being. 

People tend to speak using different varieties depending on the person they’re speaking to or depending on the group of people they’re talking to.

We’re all born into a family and use the variety of our families. The same can be said for our group of friends. We acquire the language they use and we use certain words and expression which create an in-group mentality. 

We go though life acquiring new varieties and ways of saying things. Sometimes a whole new variety is a new language in itself.

While we could say that spoken language is always learned naturally and inadvertently, we cannot say the same thing about written language and the reason for that is that written language can only be learned in a formal manner. Children learn how to read and write at school. 

The school teaches the formal variety used by the state. The name of the language is related to the name of the state itself, id est, the Spanish language comes from the Spanish State. 

Very often one single State may have individual varieties and so you have Catalan or Basque in Spain. Some of these varieties are official and recognized and some are not official. Catalan is official, but Sardinian or Sicilian isn’t. 

That being said you don’t automatically gain access to a new society by means of speaking their language because very often the criteria you have meet to access it depends on vastly different factors, which are often either concealed from whoever wishes to integrate a new culture or are quite frankly based on prejudice. 

And as we all know this sort of irrational behavior is anchored deep in our tribal minds and it takes a really long time and effort to get rid if it. 

National language and national identity are reinforced by having different subjects taught at school in the national language. Likewise, having social interactions with your family and peers enhances a kind of national soul.

It is generally thought that —although no evidence seems to support these thoughts— that learning a new major language widely spoken such as English may derive in the loss of the national language coupled with the loss of national identity and pride. 

There seems to be some empirical truth to that in my opinion. The more people use English in their everyday life at work, school and at home the more the cultural traits and cultural fads and modern nuances will permeate and create new ways of conveying meaning into our everyday life in detriment to the older ways of doing the same things.

This is often the case in multinational companies where there seems to be a homogenization of departments such as Human Resources in which the language they speak seems to operate as a kind of trojan horse full of new cultural ideas and fashions.