Kalajdzic Bojan
212200694
kala6467@uni-landau.de

The book I am about to review is written by Peter Trudgill and is called
„Sociolinguistics - An Introduction to language and society (4th Edition)“.

Product Details * Paperback: 240 pages * Publisher: Penguin Books; Fourth Edition edition (August 1, 2001) * Language: English * ISBN-10: 0140289216

About the Author
Peter Trudgill is professor of English linguistics at Fribourg, Switzerland. An author of many books and articles on sociolinguistics and dialectology, he has carried out linguistic fieldwork in most countries.

Book description
This is a classic book on a fascinating subject. Peter Trudgill examines the close link between language and society and the many factors that influence the way we speak. These range from gender, environment, age, race, class, region and politics. Trudgill's book surveys languages and societies from all over the world drawing on examples from Afrikaans to Yiddish. He has added a fascinating chapter on the development of a language as a result of a non-native speaker's use of it. Compelling and authoritative, this new edition of a bestselling book is set to redraw the boundaries of the study of sociolinguistics.

Introduction
The way we talk is deeply influenced by our class, sex and ethnic background. It can also have a profound effect on how we are perceived by others. In this fully updated edition of a classic text, Peter Trudgill explores the evidence – and the huge implications for social and educational policy.

Why do men swear more than women? How do speech styles of most Black Americans, and whites growing up in „Black areas“, differ from those of other whites? Does it make sense to defend a language against „contamination“ from foreign words and phrases? Why are langauges dying out at a catastrophic rate and what can we do about it? Should Serbo-Croat now be called Serbian, Croatian or even Bosnian? And in what sense, if any, is standard French „better“ than Québécois or High German „better“ than Schweizerdeutsch?

Such questions illuminate many fascinating aspects of human communication, but they also lie at the heart of fierce political debates about how states should deal with their linguistic minorities, when teachers should correct their pupils’ grammar and pronunciation, and weather language promotes racial and sexual stereotypes. Only sociolingustics can provide objective answers: their key conclusion are set out in this celebrated book.

Chapter 1 – Language and Society

In the first chapter, Peter Trudgill claims the fact, that language is not simply a means of communicating information, about the weather or any other subject, it is also a very important means of establishing and maintaining relationships with other people. Language fullfils a in important social function. One person, for example, would like to get to know certain things about a second- for instance what sort of job they do and what social status the have. Without this kind of information he or she will not be sure exactly how to behave towards them. (p. 1)
Furthermore he explains that our accent and our speech generally show where we come from, and what sort of background we have. We may even give some indication of certain of our ideas and attidudes, and all of this information can be used by the people we are speaking with to help them formulate an opinion about us.
Peter Trudgill says that these two aspects of language behaviour are very important from a social point of view: first, the function of language in establishing social relatonships; and second, the role played by language in conveying information about the speaker. (p. 2f)
Next, the author makes a distinction between a social and a regional dialect. The regional dialect is referred to a kind of language spoken by people from a particular part of the country whereas the social dialect is referred to kind of language associated with the social status or background.
A further disctinction is made by the author and this time it’s about dialect and accent. He says that the term dialect refers to difference between kinds of language which are differences of vocabulary and grammar as well as pronunciation. The term accent, on the other hand, refers to differences of pronunciation, and it is often important to distinguish clearly between the two.
In fact, Standard English is that variety of English which is usually used in print, and which is normally taught in schools and to non-native speakers learning the language. It is also the variety which is normally spoken by educated people and used in news broadcasts and other similar situations. (p. 5f)

Chapter 2 – Language and Social Class

This chapter deals with the fact that we can guess the social status of a person by listening to them while they are speaking.
Example:
Speaker A- I done it yesterday.
Speaker B- I did it yesterday.
If you heard these speakers say these things, you would guess that B was of higher social status than A, and you would almost certainly be right. But how is that we are able to do this sort of thing? Well, Peter Trudgill says that the answer lies in the existence of varieties of language which have come tob e called social-class dialects or by some writers sociolects. There are grammatical differences between the speech of these two speakers which give us clues about their social backgrounds. It is also probable that these differences will be accompanied by phonetic and phonological differences- there are also different social-class accents. (p. 23)
Of the many forms of social differentiation, for example by class, age, sex, race or religion, the author says that we shall concentrate in this chapter on the particular type of social differentiation illustrated in the example of speakers A and B – social stratification. Social stratification is a term used to refer to any hierarchical ordering of groups within a society especially in terms of power, wealth and status. (p. 24f)

Chapter 3 – Language and Ethnic Group

In this chapter the author describes an experiment which was carried out in the USA in which a number of people were asked to listen to tape-recordings of two different sets of speakers. Many of the judges decided that speakers in the first set were African Americans, and speakers in the second set white but they had been completely wrong.
The fact was that the white speakers sounded like Blacks, and the black speakers sounded like whites. This experiment demonstrates that first, there are differences between the English spoken by many Whites and many African Americans in the United States of America and secondly, although the stereotypes of black or white speech which listeners work with provide them with a correct identification most oft he time, the diagnostic differences are entirely the result of learned behaviour. People do not speak as they do because they are white or black. What does happen is that speakers acquire the linguistic characteristics of those they live in close contact with.
In the past it was quite widely believed that there was or might be some inherent connection between language and race but this view is obviously wrong. Any human being can learn any human language. The so called „AAVE“ African American Vernacular English is mainly spoken by blacks, and can be identified in such from their speech alone. Example: „She real nice“ (p. 42ff)

Chapter 4 – Language and Sex

Actually, the first thing you notice about somebody when you first meet them is what sex they are. Peter Trudgill says that languages do differ considerably in the extent to which sex differences are lexicalized. In German for example, you have to specify whether a friend is male, Freund, or female, Freundin. In English you do not wheras some languages, like Hungarian and Finnish, have no sex-marking on pronouns at all.
Human sex can also be indicated through the use of articles and adjectives, as in French: une étudiante trés intelligente (feminine) versus un étudiant trés intelligent (masculine) „a very clever student“. And it can also be marked on verb forms, as for example in past tense and conditional verb forms in some Slavic languages: in Polish przyechal means „he arrived“ while przyjechala means „she arrived“. (p 61f)
The two main types of social differentiation we have dealt with so far have been social stratification and ethnic-group differentiation. In both these cases we were able to point to parallels between social differentiation and geographical differentiation with respect to their effects on language: social distance, it appears, has the same kind of linguistic consequences as geographical distance. Ethnic and social-class groups, like regional groups, have linguistics characteristics in common because their members communicate more frequently with each other than with outsiders. (p. 64)

Chapter 5 – Language and Context

This chapter is about the fact that language varies not only according to the social characteristics of speakers – such as the factors of social class, ethnic group, and gender which we have already discussed- but also according to the social context in which speakers find themselves. The same speaker uses different linguistic varieties in different situations and for different purposes. The totality of linguistic varieties used in this way by a particular community of speakers can be called that linguistic community’s verbal repertoire. Many social factors can come into play in controlling which variety from this verbal repertoire is actually to be used on a particular occasion. For example, if speakers are talking to the people they work with about their work, their language is likely to be rather different from that they will use, say, at home with their families in discussing other topics. This linguistic varieties can be termed registers. The register of law, for example, is different from the register of medicine, which in turn is different from the language of engineering- and so on. Registers are usually characterized entirely, or almost so, by vocabulary differences: either by the use of particular words, or by the use of words in a particular sense. For example, doctors use the word clavicle whereas non-doctors use words such as tort and malfeasance. Bus-company employees in certain areas of Britain are much more likely to call buses with two decks deckers, while lay people will generally refer to them as double-deckers. (p. 81f)
Many other factors connected with the situation in which language is being used, over and above topic, will also have a linguistic effect. One of the most important of these is formality. Formality subsumes many factors including situation, social familiarity, kinship-relationship, politeness, seriousness, and so on. For example, it is not difficult for people who know English to see in what way the following pairs of sentences differ:

I require your attendance to be punctual.
I want you to come on time.

Father was somewhat fatigued after his lenghty journey.
Dad was pretty tired after his long trip.

A not considerable amount of time was expended on the task.
The job took a long time.

These pairs of sentences obviously mean more or less the ame thing in each case, but they differ from one another in terms of their formality. The first sentence of each pair is relatively formal, the second relatively informal. Varieties of language which differ from one another in this way are called styles. (p. 82ff)

Chapter 6 - Language and Social Interaction

In the prevoius chapter we talked about style-shifting, diglossia, dialect shifting and language-switching and that there's a relationship between social situation and language variety. But it's important to mention, that these features are not determined by the social situation. Speakers do not just accede these features because of their social situation, they are no automata. They can also use switches to manipulate, to influence or to define a situation or to convey nuances of meaning and personal intention.
This can be done in several ways. It may be done by using two languages at once for instance. In many areas of the south-western USA with it's Mexican-American communities which are bilingual, often a mixture of English and Spanish is spoken. The following example shows a typical code-switching in the "Spnaglish" language. It's about giving up smoking.

I didn't quit, I just stopped. I mean it wasn't an effort I made que voy a dejar de fumar me hace dano o this or that. I used to pull butts out of the wastepaper basket. I'd get desperate, y ahi voy al basusero a buscar, a sacar, you know?

A second possibility is language-switching. In this form a speaker switches completely from one language to another. In Kampala, Uganda, for instance, many individuals are either bilingual or even multilingual, which means they are able to speak more than one language with a fair degree of proficiency. Bi- or multilinguaism like this is a result of the multilingual society these individuals live in.

Chapter 7 - Language and Nation

Individual bi- or multilinguaism as described in the previous chapter is not actually a necessary consequence of national or societal plurilingualism. In Switzerland, for example, many individuals never become bilingual to a certain degree, so bilingual individualism is not consequently a universal phenomenon. As measured by a world-scale the situation prevailing in in Uganda is very widespread. There are more than one language spoken in the majority of the nation-states, in some cases spoken languages rise into the hundreds. Finding a genuiely monolingual country seems quite difficult, but they exist, Iceland for instance.
In countries where a minority is smaller or less influential, there is little chance, that the language spoken by them gets official language status. This factor helps Europe to give its monolingual appearance.
The UK gives the same appearance, but it's somewhat deceptive. Today sizeable groups of speakers of many languages of different places of the world live in the UK, including the the northern Indian subcontinent. Herewith there are some arguments that the first language of many older British people with West Indian roots - although many similarities - is not English.
There is also Welsh as the first language of about a fifth of Wales' population and Scots Gaelic, which is spoken natively by about 70,000 people in the West Highlands and Hebridean Islands of Scotland.
Multilingualism often poses problems for government and others concerned with national organizations. But also members of the minority-language group face problems. They have to acquire proficiency in at least two languages before they can act as full members of the national community.

Chapter 8 - Language and Geography

When linguistic innovations - new words, new pronounciations, new usages - occur somewhere, it may subsequently spread to other areas. First to areas nearest to it, continuing so long as no serious barriers to communication stop the dissemination. Starting in London, an innovation may begin to be used in Cambridge until it finds its way into the parlance of Carlisle. It has made its way through whole England. This exampe does not only apply to language, also innovations of technical and behavioral kind are subject to the same processes.
Among others the author describes in this chapter the loss of noun pre-vocalic /r/ in words like car or cart.

In the card above we can see the parts of England where loss of non-prevocalic /r/ in conservative rural dialects has not taken place in the words farm and yard. The configuration of r-pronouncing areas on the map also suggests that the innovation began in the centre or east of England before spreading north- and westwards. When the innovation began, we cannot be certain. It's important to mention, that this map represents a considerable simplification of the actual state concerning non-prevocalic /r/ in England.

Map 2 describes the importance of the role of cities in distributing language innovations into the surrounding areas. The main dialect and accent of modern English (the English, that's spoken by most people now), the 'Central North', opposed to Traditional Dialects in the 'South Midlands'.
The main difference between North and South on the map consists in the different pronounciation of words like tough with southern (A) as opposed to northern (U).

Chapter 9 - Language and Contact

When English is used as a lingua franca in Europe it's frequently spoken very fluently and expertised due to many years of schooling. A lingua franca undergoes a certain amount of simplification and reduction when it is used as a lingua franca. On the other hand it's quite defective because of the speaker's mother tongue interference. The author describes simplification as a rather complex notion, which functions mostly as prevention of mistakes. The reason is, that adults are - as contrasted with children - no good language learners.
Reduction is another important cue. Speakers of English as a lingua franca mostly use this language for business opportunities. They are often missing vocabulary, grammatical structures and stylistic devices for other language areas, e.g. leisure activities like sports. The cues 'reduction', 'simplification' and 'interference' are centralized as pidginization, which can be reduced by formal schooling and regular contact with the spoken language.
There are so called pidgin languages. A pidgin language is a lingua franca which has no native speakers. A pidgin language can be described as a 'normal' language with the features of pidginization. We can refer to it as pre-pidgin when it's used only in trading or other little-contact situations.
It needs three or more language groups to generate a contact situation with a true pidgin language: one 'dominant' language, and at least two 'non-dominant' languages. If contact in the 'dominant' language and others is minimal, and the 'dominant' language is used ad a lingua franca although it's only learned imperfectly, it's easy to notice how a pidgin language arises.

Chapter 10 - Language and Humanity

Grev Corbett, a British linguist, in his book on linguistic gender discusses a rather remarkable relationship between human sex and grammatical gender in Polish. In the Polish language there's a grammatical distinction in the plural between male humans, on the one hand, and female humans, animals and objects on the other. Corbett describes it as 'a particularly sexist division'. Russian does not have this feature, although it's related to Polish. According to Corbett it is difficult to detect 'any obvious difference between Polish and Russian women and men'. Now the question arises, to what extent can there be a connection between societal structure and social roles, and gender-differenciation in language.
Many people in the western sociaties have changed the way they feel about what is appropriate regarding gender roles. The linguistic differences between younger men and women are statistically smaller than in the case of older speakers. This can be explained by the beginnings of a move away from the gender-role stereotypes.
Trudgill quotes the word chairman as an example. Words of this type appear to be discriminatory because they apply to both male and female people, but are male-orientated because of the part -man. The more and more changing role of the woman in society led in recent years to a heightened awareness of the issue. Non-discriminatory and neutral terms like chairwoman and chairperson get more and more to linguistic usage.

Comment

I had hoped to find out more about the link between language and the development of societal mores in different places. The book is written in a textbook style that makes reading it hard work.