Social Class or speech community

University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in …, 2007

Applied linguistics review, 2010

This paper attempts to make the case for resuscitating social class as an issue in applied and sociolinguistics in Britain. Certainly, there is a great deal of contemporary work on discourse, culture, power and social inequality, but this generally focuses on gender, ethnicity and generation much more than class. And yes, in ordinary everyday activity, "transportable" identities like class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age are all blurred and interwoven with a considerable range of institutional and interactional identities (Zimmerman 1998), so that it is very much an analytic act separating class out from everything else. Even so, many many peopleand not just academicsengage in this kind of analytic differentiation, and separating out "class" has distinct implications. So for example, when migrant ethnicities are discussed in education, students" practices-&-dispositions are generally treated independently of the inherently stratifying processes of schooling, and there is talk of eradicating inequality by closing the gap between school and ethnic culture, either making schools more hospitable, or tuning home cultures more to education. Class analyses are potentially more pessimistic. Social and cultural identities are defined inside mainstream processes of stratification, not outside, and instead of being overcome by cultural bridge-building, inequality and discrimination are treated as central to schooling itself.

LangLit, 2016

It is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society, particularly how language operates within and creates social structures. Studies in sociolinguistic explore the commonplace observations that everyone does not speak a language in the same way, that we alter our speech to accommodate our audience and that we recognize members and non-members of our communities via speech. Many sociolinguists have disagreed arguing that a sociolinguistics is scarcely worthwhile and that meaningful insight into language can be gained only if such matters as use and variation are included as part of the data which must be explained in a comprehensive theory of language; such a theory of language must have something to say about the uses of language. Sociolinguistics is a developing branch of linguistics and sociology which examines the individual and social variation of language (Spolsky,2010). It is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society, particularly how language operates within and creates social structures. Sociolinguists differ from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the sociology of language focuses on language"s effect on the society (Bell, 1976) Studies in sociolinguistic explore the commonplace observations that everyone does not speak a language in the same way, that we alter our speech to accommodate our audience and that we recognize members and non-members of our communities via speech. Just as regional variation of language can give a lot of information about the place the speaker is from, social variation tells about the roles performed by a given speaker within one community. (Spolsky,2010) SOCIOLINGUISTICS: DEFINING THE CONCEPT There are numerous definitions of sociolinguistics. However, each of these definitions does not fail to acknowledge that sociolinguistics has to do with language use and a society"s response to it. Let us examine some of them. 1. The study of the link between language and society, of language variation and of attitudes about language (Spolsky 2010)

Language, 1994

Chapter One: What do sociolinguists study? -Sociolinguistics: a term that refers to the study of the relationship between language and society, and how language is used in multilingual speech communities. Sociolinguists are interested in explaining why people speak differently in different social contexts. And the effect of social factors such as (social distance, social status, age, gender, class) on language varieties (dialects, registers, genres, etc), and they are concerned with identifying the social functions of language and the way they are used to convey social meanings. A variety is a set of linguistic forms used under specific social circumstances, with a distinctive social distribution. * Formality increases between participants (speaker and hearer) when the social distance is greater. Informality (Solidarity) increases when the social distance is little between participants (speaker and hearer). * Social status depends on a number of factors such as social rank, wealth, age, gender and so on; therefore the person with the higher social status has the choice of using formality or informality (solidarity) when addressing other persons of lower social status. But the person with the lower social status uses only formality when addressing a person of higher social status.

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics

Social class is a curious construct. In the discipline where it has traditionally been most at home, sociology, there has been a constant flow of commentary on its demise and, indeed, its death over the years. In applied linguistics, the situation is somewhat different in that there has been a degree of social class denial, but more importantly, there has been social class erasure in that the construct has tended to receive little or no attention in publications that deal with language and identity and social life. Where social class is introduced into research, it is almost always done in a very cursory, partial, and superficial way. Still, there has been some research examining the interrelationship between social class and language over the years, and in this article, I provide a review of that research, focusing primarily on the period 2000-2014. First, however, I include a discussion of what social class means in 21st-century societies and a short review of class-based research...

TESOL Quarterly, 2015

Language & Communication, 1986

Trudgill's book is of wide interdisciplinary interest, since Trudgill is one of the most articulate scholars in the field today: his prose is clear, and his arguments are generally self-contained and eloquent. Although one might want a more thorough discussion of his methodological infrastructure, almost every chapter reveals a new methodological technique to extend the horizons of a field already charted by Labov's ingenious ploys. For this book Trudgill has 'revised, updated and edited' carefully chosen articles to present them as 'a coherent text.' While some such texts focus on 'secular' linguistic topics, and others focus on specific communicative aspects of linguistics, Trudgill has chosen a broad cross-section of papers which run the entire gamut of foci. The first papers are of primary concern to the linguist who realizes that the inclusion of sociological parameters can extend a purely linguistic analysis, and as the book progresses, the articles increasingly emphasize the social variables. Given that the intention was for the book to be read as a coherent text, in a couple of instances more work should have been done to integrate and update the papers. However, on the whole, the volume flows well. While Trudgill has clearly read all the American literature, he uses a primarily British or European data base, and draws conclusions which appear to imply that influences on speech in the U.K. are universal. Since the organization of British society is quite different from that in many other parts of the world, not surprisingly, the hypotheses which Trudgill presents as sociolinguistic 'universals' frequently are contradicted by sociolinguistic data gathered elsewhere. Consequently, students must be especially skeptical of Trudgill's theoretical positions when they appear to contradict the data. Thus, articles cannot be accepted at face value, but can motivate students to compare Trudgill's data with other published data. If students are careful, studying work like this can lead to new breakthroughs. Since an introduction places a book's chapters in a specific perspective, this reviewer felt the introduction called for a special comment, in light of the fact that it appears to propose a frame which Trudgill himself would clearly reject. The 'Introduction' (pp. l-7) outlines the range of interests which have been considered sociolinguistic, and moves from this to focus attention on dialect from a sociolinguistic perspective. Trudgill demonstrates language teaching us about language and about society. Trudgill has presented a framework for such a 'cross-disciplinary' understanding before (1978, pp. 1-18); however, Trudgill's condensation of that discussion here maintains that work which is transparently concerned with 'improving linguistic theory and. .. developing our understanding of the nature of

1970