Language and Society

So far the course has treated "English" or "Hungarian" as if each were one fixed thing. In reality nobody speaks a language in general. Everyone speaks a particular variety, in a particular place, to particular people, and the choices they make say something about who they are. Sociolinguistics studies how language varies with its speakers and with the situation. This chapter is a survey; the follow-up course Sociolinguistics goes much deeper.

Accent, Dialect and Language

The three terms are often mixed up, so it helps to separate them:

Everyone has an accent and a dialect, including speakers of the prestigious "standard". There is no accentless English, only accents that happen to carry high status.

Where Does a Dialect End and a Language Begin?

The usual test is mutual intelligibility: if speakers can understand each other, the varieties are dialects of one language. But the test fails constantly. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish speakers understand each other fairly well, yet these are counted as three languages. The Chinese "dialects" Mandarin and Cantonese cannot be understood by each other's speakers, yet are called dialects of one language. The reason is that the decision is political and cultural, not linguistic. A well-known saying (often credited to the linguist Max Weinreich) puts it neatly: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

Scots and English

Scotland shows the problem at home. Scots developed from the Northumbrian form of Old English and has its own vocabulary, grammar and literature. It is officially recognised as a language by the UK Government, yet many of its speakers think of it as "slang" or "bad English". Most Scots people speak Scottish Standard English, with Scots words mixed in, and move along a scale between the two depending on the situation:

Scottish Gaelic is a different matter: it is a Celtic language, unrelated to Scots or English (the families from Chapter 8), and is still spoken by a minority in the Highlands and Islands.

Standard Languages

A standard language is one variety that has been chosen, written down, taught in schools and used in government and the press. It is not better or more logical: in England the standard was based on the speech of London and the court, so the choice reflected power. A standard has value because it lets strangers read each other and gives a common written form, but it also creates a hierarchy in which other dialects are judged "incorrect". Linguists describe, they do not rank (Chapter 1). Hungarian, German and French also have standards that were selected from among regional dialects, and Esperanto's standard was designed deliberately.

Register and Style

The same person speaks differently in different situations. Register is variation by setting, topic and relationship: how you write to a bank, talk to a friend or give a lecture.

Register links back to politeness in Chapter 7: in German, Hungarian or Japanese the choice of formal or informal forms is part of the register system, and getting it wrong is noticed.

Language Varies With Social Groups

In the 1960s William Labov studied the pronunciation of r after vowels (as in fourth floor) in New York department stores, assuming that the more prestigious the store, the more often staff would pronounce the r. They did, and the same speakers pronounced it more carefully when asked to repeat the phrase. Such a feature that varies with social group and style is a linguistic variable. The English -ing ending pronounced as -in' (walkin') is another: all speakers use both, but how often depends on class, setting and speaker. The point is that variation is regular and patterned, not random or careless.

Prestige and Attitudes

Listeners judge speakers by their speech, often unfairly and before they hear the content. Overt prestige attaches to the standard variety: it is the form people say is "correct". Covert prestige attaches to local non-standard speech: people use it to show solidarity and belonging, which is why dialects survive even when everyone agrees that the standard is "better". Attitudes are about people, not linguistics: no variety is more expressive or more logical than another.

More Than One Language

Most of the world's people speak more than one language, so a single-language country is closer to the exception. Multilingual societies show several patterns:

Code-switching is not confusion or poor knowledge of either language. It follows rules: speakers switch at grammatical points, for effect, for quoting, or to signal identity. Doing it well needs a good command of both languages.

Endangered Languages

Linguists estimate that thousands of the world's roughly seven thousand languages are endangered, often because children stop learning them. Each language holds a community's knowledge, history and way of describing the world (the question raised in Chapter 6), so its loss is a loss for everyone. Revival work, such as Welsh's recovery and Gaelic medium schools in Scotland, shows that decline can be slowed.

Hands-On Exercises