Language, Dialect and Register

Group  Assignment

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Language, Dialect and Register

Lecturer  : Prof. Dr. Djamiah Husain, M.Hum

GROUP 1

1.      RAHMAT WIJAYA                              12B01143

2.      MASYIKUR RAUF                               12B01146                  

3.      RAHMAD RISAN                                  12B01153

4.      WONGSO ADI SAPUTRA                   12B01156

5.      THEO DEDY PALIMBUNGA                        12B01161

PROGRAM STUDY PENDIDIKAN BAHASA INGGRIS

PROGRAM PASCASARJANA

UNIVERSITAS NEGERI MAKASSAR

2013

I.                   INTRODUCTION

Human needs to communicate in the society. To communicate each other human must use the medium of communication. The medium of communication that the people use is divided into spoken and written. Furthermore, the medium of communication is language. Language is the tool of communication which the people use for expressing their thought. In addition, Language is the tool of interaction that the human kind use in the society. Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas,emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols ( Sapir 1921).

            Besides, the language that used by the people in the community could be linked with some side in the society. All of that side will affect the society and the language that they use. Some side that correlate to the language such as, ideology, society, education, and culture. The other of that side will be mentioned and explained in the following explanation. However, the language not only has the correlation with the part outside the language but also with the language itself. The factor which influence the use of language are dialect and register. All of that factors will be discussed more in the next explanation below.

           

II.                DISCUSSION

Language and dialects are ambiguous terms. For ordinary people, a dialect is a local non-prestigious variety of a real language. The confusion goes back to the Ancient Greeks which had distinct local varieties (Ionic, Doric, and Attic), each having its own literary traditions and uses. Language can refer to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms; dialect can refer to one of the norms. Many regions of the world provide evidence of bewildering language and dialect divisions. Socio-historical factors play a crucial role in determining boundaries. Hindi and Urdu in India are discrete language popularly and in law, yet they are almost identical in grammar. Meanwhile, the literary and colloquial forms or Arabic in Morocco, and Egypt are grammatically quite separate, yet only one language is recognized in both.

LANGUAGE AND IDEOLOGY

A language ideology is a standardized version of a language imposed from the top down. “Standard” English is an example of a language ideology – the notion that there is a correct and incorrect way to speak English, that words are pronounced certain ways and mean certain (or various) things. The problem is that, because thinking (and indeed, even fundamental concepts like personhood and identity) are entwined with our language facilities, language ideologies tend to have polarizing effects. (For more, see the post above.).

Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are pervaded with political and moral interests and are shaped in a cultural setting. To study language ideologies, then, is to explore the nexus of language, culture, and politics. It is to examine how people construe language’s role in a social and cultural world, and how their construals are socially positioned. Those construals include the ways people conceive of language itself, as well as what they understand by the particular languages and ways of speaking that are within their purview. Language ideologies are inherently plural: because they are positioned, there is always another position—another perspective from which the world of discursive practice is differently viewed. Their positioning makes language ideologies always partial, in that they can never encompass all possible views—but also partial in that they are at play in the sphere of interested human social action. Authors writing on this topic have variously called it “linguistic ideology,” “language ideology,” or “ideology of language.” The slight differences of terminology have not signaled major differences in conception. Although the anthropological approach to language ideology is distinctive, it overlaps with research in other disciplines. Approaches rooted in disciplinary linguistics, such as Critical Discourse Analysis, are anthropology’s close kin, while political and social theorists writing on “ideology” are of obvious relevance.

LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

Let us say that a society is any group of people who are drawn together for a certain purpose or purposes. By such a definition ‘society’ becomes a very comprehensive concept, but we will soon see how useful such a comprehensive view is because of the very different kinds of societies we must consider in the course of the various discussions that follow. We may attempt an equally comprehensive definition of language: a language is what the members of a particular society speak. However, as we will see, speech in almost any society can take many very different forms, and just what forms we should choose to discuss when we attempt to describe the language of a society may prove to be a contentious matter. Sometimes too a society may be plurilingual; that is, many speakers may use more than one language, however we define language. We should also note that our definitions of language and society are not independent: the definition of language includes in it a reference to society. Do all this while keeping in mind that languages and societies are constantly changing.

LANGUAGE AND INTERACTION

The perspective of ethnographic microanalysis

The central concern of ethnographic microanalysis is with the immediate ecology and micropolitics of social relations between persons engaged in situations of face-to-face interaction. Ethnographic microanalysis (which has also been called the microethnography of social interaction) is both a method and a point of view. Using videotapes or films of naturally occurring interaction, the microanalyst looks very closely and repeatedly at what people do in real time as they interact. From this approach to analysis comes a particular perspective on how people use language and other forms of communication in doing the work of daily life.

Two emphases in this perspective are especially important for language teaching. One concerns the situated character of communication in social interaction. Goffman (1964) observed that the social situation is the basic unit or scene in which everyday life takes place. The situation is influenced by the wider world, but in important ways what happens in an ordinary social situation has a life of its own; that is, the situation is a partially bounded social setting. What happens in a given situation may be powerfully influenced by general societal processes the economy, the labor market, and the class position of participants in the situation; race, ethnic, and gender relations; religious identification and beliefs; broad patterns of language and culture in the society at large. But these factors do not totally determine what happens when particular people interact in a social situation.

Interactional sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological perspective on language use that is based in linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. Because of these disciplinary roots, it shares the concerns of all three fields with language, society, and culture.Goffman's analysis of face-to-face interaction provide an understanding of how language is situated in particular circumstances of social life and how it both reflects and adds meaning and structure to those circumstances. Gumperz's analyses of verbal communication help us understand how people may share grammatical knowledge of a language but differently contextualize what is said, in such a way that very different messages are produced and understood.

Intercultural Communication

It is distinguished from those that immediately precede and follow it because it does not present another approach to the study of language use. Rather it examines answers that sociolinguists associated with the approaches outlined in the chapters on ethnography of communication, ethnographic microanalysis, and, especially, interactional sociolinguistics and speech act theory have given to questions concerning the miscommunication that often occurs when people with different life experiences and different cultural patterns of communication interact with one another. It  is concerned, in particular, with the answers that have been given to these research questions:What are the sources of intercultural miscommunication?What are the social effects of such miscommunication?, What can be done to improve intercultural communication?.

Sociolinguists have traced the sources of intercultural miscommunication to the distinctive nature of the value systems, pervasive configurations of social relations, and dominant ideologies of cultural groups. Such dimensions of the social context shape communicative conventions, thereby giving them their culturally specific character. Thus, for example, Wolfson (1992, p. 205) points out that what members of particular cultural groups thank or apologize for, or compliment on, usually reflects values because, in performing these speech acts, people are often implicitly assessing the behavior, possessions, accomplishments, character, or appearance of others. She also traces the high frequency of complimenting that she found amongst status-equal friends, coworkers, and acquaintances in middle-class urban American society to the configuration of social relations in that society.

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

The ethnography of communication

Dell Hymes's call for an ethnography of speaking (1962; later to become more broadly the ethnography of communication) resulted in the advent of a distinctive new subdiscipline, derived from anthropology and linguistics, which has revolutionized the study of the interpenetration of language and culture. This new field focuses on the patterning of communicative behavior as it constitutes one of the systems of culture, as it functions within the holistic context of culture, and as it relates to patterns in other cultural systems. A primary aim of the ethnographic approach to the study of communicative activity is to provide a framework for the collection and analysis of descriptive data about the ways in which social meaning is conveyed, constructed, and negotiated. Its goals are, at least in the first instance, descriptive, guided by the conviction that information about diverse “ways of speaking” in different human societies is a legitimate contribution to knowledge in its own right. Nevertheless, the potential significance of the ethnography of communication goes far beyond a mere cataloging of facts about communicative behavior. Ultimately, its approach and findings are essential for the formulation of a truly adequate universal theory of language and human behavior. As a blend of scientific and humanistic approaches, the ethnography of communication has two foci: particularistic and generalizing.

Speech acts

Speech act behavior constitutes an area of continual concern for language learners since they are repeatedly faced with the need to utilize speech acts such as complaints, apologies, requests, and refusals, each of which can be realized by means of a host of potential strategies. Although no course of instruction could possibly furnish all the insights that a foreign language learner would need in order to successfully finetune each and every speech act utterance, there is some evidence that furnishing learners with selected insights regarding the comprehension and production of speech acts may provide them with valuable information that they would probably not acquire on their own.

LANGUAGE AND VARIATION

Language variety refers to the various forms of language triggered by social factors.Language may changes from region to region, from one social class to another, from individual to individual, and from situation to situation. This actual changes result in the varieties of language.Thus, language varieties cover:

·         Standard language

·         Pidgins

·         Creoles

·         Dialects

·         Registers

a.    Standard language

For social political reasons, a variety of language may be officially elevated as the national language, such a language variety is called standard language. In China, putonghua is respected as the standard language; in Britain, the Received Pronunciation (RP) the SL, and in USA, Standard American English (SAE) the SL.

b. Pidgins and creoles

Pidgin is a mixed language with a small vocabulary and a simple grammar used by speakers of two languages to communicate. So it is also called contact language. Features of pidgin languages:

1. A pidgin has no native speakers.
2. It is a simplified language with reduced vocabulary and grammar. Example, Long time no see.

c. Creole:

When a pidgin begins to acquire native speakers who use it as their primary language, the pidgin turns to be a creole.The process by which a pidgin develops is called pidginization; the process by which a pidgin becomes a creole is called creolization. Black slaves speaking African dialects communicated with the people speaking French or English in the plantations in the South America. The linguistic means of communication is called a pidgin. Pidginization happens there, and later the pidginization is widely accepted, then creolization happens. That is the Haitian Creole.

d. Dialects

A variety of a language used recognizably in a specific region or by a specific social class is called a dialect. The study of dialect is called dialectology.Dialect and accent: language and pronunciation and vocabulary.Dialects are categorized into 4 types :

1. Regional / geographical dialects: varieties of a language spoken in a geographical area.
2. Temporal dialects: varieties of a language used at particular stages in its historical development.
3. Social dialects/sociolects: varieties of a language used by people belonging to particular social classes.
4. Idiolects: varieties of a language used by individual speakers, with peculiarities of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

e. Registers

Registers are varieties of language used in different situations, which are identified by the degrees of formality.

DIALECT

Dialect is different kinds of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar in the same language. There are established approaches to the issue of variation as a result of geographical location. Before sociolinguistics becoming identified as a discipline, students of language gave serious attention to the variations in language correlated with its localities. The study of regional dialects was a part of the historical linguistics in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries until the interest turned to synchronic description of a language at the present.

It was long obvious that people who spoke the same language had might have different words or pronunciations for the same thing. Caxton bemoaned the difficulty he had in choosing between northern and southern English forms. Regional differences in variety continue to be the characteristic of humor (a southern accent is laughed at in Tunisia) and prejudice (it is not always easy for one with Southern accent to book a room in a northern US hotel).

For example, there is recognition of the Texas drawl or the glottal stop of the Cockney. These are stereotypes, fixed and prejudicial patterns of thought which focus on the most obvious feature of the local accent. There are also obvious differences in lexicon. Peanuts may be called groundnuts or goobers in different parts of America. Plotting these different variants permit dialectologists to recognize regional differences. The eastern United States has a northern zone of pronouncing grease and greasy with an /s/, a transitional zone of pronouncing grease with an /s/ and greasy with a /z/, and a southern of pronouncing both with /z/. Differences can be striking: Texas English makes no difference between pin and pen.

In long-settled European countries, dialect atlases show the effect of earlier settlement patterns and of contact, e.g. original Celtic areas and the limits of Roman occupation. In a recently settled country like the USA, the atlases reveal the differences in original settlement on the Eastern seaboard. However, Geographical space is not enough to account for language variation in the case of Spanish in the USA. The influence of other factors must be accepted.

Regional Dialects

A regional dialect is a variation in speaking a language associated with place and it is an easy way of observing variety in language. Traveling throughout a wide geographical area where a language is spoken, one notices differences in pronunciation, the choices of words and syntax.

Social Dialects

The term dialect may be used to describe differences in speech associated with various social groups or classes. The problem of defining social group or social class and giving proper weight to the factors used to determine social position, e.g., occupation, education, income, caste, etc. These factors are related to how people speak. There are British ‘public-school’ dialect and also an ‘African American Vernacular English’ dialect. People have stereotypical notions of how other people speak. Social dialects can indeed be described systematically.

Social dialects originate among social groups and are related to a variety of factors (social class, religion, and ethnicity). In Baghdad, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim inhabitants speak different varieties of Arabic. The first two groups use their variety solely within the group, but the Muslim variety serves as a lingua franca, or common language, among the groups. Ethnic variation can be seen in the United States. Speakers of Jewish and Italian ethnicity in New York differentiate themselves from speakers of the standard variety. Italians pronounce bad with the vowel of beard, and Jews pronounce dog with the vowel of book.

REGISTER

In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting, an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g. "walking", not "walkin'"), choose more formal words (e.g. father vs. dad,child vs. kid, etc.), and refrain from using contractions such as ain't, than when speaking in an informal setting. The term ‘register’ denotes variation in language according to the context in which it is being used. Different situations call for adjustments to the type of language used: for example, the type of language that an individual uses varies according to whether s/he is speaking to family members, addressing a public gathering, or discussing science with professional col-leagues. However, the concept of register need not apply to specialized professions only, as Wallwork (1969: 110) makes clear:

Every time we insist on a letter which starts ‘Dear Sir’ ending with ‘Yours faith-fully’, rather than ‘Yours affectionately’, every time we tell a child not to use slang in an essay; every time we hesitate as to ‘how best to put it’ to the boss; every time we decide to telephone rather than to write, we are making decisions on the basis of the selection of the appropriate register for our purpose.

Halliday et al. (1964) stressed three dimensions along which register may vary: field, tenor, and mode.

• Field: nature of the topic around which the language activity is centred (‘what is happening’).
• Tenor: relations between people communicating (‘who is taking part, and on what terms’)
• Mode: medium employed (‘is the language form spoken, written, signed etc.?’)

Halliday and Hasan (1985: 41) insist that registers are not marginal or special varieties of language, rather they cover the total range of language activity in a society:

Register is what you are speaking at the time, depending on what you are doing and the nature of the activity in which the language is functioning. So whereas, in principle at least, any individual might go through life speaking only one dialect (in modern complex societies this is increasingly unlikely; but it is theoretically possible, and it used to be the norm), it is not possible to go through life using only one register. The register reflects another aspect of the social order, that of social processes, the different types of social activity that people commonly engage in.

Register studies have not had as big an impact in dialect study as the authors had hoped, though some researchers have pursued a broader related area which has come to be known as genre theory. Register and traditional dialect study have to a large extent been overtaken by interactional sociolinguistics, a branch which looks closely at conversational strategies employed by different groups of people when they communicate with each other.

III.             CONCLUSION

         

From this chapter the writer can conclude thatthe chapters in this part, which focus on how the larger social context affects an individual's use of particular linguistic forms, illustrate a macrolevel of social analysis and a microlevel of linguistic analysis. The authors of this book also demonstrate how geographical location, ethnic background, social class, and gender can all influence an individual's use of particular phonological, structural, lexical, and discourse features of English. At the same time, the chapters illustrate how these linguistic features can serve to define speech communities and perpetuate existing social relationships. Sociolinguistics in language teaching and minority education A central theme of this volume is, as stated in the introduction to this chapter, that education is the site where, on the one hand, larger social and political forces are reflected in the kinds of educational opportunities offered to speakers of different language varieties and, on the other, language use mediates their participation in those opportunities and, ultimately, their potential contributions to the larger society.

After little explanation above the writer also conclude dialect and register from other sources and tell that Dialect is different kinds of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar in the same language. There are established approaches to the issue of variation as a result of geographical location. Before sociolinguistics becoming identified as a discipline, students of language gave serious attention to the variations in language correlated with its localities. The study of regional dialects was a part of the historical linguistics in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries until the interest turned to synchronic description of a language at the present. It was long obvious that people who spoke the same language had might have different words or pronunciations for the same thing.

A register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting, an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g. "walking", not "walkin'"), choose more formal words (e.g. father vs. dad, child vs. kid, etc.), and refrain from using contractions such as ain't, than when speaking in an informal setting. The term ‘register’ denotes variation in language according to the context in which it is being used. Different situations call for adjustments to the type of language used: for example, the type of language that an individual uses varies according to whether s/he is speaking to family members, addressing a public gathering, or discussing science with professional col-leagues.

The significant point is that a register acquires its characteristics by convention, which people are then more or less obliged to use. Variation by person becomes minimal (except perhaps for accent). That is, the study of dialect without attention to contexts of language use makes traditional dialectology one-dimensional. Halliday et al. (1964) stressed three dimensions along which register may vary: field, tenor, and mode.

• Field: nature of the topic around which the language activity is centred (‘what is happening’).

• Tenor: relations between people communicating (‘who is taking part, and on what terms’)

• Mode: medium employed (‘is the language form spoken, written, signed etc.?’)

Register studies have not had as big an impact in dialect study as the authors had hoped, though some researchers have pursued a broader related area which has come to be known as genre theory. Register and traditional dialect study have to a large extent been overtaken by interactional sociolinguistics, a branch which looks closely at conversational strategies employed by different groups of people when they communicate with each other.

REFERENCES

McKay,Sandra Lee and Nancy H. Horberger (1996). Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching. UK : Cambridge University Press.

McKay,Sandra Lee and Nancy H. Horberger (2010). Sociolinguistics and Language Education. UK : Cambridge University Press.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect  (Accessed 03 may 2013).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register  (Accessed 03 may 2013).

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