Department of English Introduction To Linguistics Level Four Dr. Mohamed Younis

Language, Society and Culture Sociolinguistics The term sociolinguistics is used generally for the study of the relationship between language and society. This is a broad area where linguistics interacts with a number of other academic disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and social psychology. Social dialects Whereas the traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate on the speech of people in rural areas, the study of social dialects has been mainly concerned with speakers in towns and cities.

In the social study of dialect, it is social class that is mainly used to define groups of speakers as having something in common. Two main groups are identified :‘middle class’( those who have more years of education and perform non- manual work, and ‘working class’, those who have fewer years of education and perform manual work of some kind. When linguists refer to ‘working-class speech’, they are talking about a social dialect. The terms ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ are used to further subdivide the groups, mainly on an economic basis, making ‘upper-middle-class speech’ another type of social dialect (or ‘sociolect’).

In the analysis of social dialects certain features of language use are treated. These features are pronunciations, words or structures that are regularly used in one form by working-class speakers and in another form by middle-class speakers. for example, In Edinburgh the word home is regularly pronounced as [he:m], as if rhyming with name, among lower- working-class speakers, and as [ho:m], as if rhyming with foam, among lower-middle-class speakers. It’s a small difference in pronunciation, but it’s an indicator of social status. A more familiar example might be the verb ain’t, as in I ain’t finished yet, which is generally used more often in working-class speech than in middle-class speech.

Education and Occupation Although each of us has an individual way of speaking, a personal dialect or idiolect, we generally tend to sound like others with whom we share similar educational backgrounds and/or occupations. As adults, the outcome of our time in the educational system is usually reflected in our occupation and socio-economic status. The way bank executives, as opposed to window cleaners, talk to each other usually provides linguistic evidence for the significance of these social variables.

Diglossia It is linguistic situation involving two distinct varieties of a language which exists in some countries. In diglossia, there is a ‘low’ variety, acquired locally and used for everyday affairs/ daily life situations, and a ‘high’ or special variety, learned in school and used for important matters. A type of diglossia exists in Arabic speaking countries where the high variety (Classical Arabic/ Standard Arabic) is used in formal matters such as education field, in serious political events and in religious discussions. The low variety is the local version of the language, such as Saudi Arabic/ Sudanese or Syrian Arabic.

Language and Culture The type of sociolinguistic variation described above is sometimes attributed to cultural differences. This approach to the study of language originates in the work of anthropologists who have used language as a source of information in the general study of ‘culture’. The term culture to refer to all the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things and people that we learn when we become members of social groups. It can be defined as ‘socially acquired knowledge’. This is the kind of knowledge that, like our first language, we initially acquire without conscious awareness. We develop awareness of our knowledge, and hence of our culture, only after having developed language.

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