Sociolinguistics

Dr. Ahmed Al-husami, English Department,

Faculty of Arts, Thamar University.
 Multilingulaism
 Multilingualism: the use of more than two languages, e.g.
Nigeria, India, and Philippines have hundreds of languages.
 Canada, USA.
 How multilingual nations develop? migration, imperialism,
federation
 Triglossia: It is an extension of diglossia where three language
varieties coexist, often with different social roles. For example,
in some Arabic-speaking communities, there may be a local
dialect (L), Modern Standard Arabic (H), and a foreign
language like English/French superposed variety for
international communication.
 Polyglossia: several H and L languages co-exist in a complex
multilingual society, e.g. Singapore L,H, M varieties, e.g.
Mandarin, Tamil and Malay are official languages.
 A pidgin

 A pidgin ( /ˈpɪdʒɪn/), or pidgin language, is a simplified language that

develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do
not have a language in common
 . A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead
learned as a second language. A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or
body language from multiple other languages and cultures. Pidgins usually
have low prestige with respect to other languages.
A Creole

 is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages;

creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as
their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that
are normally missing from pidgins.
 The vocabulary of a creole language consists of cognates from the parent
languages, though there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts.
Language contact and dialect levelling

 Reduction of differences distinguishing regional

dialects or accents.
 The result of mobility, in the 20th century social
changes affected the local dialect diversity which
characterised regions for hundred of years.
 Immigration, urbanization, new towns.
 The outcome of close daily contact: levelling out of
differences
Outcomes of Language contact
 All variation and change can be viewed as the outcome of some form of contact
between different individuals or members of different groups: bilingualism,
bidialectlism, code switching, dialect levelling (e.g. the use of London variants (ay)
PRICE, MOUTH (aw) by young children in Milton Keynes; stops [t] and glottal []
in Reading (close to London) and Hull (far from London, no immigration or contact
with London or south east speakers. The Fens).
 Contact-induced change: pidgins and creoles

 pidgins and creoles are languages that emerge out of the

contact between speakers of more than two different
languages.
 Social conditions associated with the contact
 Limited social contact: speakers may only be in contact in a
reduced set of social interactions, such as trading or work.
Limited access to native speaker’s model of each other’s
languages.
 Lack of motivation to acquire native-speaker like skills in the
other language.
 How they are learnt.
 Pidgin: a contact language that is not nobody’s first language, no native
speakers. Arise in the conditions of trade and labor related contexts.
 Restricted social functions
 A creole a contact language which has native speakers, may be added the
community repertoire resulting in bilingualism.
 A creole serves most of the or all of the functions that any natural
human language must serve; everyday interaction, telling stories,
jokes, games, etc.
 Functional definition of pidgins and creoles
 Any variety used for business or limited to work place may be considered
a pidgin.
 Russenorsk used between Russian and Norwegian sailors in The Bering
Sea during fishing season of the northern summer.
 Francais tiraillou ‘torn French’ used in the military parts of the French
colonies in Africa.
 Once a variety is used a as vehicle for all types of communication, it has
become a creole.
 Once it acquires its native speakers, it becomes a creole (nativization).
 Creolisation: the process by which a pidgin becomes the first language of
group of speakers. Exansion of a pidgin into a wider range of social
functions.
 Vernacularisation: the process by which a contact variety becomes used
with the full range of social functions of the language of the home.
Characteristics of Pidgins
• Ps have structural norms & must be learned
 Pidgins distinct from Input languages by:

 Structural reduction, typically in morphology

 Lack many semantic and grammatical distinctions
 Few stylistic resources (=conventional variation]
 Lexical reduction, derivation from dominant groups
 00

 1. Simplification of superstrate (dominant language)

grammatical structure
2. Retention of substrate (less dominant) grammatical structures
Gulf Pidgin Arabic (Næss, Unn Gyda (2008)

 Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) used as a communication

tool between local citizens and the large Asian
immigrant population in the area for at least 30
years.
 Example Asian immigrants in the Omani border
town of Buraimia developed separate language
variety rather than as a collection of individual
attempts of mastering Gulf Arabic.
 three grammatical features of this variety, possession,
negation and the verbal system. to document
systematic reductions and greater regularity in the
grammar of GPA compared to that of Gulf Arabic, as
well as the development of a light verb system
unparalleled in Arabic, but similar to several of the
main substrate languages of GPA such as Urdu.
 GPA grammar and phonology also display several of
the characteristic features of other well-documented
Arabic-based pidgins and creoles such as Juba Arabic,
Nubi and Turku in Arabic-speaking Afr
Language shift
 Language (dialect) shift: when a community who share a
native language abandon it, and collectively shift to
speaking another one instead.
 Language shift is always preceded by
multilingualism
 What effects does language shift have on the structures of
the languages involved?
 Language shift can happen rapidly or slowly.
 Caribbean Creole languages developed within a
century, even less, from African and European languages.
Most African languages were lost in 1-2 generations
under the catastrophic conditions of slavery
 Accent

 According to the sociolinguist definition, an accent is “a

manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular
individual, location, or nation.” While an accent uniquely
refers to how people pronounce words, a dialect is
defined as “a regional or social variety of a language
distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary.”
 Slang:

 Informal words or phrases that are often used by a

specific group of people. Slang is highly informal and is
often used in colloquial speech. It is a part of a language
that is usually outside of conventional or standard usage
and that may consist of both newly coined words and
phrases and of new or extended meanings attached to
established terms
 Attitude

 Language attitudes refer to an individual's evaluative reactions

or opinions toward languages and the speakers of those
languages. These attitudes can be positive, negative, or neutral,
and they play a crucial role in shaping language use,
communication patterns, and interactions within a society.

 Register

 Registers are sets of language items associated with discrete

occupational or social groups. Surgeons, airline pilots, bank
managers, sales clerks, jazz fans, and employ different
registers. As Ferguson (1994, p. 20) says, ‘People
participating in recurrent communication situations tend to
develop similar vocabularies, similar features of intonation,
and characteristic bits of syntax and phonology that they use
in these situations.’ This kind of variety is a register.
Language and gender

 ‘Gender’ has replaced ‘sex’ in sociolinguistics.

 Sex: biologically or physiologically based distinction between males and
females.
 Gender: a social and cultural notion. It indicates the social identity that
emerges or is constructed through social action, and adherence to certain
cultural norms and proscriptions.
Gender exclusive and gender preferential features

 Gender exclusive features:

 Some linguistic features are used exclusively by (or to) speakers of a particular
sex. e.g. kinship terms
“My Auntie Kath”, grandson, niece, cousin,
 Cultural differences. You in English vs. Arabic
 Such (gender exclusive) linguistic features that directly index sex, or exclusively
used by one sex rather than another are rare.
Gender preferential features

 Some social dialect studies showed that some linguistic

forms are more used by men or the opposite.
 Generalizations made about preferential gender
differences in relation to the use of standard variants.
Principles of Gender and Variation
(Labov 1990,2001)

 Principle I. : In stable sociolinguistic variation, women use the standard more than
men
 Stable variation vs. change in progress
 Examples of sociolinguistic variation
 (ing) variable: [in], [I]
 (dh) variable : fricative or stop [d] ‘this’
 (th) variable: fricative or stop [t] ‘thin’
 Negative concord: ‘didn’t do nothing  anything’
 Explanations for gender differences

 Trudgill: in Western society, men are evaluated more on what they

do, and women on how they appear.
 Eckert: women rely on symbolic resources, eg. Speech, dress, make-
up, to establish their position in their social groups.
 Women are aware of what is proscribed (prohibited) and therefore
avoid it more than men.
 Principle II:
 Women use more of the incoming variant form in changes in progress above
the level of conscious awareness.
 Women lead in the use of incoming non-standard variants if people are not
aware of the variation involved and therefore do not talk about them.
 Example: changes in the vowel system in English, e. g central vowel [] in
‘bus’, is pronounced as ‘boss’.
 Language and social class
 Sociolect (or social dialect): a socially distinct variety.
 Speaker A speaker B
‘I done it yesterday’ ‘I did it yesterday’
‘He ain’t got it ‘ ‘He hasn’t got it’
 Grammatical, phonetic, phonological differences give us clues
about their social background.
 Social class accents
 Why do we have these differences?
 Physical barriers and distance
 Regional dialect boundaries coincide with
geographical barriers, mountains, swamps, rivers, e.g.
‘house’ [hu:s] north of the river Humber vs. [haus]
(diphthong) south of the river.
 Social barriers and distance
 The diffusion of a linguistic feature through a society
may be halted by social factors including social class.
 A linguistic innovation that begins in upper class may
reach the lower class last, if at all.
 Social stratification
 Any hierarchical (ranking) ordering of groups within a society in terms of power,
wealth and status.
 In the industrialized societies of the West, social stratification takes the form of
stratification into social classes and gives rise linguistically to social-class
dialects.
 Social class is a controversial concept, no general agreement as to the exact
nature or definition or existence of social classes.
 Social class stratification is not universal, e.g. India
caste system (hereditary). Rigid separation into
distinct groups, therefore, social distance is more
differentiating than the geographical distance in India.
 Unlike the situation in India, in the class societies of
the English speaking world, the linguistic situation is
more complex.
 Social classes are not clearly defined,
 aggregates of people with similar social and
economic characteristics.
 Social mobility is possible, the movement up or
down the social hierarchy.
 In the beginning linguistic complexity was ignored by
focusing on idiolect, or speakers in rural areas
(dialectologists, dialect surveys).
 It is only after the Second World War, linguistic
realized that confining dialect studies to rural areas,
they missed important information about the majority
of people who live in towns.
 Urban dialectologist faced the problem of describing
fully and accurately the speech of large towns and
cities with heterogeneous populations.
 In 1966 the American linguist William Labov
published The Social Stratification of English in New
York city, a large scale survey, tape-recorded
interviews with 340, by random sample
 Representative sample therefore accurate description
of all the varieties in the area.
 Labov also developed techniques to elicit normal
speech from people in spite of the recorder.
 Developed methods for quantitative measurements of
linguistic data.
 Labov showed that variation is not free in the speech
of New Yorkers, e.g ‘guard’, ‘beard’, and ‘bad’.
 Variation is not random, but determined by extra-
linguistic factors in a predictable way.
 Standard English:
 He’ a man who likes his dog
 He’ a man who likes his dog
 Regional non-standard variation is greater than social
variation.
He’ a man who likes his dog
He’ a man who likes his dog
He’ a man at likes his dog
He’ a man as likes his dog
He’ a man what likes his dog
He’ a man he likes his dog
 Sociolinguistic studies showed how Relative pronunciation, and the intermediate
and the most localized accents are related to social class.
 To measure linguistic and social phenomena.
 Assign individuals a numerical index score on the basis of income, education, other
factors, then group them with others who have similar indexes.
Language and ethnicity
 Ethnic-group differentiation in a mixed community is a particular type of
social differentiation and has linguistic differentiation associated with it.

 Experiment carried out in the USA, tape recordings of two different sets
of speakers.
 Two types:
 Language as a defining characteristic of the ethnic group membership,
common world wide,e.g. multilingual Africa, Canada. People will identify
themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic group on the basis of their
language.
 Separate identity of ethnic groups is signalled by distinct varieties of the
same language,e.g.Jewish, Italians in New York.
Language and social networks

 Linguistic variation can be analyzed in terms of social networks: the

grouping of people based on the frequency and quality of interaction.
 James and Lesley Milroy’s 1985 study of Belfast.
 The relationships individuals contract with others--- through social and
geographical space linking many individuals.
 Social networks are defined by who your friends are, who live near, who
you work with.
 How can you identify a social network?

 Observe who interacts with who in a community

 Note how they are interacting with each other.
 Patterns of interaction constitute individuals’s social
networks.
 Let the people define their own social networks. Ask
‘who are your best friends?’
 ‘Name all the people you had conversation with
yesterday”
 A researcher can build a network from all the
answers.
Language & power/ language & politeness
 The social relationship between the speaker and the
hearer is indicated by his/her linguistic choices.

 (T/V) distinction: the choice between Tu (familiar form)

and vous (the polite form) forms in languages, e.g.
Latin, French, Italian German, Greek, (English once had
thou/you distinction.

 According to Brown and Gilman (1960) it started as a

sing. And plural difference. By medieval times, the upper
classes began to use V with each other to show mutual
respect…
 The asymmetrical T/V usage came to symbolize power relationship.
 Symmetrical V usage became polite usage, spread downward but not to
the lowest classes.
 Symmetrical T usage to show intimiacy or solidarity (strong common
interest).
 This mutual T came to replace the mutual V of politeness because
solidarity is more important in personal relationships.
 Politeness markers
 Politeness is prescribed, rules, norms.
 The concept of politeness is associated with Goffman
(1967) study on face.
 Brown and Levinson (1987) define face as “the public self
image that every member wants to claim for himself”
 They distinguished between Positive face vs. negative
face.
 Positive face the desire to get the approval of others.
 Negative face the desire to be unimpeded by others in
one’s actions. Freedom of actions and freedom form
impositions.
Language transfer

 Language transfer (language interference)

refers to speakers or writers applying
knowledge from their native language to a
second language.
Thank you, your comments and
questions are highly appreciated.

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