lecture 8 Language and Social Culture.pptVIP

Language and Social Culture Can language be isolated from social culture in which it is used? No one would deny the relation of language to social culture. The definition of language often includes a reference to social culture. Sociolinguistics --the subdiscipline of linguistics that studies language in social contexts. --concerned with the social significance of language variation and language use in different speech communities including regional, ethnic and social groups. --focuses on standard and nonstandard varieties of a language, lingua franca混和语, pidgin洋泾浜语 and Creole克利奥尔语, diglossia使用两种语言或方言 and bilingualism能说两种语言. 1: How is language related to society? --the social function of language is embodied in the use of such utterances as “good morning”, “Hi!”. --the kind of language one uses is in part determined by his social background. And in turn, language reveals information about its speaker. --language reflects both the physical and social environments of a society. “snow”, eg. 2: speech community --a social group isolated for any given study is called the speech community. --a speech community is defined as a group of people who form a community and share the same language or a particular variety of language. 3: speech variety --refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by a speaker or group of speakers. Sociolinguists are particularly interested in three types of speech varieties: regional dialects, sociolects and registers. 4: Two approaches to sociolinguistic studies ---macro- sociolinguistics ---micro- sociolinguistics 宏觀社會語言學(macro sociolinguistics)又稱語言社會學(sociology of language)：研究語言的客觀環境及語言與語言之間的互動關係。 微觀社會語言學(micro sociolinguistics)又稱社會語言學(sociolinguistics)：研究語言或方言的變體、語言或方言變體的地域分佈、社會分佈，語言接觸對語言形式的影響。 语言变体 语言比别的东西更能说明我们的归属，它是我们的公众身份和私人身份的最自然的标牌或符号。 ---David Crystal Language Varieties Each language exists in a number of varieties and is in one sense the sum of those varieties. Variety（变体）is a generic term for a particular cohe