Introduction to Sociolinguistics

UNIT 1

1 – INTRODUCTION: KEY CONCEPTS IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS:

Language is used to convey meaning, it is used for a number of things other than transmitting
a verbal message, among them, to initiate, maintain and preserve social relationships with
other members of the society. Language should be understood as a social phenomenon that
relates the speakers to their social environment and their kinship to other members of the
speech community,

Sociolinguistics deals with the relation between language and society. It copes with the links
that can be found between one or more languages and their users who live within a specific
speech community. Sociolinguistics examines the social and linguistic patterns that govern our
behavior as members of human society and how they affect interaction.

Chomsky was concerned with the ideal speaker/listener communication in a completely

homogenous speech community who knows the language as a native speaker. Dell Hymes
termed the Communicative Competence that refers not only to the human ability to use the
language in different situations and under different circumstances but it also refers to other
non-linguistic aspects which are also part of the communication process, such as: silence, turn-
taking, volume, amount of talk, word choice, gestures, etc.

2 – SOCIOLINGUISTICS VS. SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE:

Sociolinguistics is to investigate and describe the relationship between language and society
and the stress is placed on language and its role within communication. It may try to analyze
specific differences of a group of speakers in a speech community at a micro level. It can also
refer to a macro level and in that case what interests the researchers is language variation as a
human phenomenon that affects large parts of the population.

Sociology of language, centers on the study of society and how we can understand it through
the study of language, that is, how we can understand sociolinguistic behavior by means of the
study of linguistic features.

Micro-sociolinguistics involves the use of a language as a whole together with another cultural
phenomenon that determines the use of language, whereas macro-sociolinguistics deals with
language planning, language policy, etc.

3 – THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS:

Sociolinguistics has spread in the last thirty years together with other branches of linguistics
such as psycholinguistics, pragmatics and applied linguistics which, far from having a
descriptive or historical approach to language such as pure or traditional linguistics (syntax,
phonetics, etc.) maintain an interest in the interdisciplinary of the field and the contribution of
other branches of the humanities to linguistics, such as: psychology, pragmatics, history,
gender studies, etc. This new branch of linguistics emerged together with other developments
of applied linguistics and was often considered a “step child”, until it finally became a

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consolidated fully acknowledged field of research. It comprises various areas of study and
research like historical and comparative linguistics, dialectology, and anthropology.

Nowadays, sociolinguistics is not only a truly consolidated discipline but it can be divided into
subfields, such as pragmatics, language gender studies, pidgin and creole studies, language
planning and policy studies, and education of linguistic minority studies, etc.

4 – VARIATION:

From a sociolinguistic point of view the most important source of information is the way social
and situational factors affect language and make it vary. One of the first features that can
sometimes be identified is the origin. Differences are associated, within a specific speech
community, with social, economical, political, religious, cultural or any other situational
background. In terms of power relationships the way people use the language is affected by
the social connection between them.

A speaker can vary his/her speech in some degree, especially to adhere to certain social,
economic, religious, etc. class, but s/he cannot vary it beyond certain limits otherwise s/he
would be ungrammatical and/or incomprehensible.

It would be necessary to point out that linguistic norms are quite often more understated than
other social conventions, such as table manners, therefore, harder to describe, or even
perceive. Social conventions are usually learned or acquired during childhood and adolescence
but these rules can vary from culture to culture and as languages often reflect the way their
users understand and perceive their lives.

So, Sociolinguistics deals specially with variation, among groups, among situations and among
places, and the task of the sociolinguist is to find regular patterns of variation in use.

5 – SOME INSTANCES OF VARIATION:

Labov states that style shifting is usually correlated to the amount of attention that the
speaker pays to his speech. Some markers characterize an ethnic linguistic variety.

Word choice also determines style shifting as the linguistic ‘domain’ (home, neighborhood, job,
church, store, school, etc.) settles the degree of formality in the words used as well as the
amount of colloquialisms in a speaker’s speech.

6 – DIACHRONIC VARIATION:

Languages are in a constant flux because people use them endlessly and the continuous use
makes them change. Pronunciation also changes in all languages.

The Danish scholar Rasmus Rask and his follower the German linguist Jacob Grimm in the first
quarter of the 19th century succeeded in showing the relationship between Germanic and the
classical Indo-European languages.

Another area of linguistic change is syntax. Syntactic change affects the pattern of sentences.
English has become an analytic language.

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Semantic change offers the most obvious instances as it is one of the most sensible areas in
this respect, as even in short periods of time words may vary their meanings total or partially
because they are closely connected with everyday usage and the contemporary culture. There
are changes in meaning and use. Change of meaning is closely related to social changes.
Semantic change can be derived into generalization or specification.

Words can be borrowed from other languages, new words can be coined or invented, and new
terms can be created by means of derivation and compounding of existing words. Native
words can pass out and be replaced by words from other languages or dialects. There is also
semantic differentiation of originally synonyms, native words and loans.

7 – SPEECH COMMUNITY:

For general linguistics, a speech community is a group of people that share the same language
or dialect in a specific setting which can be close, such as a city or a neighborhood; or broad,
such as a whole country. Sociolinguistics take the issue a bit more complex given the fact that
societal and extra linguistic factors are taken into account: verbal repertoire and the role
repertoire.

The definition of speech community needs to be sufficiently flexible and abstract to include
social groupings as dissimilar as neighborhoods and countries as speech communities. A basic
component for a speech community is the fact of sharing at least one language, and therefore,
the term refers to a group of people that could communicate in the same language. It is
important to take into account that speech communities do not necessarily correspond with
political boundaries, religions or cultures.

Languages are often used by groups of people that share a physical context but also a number
of social norms. The relationship among members of a speech community allows the
categorization of differences among the several users and variation according to certain social
conditionings such as age, gender, job, educational background, etc. These groups of people
share at least one language or variety and also some rules and norms for the correct use in
communication.

Kachru distinguished four types of speech communities:

a) A multilingual speech community recognizes more than two official languages. In

Multilingual countries a contact language is commonly adopted as an ‘official’
language for practical purposes.
b) A bilingual speech community acknowledges two languages with an official status.
c) A monolingual speech community has only one official language. Monolingual
speakers can also have a repertoire of styles, registers or dialects that may be utterly
different from the standard.
d) A diglossic community would be the one where two languages or varieties are
functionally complementary. Diglossia often distinguishes between two varieties; one
which is used in formal contexts (high variety) and one that is used in colloquial
speech (low variety).

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Spolsky: the speech community has no limitation of location or size but it entails a complex
interlocking network of communication, their members sharing the knowledge of language use
patters as well as attitudes towards others and themselves, and also sharing a set of language
varieties (or repertoires) and norms for using them.

8 – DOING SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH:

Language is used depending on the interlocutor’s social or geographic background and other
factors such as age, sex or education. This means that every speaker will show some degree of
stylistic variation depending on (a) the relations of power or solidarity with the interlocutor; (b)
the social context (domain) where the conversation is taking place: at home, in school, at the
working place, neighborhood; and (c) the topic: academic, professional, trifling.

Sociolinguistics at work are looking for commonly accepted rules and patterns that account for
variations in speech based on some determining factors such as age, gender, level of
education, place of origin, etc. and also depending on the nature of the encounter. It is
necessary to get reliable information about the linguistic phenomenon which has ecological
validity, i.e. it represents a true sample of the way communication takes place without any
type of interference on the part of the researcher.

Sociolinguistic research is based on the collection of large amounts of data and the later
statistical analysis of this data in order to find general tendencies or regularities. Nonetheless,
there is some tension between quantitative and qualitative approaches to sociolinguistic
research. Ethnographers follow a different approach, they base their research on case studies
and that is why they carefully observe single cases and they contrast the patterns of behavior
that they find with those of other communities or societies.

UNIT 2

1 – SOME VARIABLE IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS:

1.1.- STYLE:

Even within a specific speech community individuals have a range of choices when they speak
in terms of word choice, syntactic complexity and even subtle pronunciation features. Every
individual has a typical way in which s/he does things and the same applies to any aspect of
human behavior.

Stylistic variation can be found in other areas of more interest to sociolinguistics; for example,
you can speak very formally or very informally given certain circumstances and situations. This
implies a specific choice on the part of the speaker as s/he will probably choose formal
language for solemn events, less formal language for everyday situations and really informal
and casual language for trivial conversations or relaxed matters. As a result, the speaker can
decide on a level of formality depending on a number of factors such as the particular
occasion, social differences, the interlocutor’s age and other determining factors such as the
type of discourse chose, i.e., written or spoken.

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As a result of the long literary tradition in most cultures, especially western, the question of
style has often been associated with the study of literary writing. Nevertheless, style is linked
in a consistent way to all linguistic behavior, whether written or spoken, and regardless of
whether the speaker/writer is deemed to be a literary figure.

1.2. – REGISTER:

Another variable that is at the speaker’s disposal and that is caught up with style is register. As
register is a set of language features, mainly the choice of lexical items or syntactic ordering of
utterances, whose use tends to be associated with a specific interest group as in the case of
professionals with a particular occupation and, often, a particular working context: doctors, air
traffic controllers, lawyers, computer enthusiasts, etc. This type of variation is characterized by
the circumstance and purpose of the communicative situation and contrasts with variation by
individual user, geographical or socio-economic variation.

Specialization is encouraged and the flourishing number of technical words and acronyms
sometimes makes it difficult for a lay person to follow a conversation on any topic that
requires a specific register. Apart from specific language domains, register is socially motivated
as it entails a social negotiation among the participants in order to accommodate the adequate
register either in written or spoken discourse.

Register can be conceived from two different perspectives. In the narrow sense of the word,
register refers to the type of language used by a group of professionals who employ certain
linguistic features which are not used, or at least not so commonly, in other settings. This
conception of register is closely related to jargon, and tends to be associated with word choice
rather that syntactic ordering. On the other hand, in a broad sense of the word, register can be
understood as a social genre, a sociolect, that bears upon lexical choice and syntactic ordering,
and could be exemplified in the language of newspaper articles, academic prose or legal
language. Registers can be depicted by means of 3 main dimensions:

a) Field, which related to the social activity performed, the setting and the aim of
interaction.
b) Tenor, which refers to the social roles enacted and the relationship between the
participants.
c) Mode, which refers to the medium of the language in that situation.

1.3. – GENDER:

There is indeed some evidence that marks language as sexist, or rather their users, and that
both sexes do not speak the same way and that cannot only be attributed to stylistic or
individual differences. It should be pointed out that language should not be considered as
inherently sexist but it is used in a sexist way or even that it reflects a sexist world.

Trudgill in a study carried out in Norwich (England) found out that women tended to be more
conservative in terms of language use, as men were reported to show most language change.
He studied phonological and sociological variable and he also discovered that women are
generally more status-conscious than men.

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Traditionally, the term sex has been used to refer to biological and anatomical differences
between men and women, and gender has been used to refer to psychological and socio-
cultural differences between the sexes. This approach, although clear and simple enough to
categorize profound differences between males and females proves to be little simplistic for
sociolinguistic research, as one of the aims of sociolinguistics is to describe the relation
between these two, i.e., sex and gender. Sex is a biological category which constitutes the base
for the differentiation of roles, norms and expectations within a certain speech community,
and these social roles, norms and expectations compose the idea or gender.

Recent studies have shown neurophysical differences in the way males and females process
language. It seems that phonological processing in males relates to the left hemisphere of the
brain whereas it involves both hemispheres in the case of females. However, no evidence has
been shown that such biological differences have an effect on male-female language
processing and speech; any dissimilarity seems to be a result of social factors, educational
factors, or power.

2 – SPEECH ACCOMMODATION:

Speech accommodation consists of the modification of one’s own speech or other

communicative behaviors to the ones used by the person one is interacting with. This way of
adjusting one’s own speech can give way to speech convergence or speech divergence
depending on the intentions of the speakers and the results of the communication encounter.
Doctors, lawyers and therapists can accommodate their speech as part of their job when
communicating with clients, or to show empathy. Adjusting to a given register or style is also a
way of accommodating speech to take advantage of intra-group inclusion.

Speech convergence shows a speaker’s or a group’s need for social integration and/or
identification with another or others.

Research has shown that converging speech accommodation can increase the speaker’s
perceived (a) attractiveness; (b) predictability and supportiveness; (c) level of interpersonal
involvement; (d) intelligibility and comprehensibility; and, (e) the speaker’s ability to gain their
listeners’ compliance.

UNIT 3

1 – PIDGIN AND CREOLIZATION:

Pidginization is a process that sometimes takes place when two languages come into contact
and, as a result, there is a process of simplification or hybridization. Often, the words from one
language are adopted while using the syntactic ordering of the other language, but, as a rule
the grammatical system is simplified as well as other complex linguistic features.

Pidgins have been used for centuries and eventually, some of them, became creoles. The
process of creolization takes place when that language that was originally a functional
language used only for purposeful communication is acquired as a mother tongue by children

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who are exposed to it. The social circumstances in which this language is now used are more
complex as they need to serve all kinds of social needs to communicative purposes and,
therefore, the language expands. In such a situation, the pidgin develops and becomes more
complex both in terms of grammar and phonology and its use then covers all kinds of
communicative functions.

The pidgins involve some kind of simplification, in terms of lexis, grammar and phonological
features, whereas the creoles entail the expansion in all kinds of linguistic features and
communicative functions. This amplification becomes apparent because the language which
originally had limited functions becomes now a system used as a native language that needs to
be used for all types of social functions.

Originally, pidgins served the purpose of a lingua franca, i.e., a language used by people who
speak different mother tongues and who used a common language for a specific functional
situation, such as trade.

2 – SOME INSTANCES OF PIDGINS:

Most pidgins and creoles are based on an European language, and the most common and
widespread ones are based on one of the following languages: English, German, Dutch, French,
Spanish or Italian.

Pidgins are to be found all over the world but, they tend to share a number of general
characteristics. These are some of them:

a) Almost complete lack of inflection in nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives.

b) Nouns are unmarked for number and gender.

c) Verbs lack tense markers.

d) There is no distinction for case in personal pronouns, so I can stand for me, and they
for them.

e) Syntactically, the absence of clausal structures is quite common in pidgins. However,

relative clauses and other types of embedding develop in creolization.

f) In order to avoid possible confusion, as there is often no distinction between long and
short vowels (e.g., ship and sheep would be pronounced in the same way), a common
resource introduced in these languages is ‘reduplication’. For example, in Tok Psisin sip
means ‘ship’ and sipsip means ‘sheep’, as pis means ‘peace’ while pispis has the
meaning of ‘urinate’. Another common usage of reduplication is to intensify the
meaning of a word, for instance, cry means ‘cry’ whereas crycry means ‘cry
continually’, or talk meaning ‘talk’ and talktalk meaning ‘chatter’.

3 – SOME INSTANCES OF CREOLES:

The British Empire spread all over the world for around 350 years and this favoured the
expansion of Standard English and regional varieties overseas, on the one hand, but also the
creation and development of many pidgins and creoles in different parts of the globe, on the

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other. As a matter of fact there have been more English-based creoles than in other languages
such as French, Portuguese or Spanish.

Hawaiian Creole English:

Over 600.000 people in Hawaii speak Hawaiian Creole English (HCE). HCE is mainly in a
complex sociolinguistic situation because, as often happens with pidgins and creoles, it was
denigrated repeatedly in schools and public administrations for years but more and more often
it is turning into a way to express solidarity and forge local identity.

Jamaican Patwa (or Patois):

As a result of not having an official status, a name for the creole language used mainly in
Jamaica has not been fixed to the present day and some terms like Jamaican, Jamaican Creole,
Jamaican Patwa or Patois are all used. Over 90% of the 2’5 million population of Jamaica in the
late 1990’s are descendants of slaves brought from Africa. Nowadays, this language has not
got much social and socioeconomic status in Jamaica and it largely represents the speech of
the peasant and laborer with little education. It is not considered an “acceptable” language for
formal purposes and speakers are often considered as socially and linguistically inferior.

Tok Pisin:

Papua New Guinea has three official languages which turn to be second languages to most
people: Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin and English. Tok Pisin (TP) is used nowadays by three million
people as a unifying language, and lingua franca, among speakers of a number of different
indigenous languages Papua New Guinea. This language, which remains very distant to English,
is sometimes used as a pidgin and sometimes as a Creole and shows clear influences from
English in terms of borrowings, subordination patterns, plural forms, etc. In 1975 Papua New
Guinea was born and TP was recognized in the constitution as one of the national languages.

4 – DECREOLIZATION:

Creoles, as any other living language, continue to evolve. There is a phenomenon called
decreolization that arises when one creole has a prolongued contact with a standard language
in a specific society, and that standard brings a considerable influence to bear on the creole.
So, speakers start to develop the creole taking the standard as a model and a continuum is
created with the standard as a model at the top and the creole as a model at the bottom.

Varieties that are closer to the standard often become the language of the elite and educated
society (acrolect), whereas the variety which is closer to the creole often represents illiterate
people and lower social class (basilect). Between these two poles there can appear a whole
range of varieties or mesolects which determine not only social stratification but also alleged
identities among their speakers.

5 – THE USE OF PIDGINS AND CREOLES IN EDUCATION:

It is rather uncommon to find a pidgin or creole, or other minority dialect, as the language of
instruction in formal education in any educational system in the world, and Valdman considers
that this is for two reasons. On the one hand, the continuum of variation that is usually found

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between the pidgin/creole and the standard educational language represents a strong obstacle
as it is sometimes difficult to isolate a particular norm to be used in education. On the other
hand, the social consideration of the pidgin/creole is in a way hindered by the fact that it is
frequently considered as deviant from the standard and as having an inferior status in the
speech community.

Siegel affirms that speakers of creoles and minority dialects generally do not do well in the
formal education system. In some cases this can be caused by socio-economic factors but on
some other occasions it seems clear that language plays a role. Very often, these speakers are
in a way disadvantaged because the language of formal education is actually a standard variety
that they do not speak as a mother tongue.

Pidgins and creoles are gaining social and political recognition and their acknowledgement as
part of the social identity in many parts of the world is now a fact. In the last decades there has
been a global attempt to legitimize the use of pidgins, creoles and minority dialects in formal
education claiming that the speakers of these languages have a right to express their own
linguistic and sociocultural identity in their own languages. SEIGEL points out that this
enthusiasm for using pidgins, creoles and minority dialects in formal education had to face
some obstacles such as the following:

1. Negative attitudes and ignorance on the part of the teachers who, especially in
immigration settings, may mistake language problems of creole-speaking children for
cognitive problems and eventually lower their expectations of these students.

2. Negative attitudes and self-image of the students themselves because of denigration

of their speech and culture.

3. Repression of self-expression because of the need to use an unfamiliar form of

language.

4. Difficulty in acquiring literacy in a second language or dialect.

Pidgins, creoles and minority dialects have been used in three types of educational programs.
These three types are: the instrumental program that is characterized by the use of the home
variety as the medium of instruction, so it is used as a vehicle for the acquisition of initial
literacy and the learning of other subjects in the curriculum. The standard language is
therefore introduced at a later stage and it gradually becomes the language of instruction for
some subjects. The accommodation program does allow the use of the home language and its
use is not penalized in any way but it is, however, not employed as the language of instruction
for any subject nor it is studied as a language in itself. The awareness program includes in the
curriculum some teaching on basic sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic principles of different
language varieties, and their grammatical rules and pragmatics are compared with those of the
standard variety.

UNIT 4

1 - BILINGUALISM: INTRODUCTION:

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In many places around the world, people use more than one language every day, because of
situational factors as well as their sociolinguistic situation. Bilingualism is not restricted to
some countries or areas traditionally considered bilingual such as Canada or Switzerland, but is
present in every country of the world in one way or the other. So, using one language at home
and another one at work is not very strange in some places. The second language does not
need to have been learned formally; speakers may just have acquired it by constant exposure
to the language, and the shift from one code to the other is often unconscious.

Bilingualism can range from a functional ability to use one language only in certain domains, to
balanced bilingualism which entails an equal and high-level capacity in two or more languages.
In order to portray the different features of bilingualism, some aspects need to be described:

1. It is important to take into account the means of acquisition, and this would depend
on whether each of the languages was acquires as a mother tongue, a second
language or a foreign language. Each of these circumstances radically affects the
degree of attainment and the overall proficiency, depending on the age of the speaker
and the amount of time spent learning and using the language.

2. The skills in each language may vary as it is perfectly possible, to have different
commands of the various skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening
comprehension.

3. There are certain functions that bilinguals generally prefer to perform in one language
than in the other. This may be due to the fact that they have not developed a specific
skill in that language sufficiently or just because it seems more natural for them to do
it in a certain language.

4. The domain often influences language choice in bilingual speakers because the
acquisition or learning was domain-dependent or simply because one language is
preferred in some contexts and it is subjected to the effect of three main factors: a)
location, b) the role relationship among the interlocutors and c) the topics involved in
the conversation.

2 – BILINGUIALISM: DEFINITIONS AND DIMENSIONS:

Broadly speaking the study and depiction of bilingualism can give prominence either to the
social side of this phenomenon, as it stems from a context in which various languages are in
contact; or it can pay closer attention to the individual and psycholinguistic side of the issue, as
the languages involved interact and develop in the brain of the bilingual speaker.

Social bilingualism (or multilingualism) is an area of research dedicated to the study of its
social dimension as a characteristic of bilingual and multilingual societies where more than one
language are commonly used by a speech community or social group. It does not mean that all
speakers have a command over both languages, rather the term just implies that at least some
of the members of that speech community are capable of using the other language, either
productively or receptively.

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Individual bilingualism (or bilinguality) is rather simple to define in terms of the first half of the
term as it refers to the individual part of the phenomenon, that is, an individual has some
knowledge of two or more languages. It is not possible to make a clear separation between
bilingualism as an individual or societal phenomenon.

In the last decades a large amount of research on individual bilingualism has tried to
distinguish different sorts of bilingualism. The classification first introduced by WEINREICH
differentiates between ‘coordinate’, ‘compound’ and ‘sub-coordinate’ bilingualism and was
elaborated by taking as a starting point the way the concepts and meanings are encoded in the
brain. Each of these three divisions stem from the way in which the languages were leared.
Coordinate bilingualism assumes that languages are learned in different conditions and
separate contexts in which would imply that the languages are kept apart in the mind. Under
such circumstances, different contexts give way to different meanings with dissimilar
conceptual systems. Compound bilingualism arises when acquisition takes place in a situation
in which both languages are learned in the same context, and both meanings show a fused
representation or meaning in the brain. This entails that the languages involved are somehow
interdependent. Sub-coordinate bilingualism, derives from the learning of one language first
and the learning of the other later on.

Another dimension in the study of bilingualism is that which distinguished between balanced
bilingualism which refers to an individual who has equivalent competence in both languages
and the dominant bilingualism that applies to someone whose competence in the mother
tongue surpasses his competence in the other language, at least in some domains. Balanced
bilingualism entails a high communicative competence in both languages but not necessarily
monolingual competence in both languages. Balanced bilingualism should be understood in
relative terms as bilingual speakers hardly ever show equal speaking and writing abilities in
their languages, they are rarely equally fluent about all topics in all contexts. Dominant
bilingualism is actually the norm as it is rather difficult for a bilingual speaker to reach
absolutely even competence in two codes.

Another possible dimension to distinguish various types of bilingualism is related to the age of
acquisition, so a useful dimension can be drawn between childhood bilingualism in which the
development of bilingualism takes place at the same time as the child’s cognitive
development, adolescent bilingualism in which the cognitive representation of the world, to
give an example, has already been completed, at least to a certain extent, and there is mainly a
process of re-labeling previous concepts and adult bilingualism, the same as adolescent
bilingualism.

Additive bilingualism occurs when both languages are socially valued. In this case, the
acquisition of the second language does not have adverse effects on the language or languages
already known. Subtractive bilingualism, conversely, results from a sociocultural context
where the mother tongue is detracted and, as a consequence, the child’s cognitive
development may be hindered because the development of the second language interferes
with the development of the first language.

3 – CODE CHIOCE:

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As WARDHAUGH suggests, the term ‘code’ is admittedly loose but very useful to refer to any
kind of system that two or more people use for communication. Terms like dialect, language,
style, standard, register, variety, pidgin and creole are prone to arouse emotions that, in one
way or the other, are affected by their sociopolitical status or individual considerations. In the
case of bilingual or bidialectal speakers, it would be interesting to know, however, the factors
that rule code choice on ever single situation and, eventually, why certain speakers sometimes
shift from one code to another. Language choice can also be considered a way to assert some
kind of ‘right’ or even to resist some kind of ‘power’ in places where two or more languages
coexist and have equal sociopolitical status as in Canada.

The underlying issue is that motivation is a determining component in code-choice and code-
switching as there are numerous factors that affect it: solidarity with the listener, choice of
topic, social distance, contextual and situational appropriacy, register, interlocutor, etc.

The very fact of being proficient in more than one language allows for the possibility of
switching codes at some point. Wardhaugh distinguishes two main types of code-switching:
situational which refers to a language change depending on contextual factors which have
nothing to do with the topic but with the given situation and metaphorical which points to the
topic and the contents of the communicative process as the main reason for language choice.
The alternance of code often encodes personal and social values that add interpersonal
closeness or distance.

Code - switching:

At least three types of code-switching can be perceived. These are described by Romaine as:

a) Tag-switching: for instance the use of exclamations or tags from one language into an
utterance in the other language. This tag-switching might occur because the speaker
lacks the necessary vocabulary in English, or simply because it come up more easily
and spontaneously since tags are subjected to few syntactic restrictions and can be
inserted without interfering with the syntactic organization of the utterance.

b) Intersentential switch: This type of switch is found between sentences and often arises
in sentence boundaries, marked with a short pause and between speaker turns.

c) Intrasentential switch: both codes are mixed within a sentence. This type of code-
switch contains the highest syntactic risk and is typically referred to as code-mixing.

Code - mixing:

Occurs when the interlocutors change from one language to the other in the course of a single
conversation and more precisely when switching back and forth occurs with a clause. It is
important to note that the speakers do not even need to be aware of it and the breaks
between codes are somewhat blurred as they can occur within clauses. Code-mixing highlights
hybridization whereas code-switching stresses the existence of movement from one language
into the other. Code-mixing typically presumes a mastery of the codes being mixed and is very
typical of bilinguals. Code-mixing is also relatively common in the speech of immigrants.

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

4 – CODE – SWITCHING IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN:

In the case of bilingual and multilingual speakers, code choice is not always at will. When two
languages are at the disposal of the bilingual speaker, there are sometimes unintentional
interferences between the two codes. This can be seen very clearly in children receiving a
bilingual education when they mix both languages and transfer words, syntactic constructions
or phonological features from one language into the other.

As DE BOT points out, code-switching and the use of more than one language is the normal
way of expressing oneself in a bilingual context and it is as natural as any other spontaneous
speech coming from monolingual speakers. The analysis of how languages interact and are
used by bilingual speakers can cast some light on the issue of cognitive processing by
bilinguals, namely, the mechanisms of language selection and language separation.

5 – DIGLOSSIA:

A diglossic situation entails the co-existence of two or more codes which are used in the same
setting but under different circumstances, i.e., each of the codes is used with contrasting
functional purposes. These codes or varieties tend to be kept apart in their functions, i.e., the
purposes they are used for. So, given the existence of two varieties, one of them being
considered more prestigious and cultivated than the other, would lead to the differentiation
between a high variety (H) and a low variety (L).

According to Ferguson, the specialization of functions for H and L varieties determines the
appropriateness of either variety for a set of situations with few occasions for overlapping.

In most instances of languages entangled in a diglossic situation, speakers regard H variety as

being more prestigious, more appealing and more appropriate than the L variety, even if their
knowledge of the H is not as comprehensive as their ability in the L, or the L variety embodies
their mother tongue.

6 – DIGLOSSIA AND BILINGUALISM:

Diglossia, as it is stated in most works on the topic by JOHN GUMPERZ, does not only exist in
multilingual societies but also in traditionally called ‘monolingual societies’ where various
dialects, registers or styles are employed.

FISHMAN portrays the relationship between these two complex terms, diglossia and
bilingualism, by means of the following chart:

DIGLOSSIA

+ -

1- Both diglossia 2. Bilingualism without

+ And bilingualism. diglossia.

BILINGUALISM 3. Diglossia without 4- Neither diglossia nor

bilingualism.

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

- Bilingualism.

The first possibility (1) embraces a speech community where both diglossia and bilingualism
occur, both codes are used alternatively from school age and used for different functions and
in different contexts. The second possibility (2), bilingualism without diglossia, relates to the
transitory situations where rapid social changes affect a speech community and, for a relatively
brief period of time, the languages involved lack well-defined separate functions. This situation
probably describes an individual linguistic behavior rather than a social one. The third
possibility (3), diglossia without bilingualism, relates to societies where two or more languages
share a geographic area but they are not inexorably used by speakers living in that area. That
means that there are at least two speech communities that do not share a contact language
and communication is attained by means of, for instance, interpreters. These societies tend to
be formed by two or more speech communities that are united for functional purposes
because of religious, political or economic reasons, although apparent social and cultural
dissimilarities separate them. The fourth possibility (4) is, in Fishman’s words, ‘easier to
hypothesize than to find’ as only very small and set apart societies could shoe neither
bilingualism nor diglossia. It would be the case of speech communities where not
differentiation in registers or varieties is found, which is rather improbable given the social
dimension of language.

7 – MULTILINGUALISM:

Multilingualism refers to the co-existence of more than two languages or sufficiently distant
dialects, no matter how many, within a speech community. Bilingualism is used to refer to a
situation in which two languages coexist whether in an individual speaker or a social group.

Monolingual speech communities are rare these days and, what is more, most countries in the
world are multilingual. In the history of humankind, language has proven to be possibly the
most important factor that determines other aspects of political and social organization in the
world. Around 5.000 living languages are reported to exist nowadays in the world whereas
there are about 200 countries.

8 – LANGUAGE CONTACT:

In places where two or more languages share a common geographic context or simply where
one language stops being used by speakers and a different language is used, a situation of
language in contact is encountered. There are many factors that pay a role in multilingualism
and language contact and a larger number or outcomes from such situation are possible. In
areas close to international borders, for instance, speakers of each of the different languages
often develop a continuum, they speak dialects of their own languages which are close enough
to the other language to permit successful communication.

From a diachronic perspective, a contact situation between languages may result in the loss of
one of the languages, if they are in a power relationship, or in the merging of both, if both
languages are considered to have equal status and social consideration. Without doubt,

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

language contact is the main source of language evolution and language change over time.
Language contact can cause political conflict.

Language conflict can be viewed as natural or artificial language conflicts. Natural language
conflicts have been traditionally caused by political decisions regarding majority or minority
social groups. Artificial language conflicts arise when a compromise is attained and a language
is disfavored. The European Union, for instance, faces the problem of what languages should
be officially spoken within the EU. The 25 member states at the moment speak 22 different
official languages which turns their headquarters in Brussels into a veritable Tower of Babel
and the tasks of translation and interpretation into a daunting enterprise.

UNIT 5

1 – BILINGUAL EDUCATION:

Bilingual education entails the accomplishment of a number of actions and decisions regarding
multidisciplinary perspectives which can be political, economical, social, cultural and
pedagogical. These can be analyzed from different angles. In the first place, bilingual education
involves both a given language policy and a pedagogic realization in a particular classroom
practice. In the second place, bilingual education deals with national or regional matters and
by means of language planning it tries to assimilate minorities, integrate minority groups
and/or spread intercultural understanding. Politics are doubtless always present in bilingual
education as, for instance, in the case of Canada.

It seems that for a (minority) language to survive it is necessary to meet certain conditions
such as the ones put forward by Baker:

a) Languages need to be used at home for interpersonal communication; that way they
become mother tongues of new members in the family.

b) Its presence through formal schooling. This provides the speakers with wider linguistic
tools to interact outside a limited domestic setting and help in the social and
psycholinguistic development of the individual.

c) Its presence in economic circles as this guarantees that speakers will maintain or learn
it for employment purposes.

d) The association of the (minority) language with the culture and the literary tradition of
the speech community. When the (minority) language is socially and culturally valued
and is commonly used in the media and in social interactions, it has more social
functions and, consequently, more chances to spread or simply be maintained.

Bilingual education plays an important role in language maintenance and revival but it is not
the only element. Recently there has been a general tendency to perceive bilingual education
as very advantageous for everyone. This is due partly to the general reawakening of cultural
identities and the subsequent revival of minority languages, and partly to the globalization

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

process that makes new generations aware of the need to have a command of more than one
language.

Baker and Jones display eight particular advantages of bilingual education in modern societies:

1. Bilingual education allows the full development of the languages involved. This fact
enables children to engage in wider communication and have more alternatives in
patterns of communication with different generations, different cultural groups and
different geographical areas.

2. Bilingual education promotes among children deeper insights into the cultures each
language represents. It also avoids the stereotyping of different social and cultural
groups, encourages social and cultural relativism and promotes a multiperspective
viewpoint.

3. Bilingual education often results in biliteracy, i.e., the possibility of reading and writing
in more than one language.

4. It seems that children are favoured with some cognitive benefits when they can speak
two well-developed languages.

5. Bilingual education may raise the children’s self-esteem especially when the language
of home is not the majority language in the society but is studied at school.

6. Canadian immersion studies suggest that curriculum achievement is connected to

bilingual education.

7. The establishing of a secure identity within a particular community, especially in the

case of minority languages.

8. Bilingual education also brings economic advantages as it can secure employment both
in public services and private companies.

Despite the aforesaid strong points of bilingual education it also needs to be taken into
account that recent research has identified some drawbacks such as the following: (a) bilingual
education does not guarantee effective schooling, in spite of the fact that it is often associated
with academic success and, very often, it is the type of education preferred by upper-middle
classes in western societies and it is sometimes associated with an elitist education; (b) the
language register used in formal education does not necessarily correspond with the language
register needed outside the classroom, i.e., the type of academic language used as the means
for teaching often does not correspond with the colloquial register that students in bilingual
program can find outside the classroom, and this may result in some sort of exclusion by
mother tongue speakers; (c) productive skills are sometimes not fully developed if the
language of education is not present beyond the school, and this is precisely one of the most
striking outcomes of Canadian bilingual education programs. Students, under ideal
circumstances, seem to develop a full command of the language as far as receptive skills are
concerned (listening and reading). Productive skills (speaking and writing), however, seem to
develop to a lesser extent, which is not unusual in language learning in other contexts.

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

2 – LANGUAGE POLICY:

Language is rarely a causal factor and language decisions are essentially based on political and
economic reasons. Language planning is actually part of a language policy that a given
government adopts as regards one or more of the languages spoken in the country.

3 – LANGUAGE PLANNING:

Language planning consists of a deliberate and institutionally organized attempt to change the
development of a language variety, or a language itself, or to alter its functions in society.
Sometimes, language planning results from the need of a multilingual country to implement a
language policy regulating the scope and use of the languages and/or language varieties within
its territory. Wardhaugh posits that language planning constitutes a deliberate attempt to
interfere with the natural development of a language or one of its varieties, i.e., it involves
human intervention in the natural process of languages or varieties to change, spread or
erode. Language planning began several centuries ago and various purposes may lie behind
this intentional interference in the natural process of language evolution and change. It must
be sail that these attempts have not always been honorable; while the aim may be to maintain
a language that is about to disappear because of a continual loss of native speakers, on some
occasions the goal is to repress and diminish a cultural or ethnic minority that found in their
common language a sign of identity and a source of self-assertion.

Languages reflect human relationships between individuals and also between social groups
and they change in the course of time as a result of the changes in social relationships. A fully
developed language policy or at least certain ideological trends almost invariably lie behind
language planning. Indeed, Cobarrubias recognized four main types of ideology that typically
prompt the rationale behind decisions regarding language planning:

 Linguistic assimilation considers that anyone forming part of a society, regardless of

their origin, should learn the dominant language of that society.

 Linguistic pluralism implies the acceptance of various languages or varieties, and it can
be centered on individual or geographical criteria, i.e., an individual may be stimulated
to maintain his/her language in the case of a multilingual environment, where his/her
language represents a minority that does not identify with a specific geographical area,
or, more probably, in the case of a multilingual state that adopts various official
languages as they are spoken in different geographical areas.

 Vernacularization entails the reconstruction or renewal of a language that is not used

by a wide group of speakers but after some changes become widespread and adopted
as an official language.

 Internationalism is reached when the motivation in language planning is to adopt a

non-vernacular language for a wider interethnic communication as a political solution
to an internal problem often arising from equally powerful minorities, one of them
aiming at imposing their language as the official language, or the language of
education and trade, for all.

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Some factors affecting language planning:

The following factors significantly determine the development and the incidence of language
planning in a speech community.

a) Socio-demographic factors profoundly affect language planning as the number of

languages that are spoken and the number of speakers may favour the use of one
language or the other.

b) Linguistic factors may also play a role as the degree of development of one language as
well as the existence of a literary tradition may be taken into account when deciding
which language should be promoted or preserved.

c) Socio-psychological factors affect people’s attitude towards one language or the other
and their acceptance in a speech community.

d) Political factors can influence the adoption of a specific alphabet, for example, the case
of the Cyrillic alphabet introduced in middle-central Asia by the Russians, and the
adoption of the Latin alphabet in Turkey.

e) Religious factors are also important. For instance Sudan, as a former colony, had
English as official language but this was changed to Arabic, a language spoken by half
the population, because of the stronger position of Islam in the country. The Bible has
also been translated into many different languages.

Actions in language planning:

There follow 4 starting points that language planners have traditionally adopted in their task of
language planning and which are attempts in themselves to describe the process or steps
rather than the goals;

a) Selection of a norm. Multilingual countries very often need to make important

decisions regarding the language or languages that will become official, or simply the
language for education or any institutional purpose.

b) Codification. Given the circumstance described immediately above, if an indigenous

language is chosen as the standard, it may be necessary to make some changes and
adapt it to meet the requirements of a language for wider communication within
multilingual country.

c) Modernization. Technological and scientific developments probably require

modernization of specific vocabulary and very often a decision needs to be made on
whether to adopt loan words or to coin new terms based on indigenous roots.

d) Implementation. Once a decision has been made, the chosen language needs to be
officially implemented and used in all sorts of official forums: education, parliament,
media, etc.

Aims of language planning:

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

A given language policy with far-reaching or very precise aims affecting a speech community
generally make use of more definite language planning actions to achieve these goals. Nahir
sets forth eleven language planning functions or goals which can in fact be combined to handle
the language-related problems and needs of speech community. His classification, describes
the functions or goals they have sought until now in response to their language-related needs.
Needs and aspirations are likely to change in the course of time.

a) Language purification can be divided into two types: external purification and internal
purification. External purification consists of the development of prescriptions of
usage in order to protect the language from unwanted foreign influence by means,
for example, of a Language Academy. Some of the actions taken are the creation of
prescriptive grammars and dictionaries which contain the normalized use of the
language and following the criteria set out by the Academy. Particularly notorious in
this respect is the control over foreign lexical borrowings. Internal purification refers
to the acceptance of the code as it exists at a certain point in history, protecting it
from undesirable developments which are considered as non-normative (incorrect) or
simply as deviations from the standard. The generation of these normative policies
and their enforcement are tasks actively undertaken by language academies.

b) Language revival consists of an attempt to revitalize a language a language with a

small number of speakers (i.e., Irish and Welsh), or even a completely dead language
(i.e., Hebrew and Cornish), and turn it into a means of communication for a speech
community.

c) Language reform involves the incorporation of specific changes in the language (e.g.,
spelling, grammar, pronunciation, etc.) attempting to facilitate its use. The aim of this
‘reform’ can be to facilitate the use of the language by its users, the
internationalization of the language, or many other factors, but always depending on
political, ideological, religious or economical factors.

d) Language standardization implies an attempt to adopt a language, or variety of

language, as the major language of a region or nation for wider communication with
official, educational, commercial or other functions. Language standardization is seen
in the unification of small political units, the division of others and the recent
independence of former colonial territories.

e) Language spread involves an attempt to increase the number of speakers of a

particular language, normally at the expense of another language or languages. This
motivation for language shift often responds to political considerations in multilingual
countries. Language spread is necessarily connected to language standardization by
definition as the expansion of a language promoted by language planning agencies
endeavors to institutionalize one language for some political or economic reason.

f) Lexical modernization consists of the adaptation of existing vocabulary, or the

creation of a new one, to assist standard languages that may have borrowed foreign
vocabulary too fast to accommodate it to their orthography, pronunciation, etc. Nahir
distinguishes two trends in terminological work (a) as part of either the process of

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

codification or implementation of languages seeking revival (e.g., Hebrew) or reform

(e.g., Turkish) that involves developing previously unwritten languages and aims at
bridging the gap between them and modern knowledge and technology; and, (b) as
part of a process of modernization of standard languages that have borrowed
concepts and terms having a lexicon unprepared for those changes, i.e., the natural
development of the language has not supplied the relevant terminology am dot os
necessary to provide the terms that have come up as a result of social and
technological advance.

g) Terminology unification takes place when it is necessary to establish unified

terminologies, mainly in the technological and scientific domains, in order to diminish
ambiguity. Again this is largely an effect of globalization and cross cultural
communication in the present world.

h) Stylistic simplification is found when a language use needs to be disentangled in order

to reduce communication ambiguity between two groups, for instance, professionals
and bureaucrats on the one hand and ordinary people on the other. Such a situation
may have been caused by the use of an archaic or literary style. Instances of such
stylistically complex language, both in terms of lexical intricacy and grammatical
elaboration, can be found in legal and medical language.

i) Intercultural communication implies the adoption of a LWC with the intention of

facilitating communication between members of different speech communities.
Another way in which interlingual communication can be attained is by improving
mutual intelligibiligty between speakers of cognate languages. This can be
accomplished by partially standardizing the various linguistic codes in order to
minimize differences.

j) Language maintenance consists in the preservation of a group’s native language

when political, social, economic, educational or any other pressures threaten its
further existence by causing a decline in status or in the number of speakers.
Language maintenance can be exercised at two levels: first with the aim of preserving
a widely spoken language from unwanted foreign influence; and, second, as a
protection of a minority ethnic language whose acquisition and use needs to be
encouraged by means of social, educational or political arrangements.

k) Auxiliary-code standardization entails the modification of auxiliary aspects of the

language to lessen ambiguity or to satisfy changing social, political or other recent
needs. Changing place names can serve the functions of terminology unification or
stylistic simplification, but most often they just take place when a given political party
is in power.

It should be taken into account that the language planning goals described above are not
mutually exclusive and two or more phenomena can co-occur. On some occasions the goals
and the procedures can even be contradictory as there may be some tension between, for
example, language purification and lexical modernization.

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Individual language planning:

On some occasions language planning does not need to be an initiative from governments or
prominent institutions but they can also be the venture of individuals.

4 – MINORITY LANGUAGES:

Policy makers in multilingual nations need to make certain important decisions regarding the
status of the languages in contact in a given territory: first, arises the choice of official or
national language, which can be problematic in the case of developing nations composed of
different ethnic groups; second, decisions need to be made regarding instruction in schools,
which will definitely determine not only the general attitude towards a language but also the
point of view of coming generations; and, third, on some occasions there is also a need to
decide on the standardization procedures such as the choice of an alphabet or a given variety,
especially in the case of languages having scripts different to the ones of currently
internationalized languages.

It can have 3 possible outcomes that determine the degree of success or failure of a specific
language policy:

a) Language maintenance, i.e., as a result of a course of action, the survival of a specific

language, endangered or not, may be determined by political decisions.

b) Bilingualism seems to be one of the most desirable outcomes in a prolonged contact

of language groups as it guarantees the survival of the languages and seems to be the
best way for multicultural and/or multiethnic societies to reach a common ground on
linguistic and sociopolitical fields.

c) Language shift seems to be another possible development and it would not entail one
of the more desirable outcomes as it can give way to language loss. However, it is
necessary to understand that language development does not depend solely on
language policy decision making but also on sociocultural forces. More often than not,
the spread of a language in terms of numbers of speakers takes place at the expense
of another or other languages.

5 – LANGUAGE SHIFT IN MINORITY LANGUAGES:

Attitudinal factors also play a role in language maintenance or language shift. Voluntary
individual or small group migration typically results in a quick language shift, whereas large
groups migration often occasions the maintenance of social and linguistic hallmarks. This is the
case, for instance of Swedish in Finland or French in Canada, where a minority ethnic group in
demographic decay uses its language as a sign of cultural and social identity. This is more often
so in minority groups with a strong sense of identity or with close cultural traditions and values
because the use of a different language will slow down their assimilation by the dominant
ethnic group. Besides, as Paulston suggests, maintained group bilingualism is rather unusual
because if there is access to the dominant language, and socioeconomic incentives, speakers
will most likely eventually shift to the dominant language, although this process may take
generations.

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Language shift is not always the outcome of language contact, one of them a minority
language. Languages can also be maintained due to self-imposed or externally imposed
barriers. The former could be caused by ideological or religious constraints that try to preserve
some sort of identity, and the latter could originate, for instance, because of some kind of
geographical isolation. Another possibility is a diglossic situation where two or more languages
are for different functional purposes.

6 – SOME PARTICULAR SOCIOLINGUISTIC SITUATIONS:

India:

This country gained independence in 1947 and the federal government in India established a
language policy. English, would be substituted by Hindi as the official language and, as the
country was divided in states, most of them having their own language. Each regional language
would also gain the status of official language in each state. Nowadays, multilingualism is
encouraged in India and many children learn English and Hindi in the Devanagari script in
school, the official language of the country, apart from their mother tongue, spoken at home,
and the official language of their state.

New Zealand:

Almost all Maoris in New Zealand speak English and a large proportion of the young people are
bilingual. However, many youngsters do not speak Maori anymore. Maori is endangered for
several reasons. First, English is the language of education, second, Maori is spoken more
commonly in rural areas and people prefer to live in cities where English is spoken.

The Canadian Experience:

In 1982, Canada became a constitutionally bilingual country and bilingualism continues to be a

sociopolitical issue in this country today. By means of this recent Constitution, the English
rights in Quebec were protected as much as the French rights outside Quebec. Bilingualism in
the two official languages is mainly found in the population of French origin in the East of the
country such as Montreal, Sherbrooke and Ottawa.

By means of the Constitution Act in 1982, the Canadian central government undertook the task
of protecting the French rights throughout the country, whereas the government in the
province of Quebec took measures against the use of English within the province claiming that
bilingualism in Quebec led to unilingualism in English. Nowadays, the actions undertaken to
restrain the use of English in Quebec have been banned at the same time that some legislation
in Manitoba that denied francophone rights has been modified, but the French-English division
and debate is still present.

French immersion began 30 years ago, in 1965, with an experiment carried out at St. Lambert
School, Montreal, where a group of English speaking parents succeeded in getting the school
district to initiate a bilingual immersion program with their children in kindergarten. The aim of
these programs is for children to reach a level of bilingualism, and eventually of biculturalism,
by secondary school graduation that allows them to function well in French-speaking
community or to access the job market or higher education in French.

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

However, not all programs are equal and three types of immersion can be found as far as the
starting age is concerned, (a) early immersion, which is offered from the earliest years of
schooling (kindergarten, grade 1 or 2) and represents the most frequent sort of immersion; (b)
delayed or intermediate immersion, is offered in later of schooling beginning in grade 4, and
(c) late immersion is offered beginning in grades 6, 7 or later.

Swain and Johnson set forth some core features in prototypical immersion programs. They
indicate that the following characteristics cannot be understood on an all-or-nothing basis but
as part of a continuum. They add that for a bilingual program to be labeled as ‘immersion’, it
should accommodate each of these characteristics as much as possible:

a) The L2 is used as a medium of instruction, in spite of being taught formally and only as
a subject. The underlying methodological rationale is that of the communicative
approach that proposes the increase of comprehensible input.

b) The immersion curriculum is analogous to the one used with students not included in
an immersion program. In this way, it is guaranteed that immersion students get the
same content and the only variable is the use of the L2 as a medium of instruction.

c) The L1 receives obvious support as an essential component of the curriculum,

sometimes as a subject and sometimes as the medium of instruction.

d) ‘Additive bilingualism’ constitutes the chief aim of the program. This principle entails
that at the end of the program students’ L1 proficiency should be comparable to those
who have studied through their L1, i.e., L2 proficiency should not be attained at the
expense of the L1.

e) L2 exposure is by and large restricted to the classroom context, at least in some

immersion programs such as those in Canada, where parents or friends do not use the
language of instruction. Obviously, this constitutes a disadvantage for the students.

f) All students joint the program with similar levels of L2 proficiency. Some degree of
homogeneity is this respect facilitates the adoption of a curriculum and pedagogy that
matches most students’ needs.

g) Teachers are bilingual in the students’ L1 and the L2 medium of instruction.

h) The classroom culture of a prototypical immersion program is that of the local L1

community instead of that of the culture of the L1, i.e., where that language is used as
an L1.

7 – EUROPEAN UNION LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY:

There is a need to convert the rich heritage of diverse languages and cultures in Europe from a
barrier to communication into a source of mutual understanding. A better knowledge of
European modern languages will facilitate communication and interaction among Europeans
and will promote mobility and mutual understanding. In this case, the aim of a particular
language planning and policy is to unify millions of speakers under a political and economical

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

administration and given the amount of different languages it seems necessary to find a
common ground for interaction without losing either cultural or linguistic identity.

This multiplicity of circumstances exhibits the need to develop a common EU language policy
in order to promote interrelation among the different member states and the common
understanding of peoples.

To add controversy to the issue, Trimm mentions that a major problem concerning the subject
of language learning and language planning is the lack of an organic unit to take responsibility
for it. He adds that there is no longitudinal unity as responsibilities change with the transfer of
children from elementary school to high school and the university, and different agencies may
be involved in the setting of curricular guidelines, teaching materials and assessment. Given
the aforesaid circumstances a high degree of variability is to be expected within an
international organization like the EU.

Policy makers, aware of the far-reaching repercussions of a good or bad language policy for the
future of the European common market, have established some guidelines that try to promote
the use of international languages for intercultural communication. They have also undertaken
some actions regarding the maintenance of minority languages. So far, the following
documents have been already elaborated:

a) The European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages.

b) The CE Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.

c) The Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities

within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

d) The Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities.

The EU has reached a strong consensus on the fundamentals for foreign language teaching and
some programs have been developed for the exchange of students and teachers in order to
favor the learning of other EU languages, to aid teacher training, to encourage awareness-
raising, and to promote the cultural exchange among different educational system.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is a document that provides a
practical tool for establishing certain standards at successive stages of learning and evaluating
language knowledge. It aims at providing the basis for setting common standards within the EU
at an international level and provides the basis for the mutual recognition of language
qualifications within the EU, and therefore facilitating educational and occupational mobility.
The framework describes:

a) The competences necessary for communication;

b) The related knowledge and skills;

c) The situations and domains of communication.

8 – THE ROLE OF ENGLISH:

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

English has spread widely all over the world, first because of the influence of the British Empire
and, second due to the preeminence of North American culture in the world. In Europe,
English has advanced as an international language especially after the World War II, leaving
behind other preeminent languages such as French. English is now used by millions of speakers
for numbers of communicative functions across Europe.

English seems to have been adopted as the language of globalization these days. Proficiency in
English is seen as a desirable goal for youngsters and elderly people in all EU countries and in
many parts of the world, to the point of equating inability in the use of English to disability.

9 – THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF LINGUISTIC RIGHTS:

In 1996, a world-wide representation of non-governmental organizations with the support of

the UNESCO approved The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (UDLR) in Barcelona,
Spain. The main aim of this document is to turn the world’s nations’ attention to the problems
arising from a globalized world with greater movements of people, and to preserve everyone’s
right to a language identity. The original document contains 52 articles and some additional
dispositions embracing may aspects of linguistic rights. Below are some of the general
principles that this document tries to establish:

1. The UDLR safeguards the personal rights to adhere to a linguistic identity and to
develop one’s own culture.

2. The UDLR considers that all language communities are equal and therefore merit
official recognition in all kinds of social, political and economic respects (e.g.,
education, law, trade, public administration, etc.).

3. The UDLR is especially concerned about the role that education plays in the
maintenance and spread of a language and accordingly it states that education must
help to maintain and develop the language spoken by the language community. In
addition to this, it encourages “the most extensive possible command of any other
language they may wish to know.”

4. The UDLR claim the right to use proper names and place names in the language
specific to the territory, both orally and in writing.

5. The UDLR supports the right to decide the extent to which a minority language should
be present in the media in a given territory, and to receive a thorough knowledge of its
cultural heritage through it.

6. The UDLR declares the right to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage.

7. The UDLR watches over the right to use the language in all socioeconomic activities
and to have full legal validity.

Brumfit considers that this document is based on the idea of “language communities” and little
account is taken of the language rights of individuals.

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UNIT 6

1 – SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND LANGUAGE TEACHING/ LEARNING:

Language teaching and learning and sociolinguistics have certain common concerns, such as
the role of English in the world, the contexts in which this language is acquired, the way in
which it interacts with other languages, and the norms that determine the use of English.
Communicative Competence shapes the ability to interact successfully in any speech
community. Someone who has acquired the language in a naturalistic context from childhood
also acquires sociolinguistic rules together with linguistic knowledge and other competences.

The learning environment also raises the issue whether sociolinguistic rules can, or should, be
taught in a classroom context or whether this is something the language learner will deal with
in due course when s/he has the chance to interact within a speech community where the
language being learned is spoken as a mother tongue. A second issue raised in this respect is
the motivation and purpose of learning the language, that is, if it is learnt to be used within an
English-speaking speech community or if it is to be learned as a LWC to communicate with
other non-native speakers, for example, English being used among other tongue speakers of
different languages in EU.

The inclusion of sociolinguistic behavior in teaching materials will help the language learner to
develop his/her ability to interact successfully in a foreign speech community and will
gradually integrate both linguistic and sociolinguistic information. We, as native speakers of a
speech community, should not assume that all the linguistic and social resources we make use
of are part of our conscious knowledge and, therefore, we may have intuitions regarding our
speech behavior in a speech community which do not clearly correspond with actual behavior.

Two aspects need to be taken into account: a) whose rules of speaking we want to include in
the teaching materials; and b) to what extent we can generalize them to the point of using
them in second language instruction.

Anyhow, it seems clear that the sociolinguistic information needed in order to be

communicatively competent should come from interaction with native speakers or proficient
speakers of the language.

2 – COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING/ LEARNING:

The concept of communicative competence comprises various types of knowledge and skills
such as linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic. Communicative Competence is needed for
success interaction among members of the same speech community.

Linguistic competences refer to the knowledge of lexical, phonological and syntactical

elements and other dimensions of language that the language learner has learned as part of
the system, such as sociolinguistic rules and pragmatic knowledge. Linguistic competence
comprises the knowledge of vocabulary, pronunciation rules, syntactic patterns and the
cognitive organization and storage of this knowledge in the brain of the language learner.
Linguistic competence will vary from one learner to another depending on various factors such

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as the number of years spent learning the second language, the rate of learning, the age when
contact with the second language started, the learner’s motivation, the learning context, etc.
But language is a social behavior and is more than just a knowledge of the linguistic system.

Sociolinguistic competences are concerned with the social and cultural traditions for the use of
language and the social conventions that rule language use in a specific speech community.
These would comprise norms regarding politeness, norms regarding relations between the
sexes or different classes, social groups or generations, norms regarding different registers,
etc. In the foreign language curriculum, sociolinguistic competences are not always present
and when they are, they are often considered of side importance and something that the
language learner will acquire on his/her own in due time. As a rule the more distant and
different the native culture of the language learner and the target language culture, the more
differences the language learner will find and the harder it will be to notice them.

Pragmatic competences refer to the functional use of linguistic resources such as language
functions and speech acts in interaction. It also concerns itself with the language learner’s
mastery of discourse markers, cohesion and coherence and the recognition of text types, the
presence of irony, parody and politeness among other things.

3 – THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC BEHAVIOUR OF ENGLISH SPEAKERS: RULES OF SPEAKING:

The analysis of sociolinguistic behavior in native English speaking communities can provide
useful insights for the teaching and learning of languages as the description of rules of
speaking can help the teacher and the learner to systematize the process of language learning.
Below are two samples of some rules of speaking regarding address behavior and telephoning
that can certainly be taught in the classroom setting with relative ease, although others like
greetings, partings or refusals could also have been selected.

Address behavior:

Some of the earliest sociolinguistic studies on speech behavior from a cross linguistic
perspective were done on the forms of address, that is, the way people address one another in
different situations. Whenever one person speaks to another there is a whole range of options
that the speaker can use to refer to the addressee and these may vary from one language to
the other depending on the social conventions; the type of relationship among the
interlocutors; and the sociocultural distance between the languages involved.

Forms of address constitute a conspicuous sign of status relationships and different languages
may offer different possibilities and different degrees of formality and social distance. This is,
in fact, a frequent mistake made by language learners as the use of L1 sociopragmatic rules
lead to violations of the interlocutors’ address behavior.

Telephoning:

The way people answer the phone or initiate a telephone conversation varies from language to
language and from culture to culture. These sociolinguistic rules are not generally open to
conscious consideration and very often speakers are just unaware of their existence until their
sociolinguistic expectations are broken and they realize that these rules actually exist.

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4 – SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE USE IN IMMERSION CLASSROOMS:

Bilingual education and immersion programs often respond to social needs and aim at
developing proficiency in the second language for students that will need it for one reason or
the other. The accrual implementation and degree of success of these programs is subjected,
however, to a number of external factors resulting from special sociopolitical situation, a
variation in the teaching resources available, the extent of immersion, the status of the L2
outside the classroom, etc. This means that whatever decisions and actions seem plausible
from a theoretical and formal point of view may not have as good results as expected when
they are put into practice.

One of the problems found through classroom observation is that a diglossic situation can
easily develop in immersion classrooms just as in any speech community, that is, the language
of instruction, or superordinate language, acts as the formal language variety used with the
teacher and used as a language for academic purposes, and the L1 is preferred in informal
speech and social interaction with other classmates and acts as the subordinate language, or
vernacular, preferred for peer interaction in play, competition, arguing, etc. Tarone and Swain
indicate that “[…] immersion classrooms are not only diglossic but become increasingly so in
the upper primary grades.”, and this can be seen by a close observation of the types of L2
input and L2 output within the classroom, the individuals involved in the interaction, and the
purposes of the information exchange. The main difference between this type of diglossic
speech community, and any other occurring outside this context, is that instead of being
stable, these ‘special’ speech communities in classroom immersion change over time due to
aspects such as cognitive, social or personal factors affecting this peculiar speech community,
i.e., they change as they become grownups and their social and cognitive resources become
mature. This situation may be caused by the fact that the L2 language taught by the teachers
and learned by the students normally performs specific functions, such as instructional public
discourse, but it does not serve other interpersonal and trivial purposes which should also be
part of the acquired repertoire.

5 – ANALYSIS OF THE EFL CLASSROOM LANGUAGE:

Classroom language is relatively organized and purposive in contrast to casual conversation in

an ordinary social setting. This can be seen, for instance, in the way turn-taking is organized. In
casual interaction the interlocutors express agreement and disagreement in a number of ways
but they often interrupt each other as part of the communication process and their resources
to show their opinion. In the classroom context, turn-taking is frequently determined by the
types of interlocutors and, if involved, dominated by the teacher who is often more concerned
about how things are said rather that what is being said. Classroom language is in many ways
an unusual form of spoken interaction that often has nothing to do with real or general
English, both in terms of discourse markers and type of interaction and also in terms of
language structure and choice.

Classroom language is also part of an ‘asymmetric encounter’. One of the participants is

accepted as controlling the direction of the dialogue and s/he, therefore, makes use of a
particular language that is known among specialists as teacher talk. Teacher talk constitutes a
variety of language sometimes used by teachers when they are in the process of teaching, i.e.,

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a conventionalized way of speaking in a particular role, in this case the role of the teacher,
which does not differ at the level of linguistic structure but does differ in some other general
features such as higher pitch, more careful intonation and enunciation, shorter sentences,
more frequent repetitions and more questions than usual in colloquial speech. The teacher is
the addressee of most student utterances and this is favoured by the way classes have
traditionally been conceived and, enhanced by the classroom’s physical organization. In
traditional classroom settings there are often asymmetric encounters as the teacher tends to
have ‘the knowledge’ and hold a position of power in relation to students.

The three-part chain of teacher initiation, student response, and teacher evaluation is probably
the most frequent pattern of classroom discourse at all grade levels. The analysis of teacher-
led classroom discourse generally finds examples of this pattern, and anyone hearing it
recognizes it as an instance of classroom talk. So, teachers tend to initiate interaction and
students generally respond to these intuitions. Later, teachers often provide a follow up
response that can be interpreted as a feedback for the students. These three common moves
can be summarized as: (I)nitiation (by teacher); (R)esponse (by the student) and (F)ollow up
(by teacher).

The teacher controls both the development of the topic and who gets or gives a turn to talk.
What is more, s/he does not ask ‘real’ questions because s/he already knows the answers and,
in fact, all that s/he does is to check the student’s answers.

Another important aspect to take into account about this excerpt is that a language classroom
is special in the sense that language is used to talk about language (metalanguage) rather than
other subjects where the language is just a vehicle to talk about contents.

6 – IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING:

The practice that students generally get in spoken interaction may well fit them for their
communication needs and their role in the classroom, but it does nothing, or at least not
enough, to help them with the roles they will need to play in English outside the classroom.

Immersion programs entail content-based instruction and is, in a way, similar to task-based
instruction. Students in these programs are expected to learn a second language through its
use in teaching other subjects but recent research has shown that this sort of restricted
sociolinguistic context limits the possibilities of the learners to interact and they therefore
largely develop receptive skills but their productive skills are limited as the exposure to
abundant comprehensible input is not all they need. Swain has pointed out that forced output
also plays a role in comprehensive language learning.

Attempts should be made to enhance and widen the varieties of input the learner has access
to and, also, and more importantly, to force students’ output. One possible direction to help
break across the authority structure in the classroom is greater use of student-student
interaction, including tasks, and pair and group work.

7 – PRAGMATICS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING:

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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

In recent years, curricula and teaching materials have began to include strong pragmatic
components or to adopt a pragmatic approach as their organizing principle. Many proposals
for instruction in various aspects of pragmatic competence are based on the analysis of native
speaker discourse or on the comparison of interlanguage data, as well as contrasting L1 and L2
data. Intelanguage pragmatics, i.e., the study and use of pragmatics features by language
learners that make use of their interlanguage have not been studied in depth and further
research is needed to investigate how the learning of L2 pragmatics is shaped by instructional
context and activities.

Kasper and Rose put forward that language learners can benefit from positive transfer of
communicative acts that have been found contrast across ethnolinguistically distant speech
communities as it is the case of the speech act set for apologies. This speech act comprises as
its chief semantic formulas an explicit apology, an explanation and the admission or denial of
responsibility. Among its minor strategies are the offer of repair, a promise of forbearance, and
an expression of concern for the hearer, and these strategies are reported to have been found
in a number of languages like English, French, German, Hebrew, Thai and Japanese.

Sometimes the link between the strategy in the L1 and L2 may not be so evident and, what is
more, language learning involves a complex psycholinguistic process and a positive transfer
does not always occur in the way that was expected. There is then a need for description of
pragmalinguistic knowledge and its use in the classroom.

8 – LANGUAGE IN THE LAW:

The interface between sociolinguistics and the law is also known as forensic linguistics and
centers on the study of discourse in legal settings and texts, from the courtroom to police or
lawyer interviews. Language use in legal contexts is not essentially different from any other
communicative situation, although the way language is used in legal settings can have
enormous repercussions for the well being of individuals and communities. The use of
language in legal contexts reflects situational characteristics that shape the form of legal
discourse and in so doing shows specific characteristics like any other language variety.

Early studies in courtroom discourse by W. M. O’Barr and John Conley in the late 1970s
examined the influence of language factors on legal decision-making and found out that
witnesses generally make use of one of two styles: a ‘powerless’ style incorporating a high
frequency of intensifiers (really, great, much more…) and many hedges (kind of, like, in a
way..); or a ‘powerful’ style that lacks the aforementioned features and therefore sounds more
exact and confident.

Another feature of discourse in the courtroom is the clear power imbalance between the
lawyer and the witness given the fact that the former definitely controls the discourse by long-
winded questioning that require minimal response, being coercive and controlling, or simply
not letting the witness tell his/her own story except in the way the s/he wants it to be told. An
example of the way this can be attained is by using Yes-No questions with a tag, which
markedly control the answer in opposition to broad WH questions that pave the way for
personal interpretation. Eades provides a list of some other linguistic strategies that can be
used by lawyers to exercise control over witnesses like:

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a) Interruptions,

b) Reformulation of witness’s descriptions of events or people,

c) Manipulation of lawyer silence, for example, with the use of strategic pauses,

d) Nonrecognition of some witnesses’ need to use silence as part of the answer, which
can be particularly important, for example, for Australian Aboriginal witnesses,

e) Incorporation of damaging presuppositions in questions,

f) Metalinguistic directives given to the witness and,

g) Management of topics in order to convey a particular impression to the jury.

The study of speech behavior in legal language constitutes a clear example of how
sociolinguistics can have another clear application for our lives. Therefore, studies in applied
sociolinguistics regarding legal language have undertaken 3 main areas: (a) the communicative
difficulties that typically occur from the interface between the legal-layperson as a result of the
interaction between lawyers, judges, juries, victims, witnesses, suspects, etc.; (b) the
comprehension of legal texts are in themselves a source of communicative problems because
of the specific jargon that is used as well as the intricacy of the syntax that is generally used;
and (c) as a consequence of globalization, colonization and the migration movements, there is
an emerging demand for studies relating communication problems faced by non-native
speakers witnesses, suspects and defendants in the legal process. This situation requires the
presence of well-trained interpreters that apart from a comprehensive language knowledge,
also need to know the subtleties of pragmatics.

9 – STANDARD ENGLISH AND THE WORLD ENGLISHES:

Standard English is a term that refers to the variety of English used by the social elite who are
part of a socially, economically and politically dominant group in English-speaking countries.
This variety is the one usually preferred in the media and generally taught in schools as it is
considered to be ‘prestigious’. Non-standard English, on the other hand, refers to those
varieties that do not conform to the standard spoken by formally educated native speakers in
term of pronunciation, grammatical structure, idiomatic usage, or choice of words.

The standard of any language is usually associated not only with a socially, culturally and
economically dominating group but also with geographic variation, i.e., in the regions where
institutional and economic power is located or more developed. Defining and delimiting a
standard is not always easy or even possible as different varieties can be considered a standard
in distant countries or regions. So, it is not to say that the RP (Received Pronunciation) which is
generally considered the standard in England is the same as the English standard in Ireland,
Australia or the USA, where there are also a set of features including pronunciation,
grammatical structure, idiomatic usage and choice of words that is characteristic of formally
educated speakers, the language of formal instruction, the institutions and the media. There
has also been a demand for local standards – Indian, South African, Nigerian, Jamaican, etc. –
and whenever these varieties vary from one another and from British and American Standard

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English in the way British and American vary from each other they can be counted as standard
English, whereas varieties with a higher degree of variance are nonstandard.

The dispersal or diaspora, of English over the world can be divided into two phases. The first
diaspora involved the migration of around 25.000 people from England, Scotland and Ireland
to North America, Australia and New Zealand. The varieties of English used nowadays in these
places are not identical with those spoken by the early colonizers but they can be said to share
some general features and these varieties have developed through history incorporating
vocabulary from the indigenous languages they came into contact with. The second diaspora
occurred at different moments during the 18 th and 19th centuries with different results from
the first dispersal. The spread of English in Africa took place differently for the West Africa and
East Africa. English in West Africa is linked to the slave trade and the development of pidgin
and creole languages. Since the 15 th century, British traders traveled to and from the west
coast of Africa but there was no settlement in the areas today comprising Gambia, Sierra
Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon. This situation favoured the use of English as lingua
franca among the hundreds of indigenous languages and the English-speaking traders. Some of
the pidgins and creoles that developed from English contact are now widely used, mostly as a
second language, as it is the case of Krio and Cameroon Pidgin. In East Africa the situation of
English was very different because English colonizers settled there from 1850 on in places like
Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The role of English in these
countries was very obvious and this language was used in the government, education and the
law. In the second half of the 20 th centuries these countries gained independence and English
was kept as an official language in some of them, and as a second language in others. An
English-based creole, Swahili is also used as a lingua franca in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
During the second half of the 18 th C. English was extensively introduced in South Asia (India,
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, etc.) due to British trade interests in the area.
Simultaneously, British influence extended to South-East Asia and the South Pacific due to the
seafaring expeditions of Cook and other expeditions, expanding to Singapore, Malasya, Hong
Kong and the Philippines and the Pacific islands like Papua New Guinea where a new pidgin
was developed, Tok Pisin.

Y. Kachru developed a model of the spread of English that has been most influential in the field
of sociolinguistics. He divides World Englishes into 3 concentric circles: the Inner Circle, the
Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. These 3 areas stand for the types of spread, the
patterns of acquisition, and the position of the English language in the different cultural
contexts as the language has traveled from Britain to the US, Australia and New Zealand in the
first diaspora (the Inner Circle), to countries like Zambia, Pakistan, India, etc, in the second
diaspora (the Outer Circle), and, more recently, to countries where English is learned and used
as a Foreign language, for instance, Spain, Japan, Germany, etc. (the Expanding Circle).

With reference to the status of these languages in relation to the standard, the English spoken
in the Inner Circle would be considered as ‘norm-providing’, i.e., it represents a model and is
used as a native language; the English spoken in the Outer Circle could be considered ‘norm-
developing’, that is, used in countries where the variety if English is in the process of being
accepted (or has been recently adopted), and is spoken as a SL apart from other indigenous

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languages; and, the Expanding Circle would be ‘norm-dependent’ because it is learned as a FL

and the standard is taken as it is.

English spoken in the Inner Circle shows clear patterns of variation both in terms of
geographical and social differences. The outer-circle varieties are normally spoken as part of a
multilingual repertoire that may include a number of other languages spoken in different
circumstances (New Englishes). In the expanding circle, English will not be used for official
purposes such as the language of general formal education, religion, courts and the law,
national politics or administration, literature, etc. but it can be used in international relations,
international organizations, research, education at specialized levels, publicity and business,
among other functions.

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