1. Language in Society/Society in
Language.
The main issue according to the title of this text is to analyze in which way
language it is influenced by society and on the other way around. As a general idea
you can think that the text could be very specific and straight away tell you, for
example, the difference between dialect and language, or whether English an
American English are separate languages and so on. However as you continue
reading and looking at the different contexts we can realized that is not as we
thought about it.
Actually, we saw that the text expressed not only how important is the social role,
but also the geographical features of a country and how these characteristics make
changes through language.There is not a policy which defines a language or
dialect, because it is people who decided what counts as a language or dialect. We
saw an example of what happened in Papa New Guinea, even though they
suffered the influence of other language, or found similarities (grammar structure,
pronunciation or vocabulary), they still wanted to keep what belong to them, as a
way to consider themselves distinctive from others. As a result, what people
decided, later it will become part of their history, because language builds people’s
lives. Language helps us to identify ourselves, to become part of a culture, country
or city; consequently, language makes sense of what they are.
Another topic spoken in the text, are the different connotations that just one word
can suffer, which lead us to the different varieties of a language. Someone could
say that are different languages, because they use almost the same structure. The
fact is that varieties are part of a dialect as some could think; only show certain
relationship between one and other. But for speakers are seen as separate
languages, even though these differ from the linguist’s point of view.