mid test of sociolinguistic

Nama                   : widya

Kelas/ nim  : vb/ 1588203076

1.     What is Sociolinguistics?

Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between  language and society  and the way people use language in different social situations. Or sociolinguistics, the study of the sociological aspects of  language . The discipline  concerns itself with the part language plays in maintaining the social roles in a community Sociolinguists attempt to isolate those linguistic features that are used in particular situations and that mark the various social relationships among the participants and the significant elements of the situation. Influences on the choice of sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary items may include such factors as age, sex, education,  occupation,,race and peer-group identification, among others.

2.     Why do we learn Sociolinguistics?

Cause sociolinguistics analyzes the many and diverse ways in which language and society entwine. This vast field of inquiry requires and combines insights from a number of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology. Sociolinguistics examines the interplay of language and society, with language as the starting point. Variation is the key concept, applied to language itself and to its use. The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that language is variable and changing.  As a result, language is not homogeneous — not for the individual user and not within or among groups of speakers who use the same language. By studying written records, sociolinguists also examine how language and society have interacted in the past. For example, they have tabulated the frequency of the singular pronoun thou and its replacement you in dated hand-written or printed documents and correlated changes in frequency with changes in class structure in 16^th  and 17^th  century England. This is historical sociolinguistics: the study of relationship between changes in society and changes in language over a period of time.

3.     What is the relation between language and society?

That we know society need language to communicate. When two people or more than two people communicate with each other in speech, we can call the system of communication that they employ a code. In most cases that code will be something we may want to call a language. We should also note that two speakers who are bilingual. That is, who have acces to two codes, and who for one reason or another shift back and forth between the two languages as they convers, either by code – switching or code-mixing, are actually using a third code, one which draws on those two languages. If there is no language in this world, we can not interaction with the society. Maybe we are talking by using sign language. So it is one of the reasons why language is available relation with society.

4.     Pleaase mention and explain the branches of linguistics!

1. General linguistic generally describes the concepts and categories of a particular language or among all language. It also provides analyzed theory of the language.Descriptive linguistic describes or gives the data to confirm or refute the theory of particular language explained generally.

2. Micro linguistic is narrower view. It is concerned internal view of language itself (structure of language systems) without related to other sciences and without related how to apply it in daily life. Some fields of micro linguistic:

a. Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of sounds of human language

b. Phonology, the study of sounds as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning

c. Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified

d. Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences

e. Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences

f. Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts

g. Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)

h. Applied linguistic is the branch of linguistic that is most concerned with application of the concepts in everyday life, including language-teaching.

3. Macro linguistic is broadest view of language. It is concerned external view of language itself with related to other sciences and how to apply it in daily life. Some fields of micro linguistic:

a. Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.

b. Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.

c. Historical linguistics or Diachronic linguistics, the study of language change.

d. Language geography, the study of the spatial patterns of languages.

e. Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language.

f. Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.

g. Sociolinguistics, the study of social patterns and norms of linguistic variability.

h. Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the area of Speech-Language Pathology.

i. Neurolinguistics, the study of the brain networks that underlie grammar and communication.

j. Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals compared to human language.

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5.     What is standard language? Giving an example!

Standard language is an official form of language. This kind of form of languages are always artificially modified at least to some degree. Standard language is the way to use language in official and formal situation as in newspapers and public speeches. The core idea of standard language is to codify a public, particularly written language so that it is accessible to every speaker of the language to be used in education, media and science.

6.       Elaborating the language, dialect and accent, please!

-         Language is central to social interaction in every society, regardless of location and time period. Language and social interaction have a reciprocal relationship:  language shapes social interactions and social interactions shape language.

-         dialect is a regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, and / or vocabulary. For vocabulary in british: Football, biscuit, shop. And america  Soccer, cookie, store.

-         accent is the way that particular person or group of people sound . It’s the way somebody pronounces words, the musicality of their speech, etc. A dialect describes both a person’s accent and the grammatical features of the way that person talks. For example,  you can see the different between america and british accent. In america " can " and " can't "are similiar to pronunciation  while british it has different to pronunciation.

7.     Giving an example of formal language and informal language?

Formal language   : the research project will not continue  next year

Informal language          : the research project won’t continue  next year

8.     What aspects of language are sociolinguitics interestered in?

Sociolinguists are interested in explaining why people speak differently in different social contexts. And the effect of social factors such as (social distance, social status, age, gender, class) on language varieties (dialects, registers, genres, etc), and they are concerned with identifying the social functions of language and the way they are used to convey social meanings.

9.     When two or more people from different language met and tried to communicate, what should they do?

a.       Pidgin

b.      Creole

c.       Lingua franca

- Pidgin: it is a language which has no native speakers. Pidgins develop as a means of communication between people who don't have a common language.

- Creole: when a pidgin becomes the language of newly-born generations as a mother-tongue or first language, and acquires additional vocabulary and grammatical structures to serve their various necessary communicative needs (referential and social functions) it becomes a Creole.

- Lingua franca: a language used for communication between different language users, for people whose first languages differ, such as pidgin between European colonizers and African slaves (Swahili).

So i think pidginis the best answer .

10.                        Why do people switch and mix a language?

Code switching can be used in a variety of degrees, whether it is used at home with family and friends, or used with superiors at the workplace. as an acceptable form of communication in society, and may feel comfortable switching languages in everyday normal conversation.

Language mixing is the term used to describe the phenomenon of communication though the usage of two languages as if they were one language. From this definition makes it clear that the mixing occurs among children during the time before they differentiate and separate their two languages. The mixing is unconscious and is used by the child without regard of their interlocutor's understanding of both languages The children are simply using words that they have acquired to communicate their needs at the given moment. The term language mixing is also used in reference to adult bilinguals. However, in this reference, the definition is entirely different. When used to explain the speech phenomenon of specific adults, language mixing is a conscious use of a blend of two languages where interlocutors understand both languages.

11.                        Giving an example of code switching and code mixing!

Code mixing                   : This morning I hantar my baby tu dekat babysitter tu lah

Code switching     :

Ibu t : Bu H, kumaha cai tadi wengi? Di abdi mah tabuh sapuluh nembe ngocor, kitu ge alit.

          Ibu H : Sami atuh. Bagaimana ibu T, nih? Kan biasanya air lancar.

In the conversation there are two languages: Sundanese and Indonesian. The language used by mother A to mother H is Sundanese language. The code change occurs when H's mother speaks to mother T in Indonesian. This is possible because T's mother can not speak Sundanese.

regional varition

The study of regional variation is probably the best-known and longest-established form of the study of variety, and most of us have a stereotyped picture of the earnest dialect researcher roaming through the countryside to seek out ancient rustic characters and elicit information about vocabulary and pronunciation. It is usual to make a distinction between the study of dialect (which looks not only at pronunciation but also vocabulary and grammar) and accent (which is purely a matter of pronunciation). We have already met the word ‘accent’ in a completely different use (to refer to distinctive pitch patterns), and this sometimes gives rise to confusions.

Regional variation can arise from many causes. One cause is  invasion or colonisation: parts of Britain, for example, were colonised by Norse and Saxon invaders while other parts remained unconquered, and there are still recognisable differences in English language and pronunciation due to this fact. Historically speaking, we can see that separate varieties were most likely to emerge when there were barriers and frontiers between the areas in which a language was spoken. Countries in which isolated communities have been separated from each other by mountains or sea often have greater differences in pronunciation than countries where there has been free and easy movement among people. We can see something of the sort on a very large scale in the way in which American English moved away from the pronunciation of English in England where it originated, thanks to the barrier of the Atlantic. When the first American “talking” films were shown in Britain in the 1930’s, the distributors had to consider putting subtitles on the films because most members of a British audience had virtually no experience of listening to an American accent. In the present day many people are able to communicate by phone with others who have very different varieties of the language, and can hear many different language accents on radio and TV. Now spoken communication between British and American speakers seems relatively straightforward and misunderstandings are likely to be due to cultural differences rather than linguistic or phonetic ones.

There has been a recent growth of interest in a related area of the study of English pronunciation, sometimes referred to as English as an International Language. Since English is now used by so many people around the world for international communication, it is possible to see pronunciation varieties emerging which are not based primarily on the native-speaker accent of some part of the English-speaking world. Instead, they show English as a global “common property” in which key phonetic and phonological distinctions are retained, but choosing to sound, for example, English or American seems irrelevant.

Social variation

To consider the complex ways in which social factors affect variation would take us into the domain of sociolinguistics and beyond the scope of the present book. But for our purposes we can broadly distinguish between three different kinds of variation. One is related to social class: in some societies (but certainly not in all) people have a pronunciation which identifies them as a member of some social class, or as being at some point on a scale from low to high social class. A good example is “h-dropping”: a well-known study in Bradford showed that speakers were more likely to pronounce the  sound in words like ‘house’, ‘hat’ etc. if they were of higher social class, and more likely to omit it if they were of lower class.

A second type of social factor is speakers’ tendency to use different pronunciations in different social situations. Not everyone does this, and many people who do it are reluctant to admit that they do. Many people can and do speak something like the standard accent in their professional life, but switch to a different accent (either a local regional variety or a lower-class pronunciation) when they are with family and friends.

Finally, there are social divisions in society other than class ones. Many languages show differences between the speech of men and women; different professional groups (for example, teachers or members of the armed forces) often have some distinctive accent or speaking style, and many societies, though with a common language, have strong differences of religion which are reflected in the variety of the language spoken.

Style variation

We are all capable of changing the way we speak when this is necessary for successful communication. Everyone can vary between speaking rapidly or slowly, or between quietly and loudly in a way that is appropriate to the communication situation, (though some people make such adjustments more successfully than others). Phonetic descriptions of languages have tended to be made on the basis of a slow, careful speaking style, and this creates major problems when one comes to study more natural speech and discovers that it does not fit many of the “facts” stated in textbook descriptions.

Teachers, priests and politicians are good examples of people who need to be able to speak in a range of styles: public speaking is something which does not come easily to everyone, and in some cases people even take lessons in how to address a large group of people.

Age and variation

Everyone knows that young people speak differently from older people. It is not likely that this is due to physical causes. We do not know how much of age-based variation is due to individuals changing as they grow older and how much is due to the pronunciation changing from year to year. It is likely that a major factor is the wish of young people to speak in a different way from their parents, and in the present day this is strengthened by broadcasting aimed specially at young people. Some changes happen rapidly, while others emerge only over a very long period. Two changes in English have been specially noticeable since I began to work in phonetics in the mid-1960’s. One is the growth in the use of the glottal stop (for which the phonetic symbol is [] ), either as a replacement for the  phoneme in words like ‘getting’, ‘better’ (so that ‘getting better’ is pronounced [ ]), or in conjunction with  //, //, // or // where the glottal closure precedes the oral closure in words like ‘captive’ [t] , ‘cats’ [], ‘accent’ [], ‘butcher’ []. The other change is the fronting of the // vowel, most noticeably after //. In the early twentieth century, the “Received Pronunciation” version of this vowel was back and rounded in all contexts, but in the speech of younger English people from the South-East this vowel in words like ‘union’ //, ‘human’ //, ‘usual’ //  has become more of a front vowel (nearer to the // vowel), and it now has very little lip-rounding. The word ‘used’ in ‘I used to’ thus sounds almost like the word ‘yeast’.

The pronunciation of a language, then, is liable to constant change, and at any time there are many varieties which are found in different places and situations.