1. Chapter 7 Language, Culture and Society

2. 7.1. Language and Culture 1)What Is Culture?
In a broad sense, culture means the total way of life of a people including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques, and language that characterizes the life of the human community.

3. In a narrow sense, culture may refer to local or specific practice, beliefs of customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc.

4. 2) Classification of culture
1. Material cultural: concrete, substantial and observable
2. Spiritual culture: theproducts of mind (ideologies, beliefs, values and concepts of time and space, for example), abstract, ambiguous, and hidden

5. 3). Culture Vs. Nature
Nature refers to what is born and grows, while culture refers to what has been grown and brought up with, in other words, what can be nurtured.

6. Language and culture: A dialectical relationship
4) The relationship between language and culture
Language and culture: A dialectical relationship
1. Every language is part of a culture. As such, it cannot but serve and reflect cultural needs.
2. Yet, in another sense, language is not a passive reflector or culture. It reinforces and preserves beliefs and customs and conditions their future course. (胡壮麟等 1988：250)

7. Language and culture: A relationship of “part to whole”
Culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem.

8. 5) Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
It is a hypothesis concerning the relationship between language and thought, proposed by Whorf, under the influence of Sapir, his teacher. According to this hypothesis, the structure of the language people habitually use influences the ways they think and behave. That is to say, different languages offer people different ways of express the world around, they think and speak differently.

9. Evidence
All observers are not led by the same physical environment to same picture of universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. (Whorf 1940)

10. The strong and the weak version
Strong: the language patterns determine people’s thinking and behavior.
Weak: the language patterns influence people’s thinking and behavior. T C L L

11. Summary: 1. Language both expresses and embodies cultural reality.
2. As a product of culture, language helps
perpetuate the culture, and the changes in
language uses reflect the cultural changes in
return.
3. Cultural determinism Vs. linguistic determinism

12. 7.2 Language and Society 7.2.1The Scope of Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the sub-field of linguistics that studies the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live.

13. 1. Relatedness between Language and society
1). While language is principally used to communicate meaning, it is also used to establish and maintain social relationships.

14. 2). Users of the same language in a sense all speak differently
2). Users of the same language in a sense all speak differently. The kind of language each of them chooses to use is in part determined by his social background. And language, in its turn, reveals information about its speaker.

15. 3). To some extent, language, especially the structure of its lexicon, reflects both the physical and the social environments of a society.

16. 4). As a social phenomenon, language is closely related to the structure of the society in which it is used, and the evaluation of a linguistic form is entirely social.

17. 2. Speech Community and Speech Variety
The social group that is singled out for any special study is called the speech community. In sociolinguistics, it refers to the a group of people who do in fact have the opportunity to interact with each other and who share not just a single language with its related varieties, but also attitudes toward linguistic norms.

18. 2) Speech variety, or language variety, refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by a speaker or a group of speakers.

19. Two approaches to sociolinguistic studies
7.2.2
Two approaches to sociolinguistic studies

20. 1. Macro-Scociolinguistics
Macro-sociolinguistics is a bird’s-eye view of the languages used in society. It looks at society as a whole and considers how languaguage functions in it and how it reflects the social differentiations.

21. 2. Micro-Sociolinguistics
Micro-sociolinguistics is a worm’s-eye view of language in use. It looks at society from the point of view of and individual member within it.

22. 7.3 Varieties of language

23. 7.3. 1
Dialectal varieties

24. Regional dialects
A regional dialect is a linguistic variety used by people living in the same geographical region.

25. Sociolect
Sociolect, or social-class dialect, refers to the linguistic variety characteristic of a particular class.

26. Language and gender
The language used by men and women have some special features of their own.

27. Language and age
In many communities the language used by the old generation differs from that used by the younger generation in certain ways.

28. Idiolect
Idiolect is a personal dialect of an individual speaker that combines elements regarding regional, social, gender, and age variations. In other words, an individual speaker’s regional and social background, his/her gender and age jointly determine the way he/she talks. And the language he/she uses, which bears distinctive features of his/her own, is his/her idiolect.

29. Ethnic dialect
An ethnic dialect is a social dialect of a language spoken by a less privileged population that has experience some form of social isolation such as racial discrimination or segregation.

30. 7.3.2
Register

31. What is register?
Register (语域) refers to the type of language which is selected as appropriate to the type of situation.

32. Field of discourse
Field of discourse (话语范围) refers to what is going on, to the area of operation of the language activity. “Why” and “about what”.

33. Tenor of discourse
Tenor of discourse (话语基调) refers to the role of relationship in the situation in question: who the participants in the communication groups are and in what relationship they stand to each other. “To whom”.

34. Mode of discourse
Mode of discourse (话语方式) mainly refers to the means of communication. “How”.

35. 7.3.3
Degree of formality

36. General idea
Language used on different occasions differs in the degree of formality, which is determined by the social variables.

37. 7.4
Standard Dialect

38. Definition
The standard variety is a superimposed, socially prestigious dialect of a language. It is the language by the government and the judiciary system, used by the mass media, and taught in educational institutions, including school settings where the language is taught as a foreign or second language.

39. Features of the standard variety
1. It is based on a selected variety of the language, usually it is the local speech of an area which is considered the nation’s political and commercial center.
2. It is not a dialect a child acquires naturally like his regional dialect, rather it is taught and learnt in schools.
3. It has some special functions and it the language used on any formal occasions.

40. 7.5
Pidgin and Creole

41. Pidgin
Definition: A pidgin is a special language variety that mixes or blends languages and it is used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading.
Features: limited vocabulary and very reduced grammatical structure

42. Creole
Definition: When a pidgin has become the primary language of a speech community, and is acquired by the children of that speech community as their native language, it is said to have become a Creole.
Features: the structure of the original pidgin is expanded, the vocabulary vastly enriched, new syntactic-semantic concepts developed.

43. Bilingualism and diglossia
7.6
Bilingualism and diglossia

44. Bilingualism
Bilingualism refers to the situation where in some speech communities toe languages are used side by side with each having a different role to play, and language switching occurs when the situation changes.
Note Rubin’s 5 major variables to be considered in predicting language use in Paraguay.

45. Diglossia
Digglossia refers to the situation where in some speech communities two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the community, with each having a definite role to play.
Feature: the specialization of function of the two varieties, each variety being the appropriate language for certain situations with very slight overlapping.