Riassunto personale derivato dallo studio integrato del libro consigliato "An introduction to Sociolinguistics"

Introduction to sociolinguistics: different ways of saying things

Sociolinguists study the relationship between language and society in different social contexts. The language differs depending on certain parameters: the participants, the context, the topic and the function. Who can hear us, who we are addressing, the social relationship, where we are talking, how we are feeling, who we are, where we come from, social experiences, gender, ethnicity, education and occupation, topic, aim (informative, social); we use language to ask or give information, express indignation or annoyance, admiration and respect.

In fact, we can say things in different ways according to these parameters.

Lexical level examples

1) On a lexical level, an example is the name we use to address people (a woman would be called "dear" by her husband, by name by a friend, "Margaret" by the husband in a more serious conversation).

2) Or we can take into consideration two sentences conveying the same meaning: "Refuse should be deposited in the receptacle provided" and "Put your rubbish in the bin, Jilly". Of course, the first uses a passive grammatical structure avoiding any mention of the people involved, while the second uses an imperative form and an address form ("put" and "Jilly"), resulting more direct; "Refuse, deposited and receptacle" are more formal words than "rubbish, put and bin". Both sentences express the same message but they are not interchangeable: if a mother would use the first sentence to her son, it would sound odd, and he would assume she was being sarcastic or humorous.

Dialects and language switching

3) In Northern Norway, there is a village, Hemnesberget, where villagers use two distinct kinds of Norwegian: the local dialect, Ranamal, used within family and friends, and Bokmal, the standard Norwegian, used in school, textbooks, official business, etc. Yet, if one would use Bokmal to buy petrol, it would sound odd. Each has its own pronunciation (for instance, Ranamal has a palatal sound), different morphological features, like the plural form, and certain words differ. Another interesting factor for switching language is the topic: whenever they talk about daily routine in the village, they use Ranamal, but they use Bokmal when they discuss national politics. Sociolinguists name these variations depending on social factors "variety" or "code".

4) Another example is the mountain village Sauris, in Italy: the adults were all trilingual. They spoke a German dialect within the villagers (because the village was part of the Austrian empire), the regional Friulian with people from the surrounding area outside the village, and Italian was the language to talk to those from beyond the region, for reading and writing. Italians from outside the area would not be able to understand German nor even the Friulian.

5) In monolingual communities, the varieties take the form of different styles and dialects. In Malaysia, many people use two varieties of English and two different dialects of Chinese, according to standard or colloquial contexts. People acquire these varieties by extensive exposure, though more formal varieties, especially written varieties, may involve more conscious learning.

Social dimensions

In addition, there are four components influencing the code.

• Solidarity/social distance scale: how well we know someone (e.g., the choice of name for addressing, a dialect or style over another: like in Norway or Italy examples).
• Status scale: the status of the participants (the higher status of a school principal talking to a student with a lower status, the choice of name for addressing).
• Formality scale: degree of formality: it can be determined by social distance and status scale, but can also be separate such as in formal settings (as a law court, influencing language choice regardless of the personal relationships).
• Functional scale: language can convey objective information and be referential (as in weather forecast) or can be affective, expressing how someone is feeling (talking about the weather with the neighbour).

Language choice in multilingual communities

1) A young boy living in Bukavu, an African city in Zaire, which is multicultural and multilingual with more people coming and going for work and business than people who live there permanently, speaking over forty groups of different languages. He uses about three varieties during a normal day:

• Informal She, his tribal language, at home and with family.
• Formal Shi, with family for weddings and funerals.
• (Kingwana) Swahili variety: with younger children and adults in the streets.
• (Zairean) Swahili, lingua franca: learnt at school, used for official use.
• (Indoubil) Swahili variety, slang: within friends and young people, regardless of ethnicity, based on languages used in Bukavu (French, English, Italian).

2) A speaker in New Zealand speaks:

• Tongan: with family, at home.
• Some English: with older sisters when they are talking about school or doing homework.

Domains of language use involve codes used with certain parameters (addressee, setting, and topic):

• Family: parent, home, planning a family party.
• Friendship: friend, beach, how to play beach tennis.
• Religion: priest, church, celebrating the Mass.
• Education: teacher, school, solving a maths problem.
• Employment: employer, workplace, applying for a promotion.

3) In Paraguay, Spanish (the language of colonisers) and Guaranì (the American Indian indigenous language) are used:

• Spanish: in religion, administration, in education with a university lecturer.
• Guaranì: with family, friend, and with a primary school teacher.

Modelling variety or code choice

It is possible to draw models of a community code choice, drawn on domains and the three important social factors (participants, setting and topic). The model simplifies the complexity of especially bilingual and multilingual interaction and it is useful to be clear on which codes are appropriate in certain domains or for newcomers in a community. It is also useful in the case of "leakage" since it can include situations which go beyond the social factors (social distance, status, formality, function): in drawing a model of domains though, we need to consider that certain domains could not be congruent or typical because people select codes which make it easier to discuss a particular topic, regardless of the setting, a process often called "leakage": for instance, at home, people often discuss work or school using the language associated with those domains.

Plus, a model can be altered or implemented, for instance by adding other domains (pub, law court) if we find more information. However, if a model gets too complicated and includes too many specific points (like code switching and mixing), it loses its value and usefulness since it is supposed to capture generalisations. At the same time though, this represents the limitation of these models in describing the complexities of language choice.

Diglossia

Diglossia needs to have certain features:

• Two distinct varieties of the same language are used in a community, a high variety (H) and a low variety (L).
• The two varieties are complementary: they are used for distinct functions.
• No one uses the H variety in everyday conversation.
• Generally, the H form would not occur in everyday conversation, and the L form would seem odd in writing.

Some examples:

• In Eggenwill, Switzerland, people know two varieties of German: the local Swiss German dialect, used in everyday interactions, and the standard German, learnt at school, used in newspaper and novels, but rarely used in speech.
• Arabic-speaking countries use classical Arabic as H and regional colloquial as L.
• Greek has a H and L variety.
• In Europe in the Middle Ages, Latin was the H form and the romance languages were the L forms.

The degree of difference of H and L varies from place to place, for example:

• In the pronunciation: the sounds of Swiss German are quite different from standard German, but Greek H and L are very similar in pronunciation.
• In the grammar: often the H grammar is morphologically more complicated: standard German uses more nouns and tense inflections, and French H and Haitian Creole L as well.
• In lexis: H uses more formal and technical terms, while L has words for everyday objects: in English, we can choose between H words (peruse, affluent) and L equivalent variants (read and rich).

Attitudes to the L variety are varied:

• Generally, the H form would not occur in everyday conversation, and the L form would seem odd in writing: classical Arabic is considered as the language of the Koran, for formal interactions and in writing: trying to buy food in classical Arabic would be like asking for steaks at the butcher's using Shakespearean English.
• In Haiti, French is regarded as H variety while Haitian Creole is used for everyday interactions with friends and at home.
• However, in Switzerland, people use their L variety all the time, even to strangers.

Diglossia with and without bilingualism

Diglossia is a characteristic of speech communities and not of the individuals: individuals may be bilingual, societies may be diglossic. We can have four different situations given by the relation between diglossia and bilingualism:

• Both diglossia and bilingualism: two languages are required to cover the full range of domains.
• Bilingualism without diglossia: in many English-speaking countries, individuals are bilingual (Australia, US, England, and New Zealand) but the two languages are not used in different domains.
• Diglossia without bilingualism: two languages are used for different functions, but by largely different speech communities: colonised countries with social class division where the elite speak one language and the lower class use another (Haiti).
• Neither diglossia nor bilingualism: monolingual groups, especially isolated communities where there is little contact with other linguistic groups (Iceland before the twentieth century, Papua New Guinea).

Plus, we can find additional situations:

• It is possible that, despite the consideration of H variety as a prestige form, people may admire the L variety, as in Paraguay, where people are proud of Guaranì.
• Some people may use H variety at home (instead of L) as in Sauris, where parents use Italian to children to prepare them for school.
• Literature, which is generally written in H, could have a more rich repertoire in L.

In conclusion, though H has generally been standardised and codified in grammar books and dictionaries, L languages are also increasingly being codified and standardised.

Polyglossia

Polyglossia describes a community in which more than two distinct codes or varieties are used for distinct purposes, like in Bukavu. Another interesting example is Singapore, where at H level there are Mandarin (used for TV, newspaper) and formal Singapore English (job, government) both learnt at school, and at L level, Cantonese (at home), Hokkien (at small shops or marketplace) and informal Singapore English (with friends).

Changes in a diglossia situation

In diglossia, it is possible for two varieties to continue to exist side by side (Arabic countries and Haiti) or that one variety may gradually replace the other, like Latin replaced by the romance languages, or English. In fact, England was diglossic after 1066, when the Normans were in control: French was the language of the court, the administration and the high society, while English was the language of the peasants and the streets. English gradually absorbed a huge number of French words (boeuf-beef, mouton-mutton, veau-veal, porc-pork).

Another example is in Greece: Greek Dhimotiki (L) and Katharevousa (H) roles were distinct. With 1967 and the right-wing military government in power, Katharevousa was the only official language; later, Dhimotiki was adopted as the official language by the democratic government. Till in the 80s, Katharevousa was increasingly considered to be antiquated and started to be no longer used in schools and textbooks, and it seems likely that it will disappear.

Code switching or code mixing

1) People sometimes switch code within a domain when there is a change in the situation, such as the arrival of a new person: for example, switching from English to Maori in New Zealand to greet someone who has just arrived, or a Polish family in England, switching from Polish to English when speaking to the local priest.

2) A speaker can also switch the language as a signal of shared ethnicity or to signal solidarity/social distance with the addressee (even with brief phrases and words, despite he is not proficient in that language): for example, "confiscated by custom, da gai" ("da gai" means "probably" in English-Mandarin switch); "Engari (so) we turn to more important matters" (English-Maori switch); French-Alsatian Germanic dialect switching of salespeople in Strasbourg according to the shoppers.

3) Switching can also signal status relation or the formality: switching to H varieties for more formal relationships like doctor-patient or school principal-student (Bokmal in Hemnesberget, Spanish in Paraguay, Zairean Swahili in Bukavu) and to L varieties to minimal social distance relationships like a neighbour or friend (Ranamal in Hemnesberget, Guaranì in Paraguay, Kingwana in Bukavu).

4) Switching for changing the topic: switching can be used at home switching from daily interaction topics to work/school topics (in Hemnesberget from Ranamal to Bokmal).

Code switching: referential code

Bilinguals find it easier to discuss some topics in a code rather than another: for more referential topics, where they need to pay more attention to the content, we could list a few examples:

• The Japanese war brides in America found it easier to use Japanese for topics they associated with Japan such as fish and New Year's Day.
• Chinese students sharing a flat in English-speaking countries tend to use Cantonese with each other but switch to English to discuss their studies, partly because they learned more English vocabulary of certain topics (economic, linguistic, physics and other technical topics) of which they don't know the equivalent words in Cantonese.
• Switching for the quotation of a person, a proverb or a well-known saying in another language, also serving as quotation marks.