The Relation between Language and Society

THE RELATION BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

Written and Lectured by Dedy Subandowo, M.A
As a part of Introduction to Linguistics Lectures

A. Introduction to Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is study the relationship between language and society (Holmes, 1992:1, Kridalaksana, 2008:225). The sociolinguistics deals with explaining why we speak differently in different social context and factor such as, class, ethnicity, age, and sex. This study is concerned with the identifying the social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning. Sociolinguistics is also the study about dialects, languages in contact, language and education, and language in use (Fromkin, 2011: 430). Chaer (2004:2) explains that sociolinguistics is “the study about sociology and linguistics. In vice versa, Wardhough states that sociolinguistics and the sociology are different study.
“The sociolinguistics will be concerned with investigating the relationship between language and society with the goal of better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication; the equivalent goal in the sociology of language will be to discover how social structure can be better understood through the study of language, e.g., how certain linguistics features serve to characterize particular social arrangement” (1986:12).

Whereas Spolsky describes that sociolinguistics is the study the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the user of language live (1998:3). It can be concluded that sociolinguistics is the branch of linguistics and deals with the relation of society and language. The sociolinguistics cannot be separated from the social meaning and of language use. This study concerns when and for what purpose does somebody speak what kind of language or what variety with whom.


B. Discussion
In this part of the discussion, the writer will describe sociolinguistic factors, the dialects, languages in contact, language and education, and language use (Holmes, 1992; Fromkin, 2011).
1. Sociolinguistic factors
a. Social factors
The social factors are including the users, participants, social settings and functions. The users divide “who is talking to whom (e.g. wife-husband, teacher-student). The setting and social context are also relevant such as, at home, hospital and class. The function describes “why are they speaking” and another factor is topic which describes “what are they talking about”.
b. Social dimensions
The relationship between the participants is one of the factors of the social dimension. The factors like the social distance (intimate-high solidarity), status scale (high-low status), the status, formality (formal-informal) and functional scale (topic of interaction) are really influenced the sociolinguistics.
c. Explanation factors
This factor is to identify clearly the linguistic variation such as, vocabulary, sounds, grammatical construction, dialects, languages and the different social which lead the speakers to use one form rather than another such as, participant, setting or function of the interaction.
2. Dialect
All speakers can talk to each other and pretty much understand each other. Between one and another do not speak alike. It can be influenced by age, sex, social situation and where and when the language was learned. The language of an individual speaker with its unique characteristics is referred to as the speaker’s idiolect. When there are systematic differences in the way groups speak a language, it says that each group speaks a dialect of that language. Chambers (1980:5) noticed that dialect on the other hand, refers to varieties which are grammatically (and perhaps lexically) as well as phonologically different from other varieties. The example when the two speakers are say I done it last night and I did it last night, they are saying different dialects.
3. Language in contact
Sometime the user of language finds the speaker of language that speaks different language. It can be seen clearly in some part of the world that the speaker of bilingual communities, you may not have to travel very far at all to find the language disconnect. To make the user understand about this situation, they need a language that can communicate each other. In this part, lingua franca, bilingualism, pidgin and creole, are the kinds of language in contact. The details are explained below.
 Lingua Franca is the language that is used by common agreement of the people who speak diverse language. English has been called lingua franca of the whole world.
 Pidgin and Creole
Pidgin is a mixed language that arises in situations where speakers of different languages are unable to understand each other’s native language and, therefore need to develop a common means of communication (Bussman, 1998:905). Pidgin is used to communicate among the people who have no common language (Todd, 1974:1). Creole is defined as a language has evolved in a contact situation to become the native of generation of the speaker (Fromkin, 2011:458). It can be said that creoles are the pidgin that has a native speaker.
 Bilingualism is the ability to speak two or more languages, either by an individual speakers, individual bilingualism, or within a society, societal bilingualism. The kind of bilingualism is code-switching which is described as the a speech style unique to bilingual, in which fluent speakers switch languages between or within sentences or in whole code.
4. Language and Education
Second-Language Teaching Method has two approaches: the synthetic approach (teaching grammatical, lexical, phonological, and the functional units of language step by step) and analytic approach (topics, texts or tasks) which has concern in content based instruction.
5. Language in Use
The language in use can be described in style and jargon. Style is the various languages that are used by the speaker in the situation dialects. Everybody has at least formal and informal style. In an informal style, the rule of constructing are used most often, the syntactic rules of negation and agreement may be altered, and many words are used that do not occur in the formal style. Jargon is the language that is used by the conceible science, profession, trade, and occupation uses specific slang terms. The examples of linguistic jargon for Introduction to Linguistics are phoneme, morpheme, lexicon, phrase structure rules and so on.

C. Conclusion
Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between language and society. There are some sociolinguistic factors such as, social factors, social dimensions, and explanation factors. Every person has a unique way of speaking called as idiolects, and dialects which are grammatically (and perhaps lexically) as well as phonologically different from other varieties. The language in contact consists of Lingua Franca, Bilingualism, Pidgin and Creol. The language education can be seen in second-language teaching method. Language in use includes styles and jargons.