SOCIOLINGUISTICS
LANGUAGE, STYLE, AND SOCIAL CLASS
BY:
1. EKI FERNANDO (1255 )
2. ELVIYASA GABERIA SIREGAR (12551127)
3. PUTRI LIANA FRANSISKA (1255 )
4. SITI MARDIAH (1255 )
ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM
STATE COLLEGE FOR ISLAMIC STUDIES (STAIN) CURUP
2015
LANGUAGE,
CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CLASS
A. Language
Language is central to social interaction in every
society, regardless of location and time period. Ferdinand de Saussure explain
that language is a system, sign and also sound which is used for a group in a
community with the aim to do interaction or communication as a social human. Language
is not uniform or constant. Rather, it is varied and inconsistent for both the
individual user and within and among groups of speakers who use the same
language. People adjust the way they talk to their social situation. Language
is also arbitrary and conventional. An individual, for instance, will speak
differently to a child than he or she will to their college
professor. This socio-situational variation is
sometimes called register and depends not only on the occasion and relationship
between the participants, but also on the participants’ region, ethnicity,
socioeconomic status, age, and gender. One way that sociolinguists
study language is through dated written records. They
examine both hand-written and printed documents to identify how language and
society have interacted in the past. This is often referred to as historical
sociolinguistics: the study of the relationship between
changes in society and changes
in language over time.
B.
Style
In sociolinguistics, a style is a set of
linguistic variants with specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group
membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. Linguistic variation is at the heart of the concept of linguistic style, without variation
there is no basis for distinguishing social meanings.
William
Labov first introduced the concept of style in the
context of sociolinguistics in the 1960s. With
regard to style, Labov established that speakers’ capacity to change something
about their way of speaking was related to social parameters and to situations
where these parameters mattered. Our linguistic styles are, in other words, bound
up with social trends and with our competent use of those linguistic features
that have come to be valued by the trends. The name traditionally given to this
practice of adapting our speech is ‘style shifting’, and the sociolinguistic
study of style shifting from then on usually involved (1) identifying
phonological and morphosyntactic features (typically a standard and vernacular
form) that are routinely produced differently according to the formality of the
context (or the composition of the speaker’s audience) and (2) quantifying the
extent to which this is done. The extent to which you pay attention to your
speech determines how much you move away from your ordinary or ‘natural’ way of
speaking, and this generally meant moving to a more prestigious or higher
status form. The ‘most natural’, uncorrected speech was then the ‘older’ form,
which differed from the ‘newer’ form, spoken by those who have prestige. This
is how the presence of postvocalic [r] in New York meant high prestige but was
fairly new and on the increase, whereas the absence of it signified low
prestige and symbolised a declining tradition. Thus, in a situation where high
social prestige matters, people will often change to the prestigious form. So
clearly, next to ‘attention paid to speech’, another principle was that
speakers displayed an upwardly mobile tendency, meaning that all speakers
gradually adapt to high social status forms, or that the standard language is
the stylistic target for all speaker: speakers of low social prestige are seen
to have a ‘natural’ way of speaking, but to move from their ‘unstyled’ speech
to a ‘styled’ version of it when they adapt to higher social status conditions.
Consequently, sociolinguists shared an immense methodological concern on how to
reach these older vernacular forms that speakers of lower prestige use in their
‘true’ linguistic habitats, which were considered authentic, uncorrected,
unmonitored, or in short, ‘real’ speech. This was a major concern, since Labov
and others usually noted that such speakers did in fact not produce such
unmonitored or ‘unstyled’ speech when they were being interviewed by
sociolinguists. Interviewees often felt that the research situation itself was
of high social prestige, and they produced the forms they had learnt to produce
in similar high prestige circumstances. One of the procedures was to manipulate
the topics in the interview from casual (talking about childhood customs or
dangerous situations) to formal or careful (reading passages, word lists) and
in this way talk interviewees into producing highly formal as well as ‘normal’
or ‘authentic’ speech. This approach received a fair amount of criticism,
however. It was pointed out, for example, that casual and careful might not be
as easily distinguishable in practice as Labov suggested, since speaking
carefully does not always imply using standard linguistic features – one can
carefully and consciously shift into the vernacular; similarly, speaking in
dialect does not always point to casualness. More or less at the same time,
Labov and other researchers furthermore noticed that speakers did not always
adopt prestigious forms. ‘Why do not all people speak in the way that they
obviously believe they should?’, Hudson quotes Labov asking, since some groups
prefer using their own, less prestigious, variants instead. This suggested the
existence of alternative markets where older linguistic forms retained currency
and survived, or where other stylistic targets prevailed than the standard
language in the attention paid to speech framework. In order to explain this, a
distinction was made between forms that have an ‘overt’ prestige (acknowledged
by everyone as forms with a high status because of the high prestige of their speakers),
and forms with a ‘covert’ prestige in a specific, local nonprestige group.
Consequently, to explain variation one started to appeal to the concept of the
social norm or the group norm that was seen to pressure speakers to adapt their
speech in conformity to their local networks.
Labov’s work primarily attempted to linked linguistic variants as a
function of formality (a proxy for attention to speech) to specific social
groups. In his study of /r/-variation in New York Department stores, he
observed that those with a lower social class are less likely to pronounce
postvocalic [r] in words like fourth and floor, while those with
a higher social class are more likely to pronounce postvocalic [r] in their
less careful speech. However, once forced to pay attention to language, they
style-shift in a way indicative of their social aspirations. That is, those
with a middle social class often alter their pronunciation of /r/ in a way that
is generally indicative of a higher social standing, while those with a lower
or higher social class more or less maintain their original pronunciation
(presumably because they were either happy with their current position in the
social hierarchy or resigned to it).
C. Social Class
Social
class is a central concept in sociolinguistic research, one of the small number
of social variables by which speech communities are stratified. Social class
involves grouping people together and according them status within society
according to the groups they belong to. Trudgill states that “most members of our society have some kind
of idea, intuitive or otherwise, of what social class is,” and most people,
both specialists and laypeople, would probably agree with this. It is ironic,
then, that social class is often defined in an ad hoc way in studies of
linguistic variation and change, and linguists do not frequently take advantage
of the findings of disciplines that make it their business to examine social
class, particularly sociology, to inform their work. Still, social class is
uniformly included as a variable in sociolinguistic studies, and individuals
are placed in a social hierarchy despite the lack of a consensus as to what
concrete, quantifiable independent variables contribute to determining social
class. To add to the irony, not only is social class uniformly included as an
important variable in studies of linguistic variation, but it regularly
produces valuable insights into the nature of linguistic variation and change.
Thus, this variable is universally used and extremely productive, although
linguists can lay little claim to understanding it. Most sociological
definitions include the notion of the “life-chances” of an individual or a
class, as does, for example, Michael
(1962), the basis of Labov's
(1966) study of the Lower East Side of New York
City. Here social class is defined as “an individual's life chances stated in
terms of his relation to the production and acquisition of goods and services.”
Examples Class Structure (social class) in US:
1. Two upper classes ; Upper upper : Old money, Lower upper : New money
2. Three middle classes ;Upper middle : Professional, Middle class : White
collar and entrepreneurs, Working class : Blue collar
3. Two lower classes ; Upper lower : Unskilled laborers, Lower lower :
Socially and economically disadvantaged.
References
Accessed April, 13 2015. Pkl. 10.23
Accessed April, 13 2015.pkl 09.50
Accessed April, 13 2015 pkl 09.53.
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