Relationship between Language and Society

Social context recognises that people use language and that language is a part of society. Social
context tries to describe, and account for, the different ways that different people use language.

Social context looks at relationships between language and society and looks at language as
people use it. It considers the relationship between a person’s language and their social identity.

We observe the way that people use language differently and try to explain why this is. This
explaining is not always easy.

Social context asks:

(a) what variations are there in a language and

Social context is, interesting, exciting and fraught with difficulties. There are very few definite
neat answers to things. What we need to do is try to become aware of the way language varies
according to who people are, what they are doing, and the attitudes they have to their language.

Social context will think about variety within a language. Everybody who speaks a language has
a very wide linguistic repertoire unless they have very severe learning difficulties, or are learning
the language as a foreign language. This means, they can use language in many different ways,
depending on the situation they are in. The sort of language that they use also depends on their
social background and social identity.

What is the relationship between language and people?

There are 4 possibilities:

a) Language influences society and people

b) people and society influence language

c) There is interaction as language influences people and society and people and society
influence language;

d) There is no influence of either so language is just a tool used by people and there is no
social effect.

We can probably discount number 4:

Some linguists would like to see language as something pure, abstract and untouched by the real
world, like a mathematical formula, but that's just a convenient way of thinking about the
structure of language. As soon as we look at people using language we can see that the practical
version of this abstraction is much more complex.

In the end we will probably need to say that number three:

Society and language influence each other

Is the correct way to look at the relationship. Speech and social behaviour are constantly
interacting. All the time language is changing because of social contexts and social contexts
cause the language to be changed. However, this does not mean that we should not explore the
two other possibilities in some depth, because they can enlighten us about the relationship of
language and society.

1) Language influences people.

There are two views here - one is more extreme than the other. The first idea is that language is
so powerful that it actually affects how you see the world; the second is that is influences the
way we think and behave.

A linguist called Whorf claimed language actually affects the way you see the world (so
language is like a pair of glasses through which we see everything). This led to the Sapir-Whorf
theory, also called the “Whorfian hypothesis”. It was based originally on studies of the Hopi
Indians.

Whorf said that Hopi and European had different ways of talking about the world, so it
influenced the way they saw the world. The Hopi language treats the world as full of things that
are “non-discrete” and “flowing” whereas European languages see them as discrete and
countable. European languages treat time as something that can be divided up into separate
seconds, minutes and days. Trees and plates can be counted, but water and hope cannot and the
language makes distinctions here. The Hopi language treats time as indivisible so that Hopi will
not talk about minutes and weeks. Trees and water are simply treated linguistically as non-
discrete items. The result of this (claimed Whorf) was that the Hopi genuinely see the world
differently from Europeans. Their language structure makes them see the world differently.
Unfortunately, for this theory, nobody asked the Hopi if they really saw the world differently. It
would seem that they see it just as we do. After all, what would happen to a bilingual
Hopi/English speaker? Would their world view shift depending on the language they were
speaking?

Another example of this theory is the often-cited fact that Eskimos have lots of different words
for snow, so it means they actually see different kinds of snow, whereas we only see
"snow". But this isn't really true because we can use words to describe the snow if we need to,
e.g. hard, soft, wet, dry etc. We aren't tuned to thinking about it that way, but if it becomes
important, we can easily do so. We might not know the names of different makes of car, but still
be able to tell the difference between a Fiat and a Rolls Royce, for all that. So could an Eskimo,
even if the Inuit language didn't have the exact words. Besides which, Eskimos don't really have
all those words for snow - it's just one of those pieces of information that everyone repeats and
no-one has checked if it's true. If you check, you find it isn't true!

There is an important lesson here that linguists can learn: don't make great generalisations about
languages and people that you don't know very well. Any Hopi or Inuit could have told us
immediately that this was a load of nonsense, but no-one ever thought to ask them. Many
people, including linguists have done the same when describing sign languages, too. Often they
have said things that people have come to believe when deaf signers have known it wasn't true.

George Orwell’s book “1984” brought this idea up, with the idea of “Newspeak” which The
Party was introducing to replace “Oldspeak”.

The Party view was that “the purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all
other modes of thought impossible… A heteretical thought… should be literally unthinkable, as
least so far as thought is dependent on words”

Orwell was making a dig at the Whorfian hypothesis when he wrote about Newspeak. The point
about the story is that this sort of control does not really work, and cannot work because if we do
not have words for our thoughts, we just create them anyway.

Still, some politicians and businesses do like to believe that the language we use will affect the
way we think about something. In 1976, the British government replaced “The Official Secrets
Act” with “The Official Information Act”. The name had gone from “secret” to “information”
but the laws were unchanged. After the Second World War, Britain’s Ministry of War became
the Ministry of Defence. It is also worth noting that a “defence procurement contract” is still an
“arms deal” by another name.

So, language doesn't affect what we can see in the world, but it is still possible that language
affects people and society because maybe language still affects the way we can think.

A linguist called Basil Bernstein found that middle class children used an "elaborated" code of
English in school. This meant they used more abstract words, less context dependent words and
more complicated sentences. Working class children seemed to use a more "restricted" code.
This meant using more concrete words, more context-dependent and less complicated
sentences. So some people (but NOT Bernstein) said this means working class children can't
think in abstract ways because their language doesn't allow them to. This, of course, is
nonsense. Just as with deaf people. All it means is that the children used different ways of
expressing the same thing.

One example of the way that language is said to affect society is in sexist language. The theory
is that language affects the way we view men and women because it treats men and women
differently. If you use words like chairman or fireman it implies only men can do the jobs, so
women feel left out. It is worth noting, though, that the form of the words can influence our
view of things. If you see the word “farmer” you probably picture a man, although there is no
reason why it shouldn’t be a woman. If you see the word “actress”, though, you immediately
picture a woman because of the form of the word. Another feature of English that might exclude
women is the use of "him" to mean "him and her". English has to assign a gender to a pronoun
so God has “become” male, and again women can feel left out. In fact the use of “he” to refer to
God has caused us to treat God as in some way masculine to such an extent that if we use “she”,
people are pulled up sharply by the implication.

This way the language may create sexism in a society. But really, it's more likely that the society
made the language sexist, eg using words to put women down like chick, bird etc. (Bird used to
refer to men and women, but now it is just derogatory to women).
language have an effect on the way we think

We need to consider the attitude that some people have towards their own language, and attitudes
that other people have. The language that we use can make a big difference to the way that we
see ourselves, and the way society sees us. It can also influence the way we relate to society.

Accent is very important in Britain. Advertisers on television only use regional accents for
voice-overs if the product is cheap or if the aim is to amuse. Serious things or expensive
products use the voices of middle-class men. During the war, the BBC had to use "middle class"
speakers to read the news because no one believed the people with regional accents. This has
now changed, which goes to show that social factors in languages do vary and change over
time. However, not all regional accents have the same social acceptability and "broad" (that is,
strong) regional accents are still cannot be too strong for some media broadcasts.

Everyone seems to have an idea what is a "good" language or variety and what is a "bad"
one. This opinion is entirely socially conditioned. Sometimes people with power (e.g.
governments or schools) decide what is a good or bad language. Sometimes it is just ordinary
members of a language community who have these views. Linguistically they are all the same,
because they can all communicate in the same way, but they just have different social values.

Social context will look at the relationship between language and power and attitudes to
language. The language that someone uses may influence other people's attitudes towards
them. People have fought and died for language (e.g. in medieval times people were accused of
heresy for saying that the bible should be translated from Latin into English. In some countries
in the world, you can be arrested for speaking a forbidden language).

This is the same for many languages all around the world, for example, minority languages in
India. People may think their language is not a good language because it isn't the one taught in
schools and isn't used in business. People who use another language make more money and
other people respect them, so people want to use that language.

There may be some ways in which the language we use influences people and
society. However, it is also possible that:

1) People influence language and language use

Power also comes in here when we discuss the influence of people and society upon a language:
if you have power, you can manipulate the language to suit you. This is important here for sign
languages.

Variation in language.
The problem, as we have said, is that languages vary.

How do they vary?

1) Phonologically - "Pronunciation"

Traditionally, linguistics has a term "pronunciation" that includes accent and intonation. A word
or sign is pronounced differently, either because of some regular phonological change, or
because the sign is just made a little bit differently.

In an accent, a speaker or signer uses some sort of regularly different way of speaking or
signing. For example the different way people say the vowel in cup and grass, or the letters "th"
like in thing or thought. In the Irish and Jamaican dialects of English, people often say "th" as a
sort of "t" with a lot of breath behind it, while in other forms of English, it is pronounced as the
“th” with the tongue between the teeth.

The important thing to remember is that accents have to be regularly different, at the
phonological level. If a person has a certain vowel sound in cup, then they will also have it
in but, butter, supper, fuss and enough.

2) Word differences - A speaker or signer uses different words or signs to mean the same thing,
even though they all use the same language.

This is the most common, noticeable difference because the words or signs are different. For
example, different signs for colours are used by different people around the country. Some signs
are mostly used by men and some by women. Some only used by Catholics, and some only by
Jewish people, and so on.
There are also multi-channel signs that are special to certain groups of people, eg the sign for
“existence” that is used in Scotland but much less in England.

3) Grammatical differences.