Language, Dialect And Register Sociolinguistic Perspective

tT HAS BEEN suggested in earlier papers that associated with the | organization of particular social groups are distinct forms of spoken lanXguage.l Linguistic differences, other than dialect, occur in the normal social environment and status groups may be distinguished by their forms of speech. This diffierence is most marked where the gap between the socioeconomic levels is very great. There have been many studies of children aimed at measuring this diffierence. It is suggested that the measurable interstatus diffierences in language facility result from entirely different modes of speech found within the middle-class and the lower working-class. It is proposed that the two distinct forms of language use arise because the organization of the two social strata is such that diffierent emphases are placed on language potential. Once this emphasis or stress is placed, then the resulting forms of language use progressively orient the speakers to distinct and different types of relationships to objects and persons, irrespective of the level of measured intelligence. The role intelligence plays is to enable the speaker to exploit more successfully the possibilities symbolized by the socially determined forms of language use. There are exceptions to this linguistic determinism which arise under special limiting physiological and psychological conditioIts. It is suggested that the typical, dominant speech mode of the middle-class is one where speech becomes an object of special perceptual activity and a 'theoretical attitude' is developed towards the structural possibilities of sentence organization. This speech mode facilitates the verbal elaboration of subjective intent, sensitivity to the implications of separateness and diffierence, and points to the possibilities inherent in a complex conceptual hierarchy for the organization of experience. It is further suggested that this is not the case for members of the lower working-class. The latter are limited to a form of language use, which, although allowing for a vast range of possibilities, provides a speech form which discourages the speaker from verbally elaborating subjective intent and progressively orients the user to descriptive, rather than abstract, concepts. A study was designed to show that the two speech modes are related to diSerent statlus groups and, more importantly, to show that the orientation of the two linguistic structures is independent of non-verbal intelligence test scores. It was predicted for the working-class group that the langllage scores would be severely depressed in relation to the scores in the higher ranges of a non-verbal measure of intelligence. The design of the study was as follows. Two extreme social groups were

This paper discusses the social dialects of children and parents in the children's short stories in Bobo magazine. Humans often use language variations in the form of social dialects to mark their membership in certain social groups and to express their social identity. This also occurs in the socia

The individual patterns and levels of foreign language proficiency are shaped by a complex system of interrelated factors that influence outcomes. In today’s world, the target language use takes place in entirely different contexts and forms – partly due to digitalization. This study explores the language proficiency patterns of secondary school students, including the language they speak, the types of these languages, their self-reported level of English proficiency, and the number of English language exams taken. It also examines the everyday forms of target language use. The analysis draws on two waves of a national Hungarian survey (Hungarian Youth 2016, N=1548, Hungarian Youth 2020, N=1587), enabling a comparison of data. In the case of the 2020 dataset, two regression models were run to explain, respectively, the level of English proficiency at or above the intermediate level and the possession of English language certificates. The result indicates the dominance of the English language and its increasing prevalence between 2016 and 2020, while the number of spoken languages showed a slight decline. At the same time, a positive change was observed in the level of language proficiency regarding the languages spoken. Proficiency in English at or above the intermediate level is embedded in a broad set of explanatory variables, including parental education, financial situation, and various forms of language use (e.g. watching films or movies). The factors influencing the possession of language certificates differ from those explaining general language proficiency.

This paper reviews recent literature on the linguistic expression of social status, particularly those studies relating forms of language use (social dialectology and style of speaking) to forms of social stratification. To place that literature in cross-cultural perspective, the principal question orienting the review is this: to what extent do the findings of sociolinguistic research on this topic in North America-notably the urban dialectology that has flourished in the past two decades-resemble or contrast with results for the rest of the world, especially the non-Western world? In other words, have studies of sociolinguistic patterns in American cities identified processes that occur in any or all societies exhibiting distinctions of social status, or have they identified processes that pertain only to a society of a certain kind (urban, industrial, class-based, speaking an Indo-European language)? I first summarize the relevant American work, then outline some of the problems in comparing these studies with studies of other settings; then I review some of the major forms of the linguistic expression of social status that have been discussed for the non-Western world: social dialects, language levels, and systems of honorifics. While language levels and honorifics may seem to pertain more to language structure than to language use per se, the relation between structure and use is one of the problems this literature raises.

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Linguistics, anthropology, social sciences and law have treated languages as more or less closed systems. Scholars have been interested in the variation in language and the linguistic behavior of the people that speak particular languages. Some scholars have postulated that all languages are “invented” and questioned the very existence of languages, speech communities and ethnolinguistic groups. This chapter argues that denying the existence of a particular language may also represent denying the identity of members of minority communities, many of which fight for recognition as an independent ethnic and linguistic identity and stresses that in order to understand the processes leading to language attrition and loss of minority linguistic heritage, one has to create theoretical models that join the perspectives of contact linguistics and variation studies with a framework of careful ethnographic study of social identity and status position and critical research into power relations in a context of changing language use.

ABSTRACTTo account for the full range of language use in contemporary multilingual urban contexts, the notion of target language (TL) needs to be reconsidered. In studies of second language acquisition and language variation, taking TL for granted implies that people agree on what constitutes ‘good’ language, or the standard norm. The TL of language learners and users is, however, more heterogeneous than is often assumed. To gain insight into what people are actually targeting in their language development and use, we need to study their perceptions of ambient sociolinguistic variation. In this folk linguistic listener study involving 343 upper secondary school students, a range of data types were analysed: attitude scales, variety labelling, and assessments of speakers’ social and linguistic backgrounds. This article highlights some results pointing to a considerable divergence in the listeners’ perceptions, in particular with regard to speech representing what is here characterised as migration-related social dialects. Several listeners labelled these samples as ‘good’ Swedish, possibly suggesting that they do not simply aim at or even relate to a TL identical with the dominating monolingual norm, but may instead have a less narrow view of the kind of Swedish they consider appropriate for use in more formal situations.

Multilingual teams often include subgroups of members who share a native language different from the team's common language. Linguistic choices by members of these subgroups can have implications for information exchange at the team level. We reported a field study of language use in 3 multilingual teams, each of which consisted of some native English speakers (NS) and some non-native English speakers (NNS) who shared a native language with at least one other team member. We found that NNS often shifted between English and their native language. The way language shift happened differed for formal meetings, informal conversations, and instant messaging. Language variation was often associated with shifts in content, participants, and communication medium. Further analysis indicated that language shift had both benefits and costs for team communication, depending on the context in which it happened. Based on these findings, we outline suggestions for designing multilingual collaboration systems.

«Two languages on the same market : history and change» After a short history of Finnish and Swedish — in their standard and dialectal forms, the author examines the language maintenance and the language shift among the Swedish-speakers, especially in a group of five generations in Vanda, near Helsinki. She is forced to stress that languages are not simple formal systems but socio-symbolic challenges and that the language use of minorities does not follow a strict pattern.

Reviewed by: Second language acquisition by Roumyana Slabakova Tania Ionin Second language acquisition. By Roumyana Slabakova. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xxi, 483. ISBN 9780199687275. $40. Introduction This book is a textbook of second language acquisition (SLA) written within the theoretical framework of the generative approach to SLA research. The intended readers are advanced undergraduate students and graduate students who have some background in linguistics, in particular in syntax and semantics. The text is intended first and foremost for students with a prior background in generative linguistics. While the main linguistic concepts are explained when they are introduced, such explanations are necessarily brief, and students with no prior background in linguistics would find the more technical parts of the text somewhat difficult to follow. However, students or other readers who have a general interest in language and/or language acquisition, but lack a background in generative linguistics, should still be able to follow the main concepts presented in the book. This textbook is quite unique in that, while its focus is on theoretical research on SLA, it explicitly makes the link to potential pedagogical relevance of the research findings. Brief summary The book consists of thirteen chapters, divided into three parts. Each chapter ends with a section of exercises; at the end of the book are a glossary, references, and an index. Part I, ‘Language’, provides a brief overview of the relevant background information that readers need to have in order to fully appreciate the rest of the book. Ch. 1, ‘Language architecture’, lays out the central argument of generative linguistics for the innateness of language and introduces the reader to several famous proposals on the structure of the language faculty. Ch. 1 then addresses the task faced by a second language learner and lays out the logic of the methodology used in generative SLA research. Ch. 2, ‘Language variation’, walks the reader through the history of the generative study of language variation, from principles and parameters through the minimalist program. Like Ch. 1, Ch. 2 ends by considering the implications of the theoretical linguistic research for the learning task of a second language learner. The goal of Ch. 3, ‘The psychological reality of language in use’, is to prepare the reader for later chapters that address second language processing by reviewing the central models and findings of the literature on language processing and psycholinguistics more generally. Part II, ‘Language acquisition’, has the goal of placing the study of SLA into the study of language acquisition as a whole by considering a number of different language-acquisition scenarios. The focus of this part is on the respective contributions of age of acquisition and of input quantity and quality to the task of language acquisition. Ch. 4, ‘The critical period hypothesis’, goes over the history of critical period studies and addresses the debate about the existence of critical or sensitive periods in SLA. This chapter also considers the role of input, bringing together a number of quite distinct phenomena, including variable input, comparisons between heritage speakers and second language learners, and variability among native speakers at different educational levels. Ch. 5, ‘First language acquisition, two first languages’, provides an overview of the process of first language acquisition; most of the chapter is devoted to monolingual first language acquisition, but the last section discusses simultaneous bilinguals, who form a natural link between monolinguals and adult second language learners. In Ch. 6, ‘Child second language, multilingual and heritage language acquisition, language attrition’, a variety of other types of language acquisition scenarios are discussed. Throughout this chapter, and especially in the last section, the focus is, once again, on the relative contributions of age of acquisition and input quantity and quality to the outcome of the language acquisition process. The position taken in this chapter, and [End Page e198] throughout the rest of the book, is that the effects of age can potentially be overridden by rich input, and that universal grammar remains active in SLA by adults. Part III, ‘Second language acquisition’, is the heart of the book. In addition to providing an overview of SLA research in the core areas of linguistics (with the one exception of...

This article discusses the function of language and pragmatic meaning in social media to combat Covid-19. Theoretical references used are ethnopragmatics. Ethnographic studies basically examine language from a cultural aspect. Cultural aspects include knowledge, behavior, and artifacts. Meanwhile, pragmatics is a study of language use on the basis of context. This research uses data sources from Instagram, Facebook, WA, and email. Research data in the form of language use in social media above. Data from Instagram and Facebook are downloaded from the internet, while data from email is collected through the direction of researchers with guidance on the instrument. Data collection techniques are done through reading and taking notes. Concrete data analysis techniques are carried out through data identification, data classification, data interpretation, and reporting in the form of journal articles. The findings of research on language subfunctions include asking, inviting or influencing, being sarcastic, motivating and criticizing, and saying thank you. Meanwhile, the pragmatic meaning used in social media includes indirectly advising, persuading, indirectly reminding, subtly insinuating, inviting, complaining, and give advice.

Reference Resolution in the Wild: On-line Circumscription of Referential Domains in a Natural, Interactive, Problem-solving Task. Sarah Brown-Schmidt (sschmidt@bcs.rochester.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 Ellen Campana (ecampana@bcs.rochester.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 Michael K. Tanenhaus (mtan@bcs.rochester.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 Abstract We examined how naive conversational participants circumscribed referential domains during the production and comprehension of referring expressions by monitoring participants' eye movements during a referential communication task. The results replicated some well- established results, e.g., incremental reference resolution, demonstrating the feasibility of studying real-time language comprehension in interactive conversation. We also observed a high proportion of underspecified referential expressions that were easily understood by addresses because of discourse and pragmatic constraints, including constraints developed as a result of the conversation. Background In characterizing work in language performance, Clark (1992) pointed out that the field has been largely divided into two traditions. One tradition, the language-as-action tradition, emphasizes interactive conversation as the most basic form of language use. According this tradition the principles of language performance and language design cannot be understood without taking into account the interactive collaborative processes that are embedded in conversation. A central tenet in work within this tradition is that utterances can only be understood within a particular context, which includes the time, place and participant's conversation goals. Thus researchers within this tradition have focused primarily in investigations of interactive conversation using natural tasks, typically with real-world referents. A second tradition, the language-as-product tradition, focuses primarily on the processes by which listeners decode (and speakers encode) linguistic utterances. Psycholinguistic work on language comprehension within in this tradition typically examines moment-by-moment processes in real-time language processing using fine- grained reaction time measures. The rationale for using these measures is that comprehension processes are closely time-locked to the linguistic input which, for spoken language, unfolds over time. Until recently, the real-time response measures in the psycholinguist's toolkit required the use of de-contextualized language, typically pre- recorded sentences presented in impoverished contexts. This constraint ruled out real-time investigations of natural, interactive conversation. Moreover, a dominant theoretical perspective within the product tradition was that initial core processes (e.g., lexical access and syntactic processing) were informationally encapsulated from contextual influences (e.g., Fodor, 1983). Recently, the advent of light-weight head-mounted eye- tracking systems has made it possible to investigate real- time comprehension in more natural tasks, such as tasks where participants follow spoken instructions to manipulate objects in a task-relevant visual world (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995). Fixations to task-relevant objects are closely time-locked to the unfolding utterance, providing a continuous real-time measure of comprehension processes at a temporal grain fine enough to track the earliest moments of lexical access, parsing and reference resolution (Tanenhaus, Magnuson, Dahan & Chambers, 2000). A growing body of research employing eye-tracking techniques demonstrates clear effects of contextual constraints. For example, syntactic ambiguity resolution is influenced by referential constraints provided by the visual context, including the number of potential referents and their properties (Tanenhaus et al., 2000). Moreover, some recent work using confederates in constrained tasks suggests that under some circumstances information provided by knowledge of the speaker's perspective and intentions can affect even the earliest moments of comprehension (Hanna, However, a major limitation of previous work is that all of the language used has come from scripted language, ruling out spontaneous collaborative processes that are likely to underlie circumscription of referential domains,

Understanding Dialogue: Language Use and Social Interaction is written by two prominent psychologists of language. It develops an elegant model to account for the cognitive mechanisms of dialogue. The Shared Workspace Framework for Dialogue is capable of explaining how individuals contribute and control their utterances and how they can manage each other’s contributions and cooperate as one system. I believe this book is worth the attention of all linguists interested in language psychology. First, dialogue is the most fundamental form of language use; second, the theory of dialogue proposed in the book represents a major advancement in the psychology of conversation; third, the theory has a wide range of applications. I believe the current review of the book is the most comprehensive summary and assessment of the book to date.

Research on STEAM education has primarily focused on formal education settings such as schools, with more research needed in informal or non-traditional education settings. As children frequently engage with informal and non-traditional education settings, it is important to understand how we can transmit information in these settings to bolster and further the learning process and increase engagement. STEAM fields have been plagued by racial and gender inequities that have led to these groups being marginalized and excluded (Blair et al., 2017; Eaton et al., 2020; Martin, 2018; Martin & Phillips, 2019; Miller et al., 2018; Newall et al., 2018, Sheffield et al., 2017; Starks & Matthaeus, 2018; Stitt & Happel-Parkins, 2019; Todd & Zvoch, 2019; van der Lee & Ellemers, 2015). Adults are a critical part of the learning process in informal settings, and it is critical that we understand the influence they can have (Fernández García et al., 2019; Lipowska et al., 2016; MacPhee & Prendergast, 2019; Martin & Phillips, 2019; Rice & Alfred, 2014; Spears, 2008; Tenenbaum & Leaper, 2002; Tiedemann, 2000). I sought to explore the impact of Color-Blind Racial Attitudes, Gender-Blind Attitudes, and STEM Gender Beliefs on adult language use in informal STEAM education settings given a child’s race and gender. I hypothesized that adults would use more STEAM language with a White boy than they would with a White girl, Black boy, or Black girl. I also hypothesized that adults with greater gender-blind attitudes would use more STEAM language with boys than girls. Additionally, I hypothesized that adults with greater STEM-bias attitudes would use more STEAM language with boys than with girls. Finally, I hypothesized that adults with greater color-blind racial attitudes would use more STEAM language with White children than with Black children. Child gender moderately predicted the use of some aspects of STEAM language. Additionally, adult color-blind racial attitudes moderately predicted some aspects of STEAM language given a child’s race. Primary hypotheses were not supported, although some marginally significant results were found.

Reviewed by: Shifting languages: Interaction and identity in Javanese Indonesia by J. Joseph Errington Erik Schleef Shifting languages: Interaction and identity in Javanese Indonesia. By J. Joseph Errington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 216. Joseph Errington wrote this book with two major audiences in mind: area specialists and anthropological linguists. He contrasts Javanese and Indonesian based on an approach that draws on recent work at the juncture of human geography and critical theory. This approach is both a strength and a weakness of this book. On the one hand, it allows E to consider each language as institutionally and ideologically bound up with distinct strategies of influence or control; on the other hand, this very theoretical concept is always a little detached from the actual data presented and is therefore not always as convincing as the author would like it to be. The book is divided into eleven chapters. After an introduction and discussion of the special situation of Indonesian as an ‘unnative’ language in Ch. 1, Chs. 2–5 give an overview of Javanese and Indonesian [End Page 392] as linguistic grounds in which social changes are manifested. The chapter topics of this first part include a description of rural and urban life in south-central Java; a historical overview of the development of Indonesian; and a discussion of speech styles, social hierarchy, and community. E further discusses the national language in relation to national development and public language and authority. He sketches Javanese and Indonesian relative to shifting landscapes and senses of community, authority, territoriality, and ethnic and national hierarchy: Javanese as ‘a symbol of the prenational exemplary center, and Indonesian as an instrument of the power and ideology of the nation-state’ (34). The result of these shifts is socially motivated language change. Chs. 6–10 deal with the politics and culture of bilingualism in south-central Java. Chapter topics include changes in kinship terms, interactional and referential identities, language contact and language mixing, speech modeling, shifting styles and modeling thoughts, and Javanese-Indonesian codeswitching. E describes talk as social praxis that is structurally shaped in interaction and informed by the shifting senses of the languages’ broader values. A final chapter summarizes the conclusions of the book. This is a useful book. Although its discussion is rather dense and not always easy to follow, examples of spontaneous language or even anecdotal evidence give the reader a good idea of the language situation in south-central Java. The book makes available an excellent discussion of theoretical aspects of institutional and interactional dimensions of language use. E attempts to relate ‘macro’ social forces to ‘micro’ social processes of everyday life including language use; however, his data are not always sufficient to answer the questions he poses or to support the claims he makes when it comes to discussing these links. The kind of data E presents always keeps the reader wondering and craving more information, especially about the informants and their own thoughts and attitudes about language and language use. Nonetheless, each part of the book can stand on its own and is a useful and thought-provoking description and discussion of the dynamics of social and linguistic change. [End Page 393] Erik Schleef University of Michigan Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America