The document explores the variations in language usage influenced by sociolinguistic factors such as region, socioeconomic status, and gender. It defines key concepts including speech community, speech variety, standard language, sociolects, regional dialects, and registers, outlining how these variables affect language use and communication. Additionally, it highlights that language variation is a natural phenomenon shaped by various social influences.

1. LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY
Chipalo, A. J
DUCE

2. Introduction
• All languages vary in their usage.
• Actual usage varies from group to group,
place to place and speaker to speaker, in terms
of
– pronunciation of a language,
– the choice of words and
– the meaning of those words, and
– even the use of syntactic constructions

3. • Consider the usage of BrE and AmE
• Phonologically i.e. pronunciation
• Lexically i.e. choice of lexical items
• Syntactically i.e. sentence construction

4. • Consider the use of Kiswahili in the Tanzania
Mainland and Zanzibar
?

5. Basic Concepts
• The branch of linguistics which focus on these
social aspects of language is called
sociolinguistics
• Simply sociolinguistics is the study of language
in social context.
• It studies the social variables that trigger
variation in the language use
• Let’s see several concepts that will be
encountered while studying sociolinguistics

6. • Speech community,
• Speech variety,
• Standard language,
• Sociolect,
• Dialect,
• Register,

7. Speech Community
• A speech community is a group of people who
share a set of norms and expectations
regarding the use of language.
• Norms is this case are referred as standards of
behaviour that are accepted in a particular
society
• Thus a speech community can share standards
like education, economic status, sex, age etc.

8. • A speech community can be as small as a town,
village or even a club or as large as nation or
group of nations.
• It is normally characterised by:
– A particular language or variety of language
– Rules for the appropriate use of their language in
social context.
– Members of speech community can be
distinguished from other comparable groups by
similar sociolinguistic criteria.

9. Speech Variety
• Speech variety is the term used to refer to the
language (or form of language) used by a
certain group of speakers or speech community.
• A speech variety can be distinguished by its
basic lexicon, phonology, syntax and/ or
morphology as being shared by members of the
group

10. • Speech varieties are of four types:
– the standard language,
– social speech varieties (also called social dialects
or sociolects),
– regional speech varieties (or regional dialects) and
– functional speech varieties (or registers) .
– Let’s define these types

11. Standard variety
• Standard variety/ language is a speech variety
that ranks higher than other varieties
• It serves as the language of education & admin
• It is used in the
– Government business
– Communication media
– Educational institutions
• Standard variety is mainly found in written form
hence more fixed and resistant to change than
other varieties in community.

12. Sociolects
• Sociolects are also known as social dialects or
social speech varieties.
• They are speech varieties according to the
socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, age,
occupation etc of the speakers.
• They are mostly arranged along a vertical
dimension corresponding to social status of the
speakers.

13. Regional Dialects
• These are thought of as distributed along a
horizontal dimension, i.e. along regions or
places.
• Regional dialects differ from each other
systematically in terms of lexical or phonological
criteria. Consider the case of BrE and AmE
• They are not usually defined in terms of
morphological or syntactic properties.

14. Registers
• Registers are also known as functional speech
varieties.
• They are speech varieties which are thought of
appropriate to particular speech situations.
• Registers may be characterized in phonological,
syntactic, or lexical terms.
• For example a formal setting may condition a
formal register characterised by appropriate
choice of lexical items and adherence of
grammatical rules.

15. Things to note from speech
varieties
• No two speakers of a language speak exactly
the same way
• Nor does any individual speaker speaks the
same way all the time.
• Variation is a natural part of human language.
• Variation in language is influenced by factors
such as socioeconomic status, education, age,
gender, region, ethnicity etc.

16. Social Differentiation of Language
• Speakers of the same language in a single
geographical area speaks differently.
• This is because speakers may have differences
in terms of education and economic status.
• In a broad view sociolinguistics studies the
relation of language and culture
• It investigates the role of the language in the
organisation of social group & institutions.

17. • Also sociolinguistics examines how attitudes
and perceptions are expressed with language
and how one can determine the behaviour of a
speaker according to how s/he speaks.
• With this social differentiation the following
terms are common: taboo, euphemism, slang,
jargon, argot etc

18. »THE END