Master’s Program- Applied Linguistics
Academic Year: 2012- 2013
Course Title: Sociolinguitics
Instructor: Dr. Mohamed Jabeur
Student: Nada Mrabet
Questions:
1.
What is
the distinction between sociolinguistics and the sociology of language?
2.
What is
meant by sociolinguistics or communicative competence?
3.
To what
extent is sociolinguistics a dissatisfaction with structural linguistics?
Answers:
1) Sociolinguistics-
also called Micro- Sociolinguistics- is, as Hudson (1996, p.4) states,
« the study of language in relation to society ». Therefore, the
focus here is emphasized on the structure of language and the way society with
its different aspects from social classes and culture, to gender and ethnicity,
influences the kind of linguistic structures we use and the way we talk. This
leads us to conclude that Sociolinguistics studies, for example, how social
situations require a change in the way we talk as there is a difference between
‘formal’ and ‘informal’ speeches, ‘discussions’ and ‘arguments’, and ‘requests’
and ‘demands’.
The Sociology of
language- also called Macro- Sociolinguistics- is, as Hudson (1996, p.4)
affirms, « the study of society in relation to language ».
Accordingly, we study the language of a particular community with the aim of
discovering and understanding the use of the social structures and the way the
people of this community use them to communicate properly. This leads us to the
idea that the Sociology of language studies, for example, the way linguistic
structures are formed when different members of a tribe, including the
Chieftain, address each other to identify the different social classes of that
tribe.
2) Sociolinguistics
is considered to be a young discipline as its actual growth started to take
place with William Labov who is often regarded as « the founder of
the discipline of
variationist sociolinguistics ».
Another name for
sociolinguistics is micro-sociolinguistics. This should be borne in mind when
examining the statement of Coulmas (1997, p.2) which states that « micro-
sociolinguistics investigates how social structure influences the way people
talk and how language varieties and patterns of use correlate with social
attributes such as class, sex and age ». This means it is society that
determines how to use language in an appropriate way; how to address certain
people with different social variables (gender, ethnicity, social status,
etc.), and what words and types of intonation and attitudes must be used to express
‘request’, ‘order’ and ‘certainty’.
Let us take an
example that investigates the appropriate usage of the words ‘black’ and
‘nigger’. We all know that the latter is racist; but, only when it is used by
nonblack people. In fact, it is allowed
to be used exclusively by black men. In this case, it is the social variable of
ethnicity that determines which word to be used by which people.
3) Structuralism appeared in the early 20th
century with the Structural linguistics developed first by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand De Saussure, and afterward by the American linguists Leonard
Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky.
De Saussure’s main
interest in language is deviated to the study of grammatical rules rather than
the act of speech itself. In fact, his focus is on the common feature of a
language, which is structure, in place of the variable feature which is speech.
To make such thought more explicit, he uses the terms ‘langue’ and ‘parole’,
about which it was said that “La langue denotes the abstract systematic
principles of a language, without which no meaningful utterance (parole) would
be possible”. This means that ‘langue’ makes the ‘infrastructure’ of language
especially with the fact that De Saussure makes a distinction between language
and speech, as if to say that speech is not really part of language or even
speech is an incorrect and distorted version of language. Likewise, Chomsky’s
competence holds that the most important aspect in the linguistic theory is the
abstract knowledge of grammar rules; a competence that, later on, comes to be contrasted
by Hymes (1972) with his communicative competence.
After modern
linguistics became the focus of attention of many linguists, the latter became
more and more involved as far as to consider De Saussure’s theory of structural
linguistics out-of-date, as it is stated by Jan Koster (1996, p.115-120) that
“Saussure, considered the most important linguist of the century in Europe
until the 1950s, hardly plays a role in current theoretical thinking about
language.” Similarly, Chomsky’s theory of competence was refuted by Hymes
(1972). The latter held that Chomsky’s theory is ‘sterile’, and led to the
final conclusion that the communicative language is much more developed and
effective for language learners than that of Chomsky’s as it includes both knowledge
of grammar rules (Chomsky’s competence) and the ability to apply those rules in
real life usage, i.e in society.
In a nutshell, sociolinguistics
comes with a revolutionary ‘triangular relation’ between communication, society
and language. Each of the previous elements complete each other as language is
studied in context of communication as well as of society. This makes us look
at language not from a mere mental point of view, but also a social one. Here
we refer to an argument developed especially by William Labov (1972a: 8) who states
that we cannot study a “language X” without both referring and studying “the
group who speak X”. Another view supports this argument is the one of J. R.
Firth which affirms that as speech is part of language, the former is so
important in communication that it enables us to identify and classify
different speech communities. And the fact of excluding society in the study of
speech will definitely lead us to finding less developed explanations to the linguistic
structures of language than the ones we would find when studying speech in the
context of society.
References:
B. Leitch, V. Structuralism.
< http://mural.uv.es/madelro/structur.html> [accessed 26/10/2012]
C. Richards, J.
2001. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Koster, J. (1996)
"Saussure meets the brain”, in R. Jonkers, E. Kaan, J. K. Wiegel, eds.,
Language and Cognition 5. Yearbook 1992 of the Research Group for Linguistic
Theory and Knowledge Representation of the University of Groningen, Groningen,
pp. 115-120.
Philips, J. Langue
and Parole. < http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/langue&parole.pdf>
[accessed 26/10/2012]
Trudgil, P. 1983. On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wardhaugh, R.
2006. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Blackwell.
