Compiled and elaborated by MR.

El Farmaki Ahmed

Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics emphasizes the social influences on language. Sociology of language emphasizes the role of language in society. Sociolinguistics is a discipline that is concerned with the study of the effect of social factors on the way the language is used. It is a branch of anthropological linguistics that studies how language and culture are related and how language is used in different social context. Sociolinguistics differs from the sociology of language, in that the focus of sociolinguistics is on the effect of society on language while the latters focus is on the languages effect on society. Sociolinguistics is a term including the aspects of linguistics applied toward the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations. It ranges from the study of the wide variety of dialects across a given region down to the analysis between the way men and women speak to one another. Sociolinguistics often shows us the humorous realities of human speech and how a dialect of a given language can often describe the age, sex, and social class of the speaker; it codes the social function of a language.

Linguistic items
Linguistic items are: 1- Lexical items; 2- Rules of various kinds for combining the pronunciations and the meanings of these lexical items in sentences; 3- Constraints of various kinds of these rules. According to sociolinguistic statement, linguistic items refer to individual lexical items, rules and constrains. Different linguistic items in the same language can have quite different social distributions in terms of speakers and circumstances.

Varieties of language
Varieties of language can be used to refer to different manifestations of it. The things that make one variety of language different from other is the linguistic items that it include.

Definition: variety of language is a set of linguistic items with similar social distribution. Variety may be referring to languages, dialects or styles. A variety may be smaller than a language.

N.B: According to Chomsky (transformational-generative grammar 1965) language and dialect called common-sense knowledge

Compiled and elaborated by MR. El Farmaki Ahmed

Speech community
The term speech community is widely used by sociolinguists to refer to community based on language, but linguistic community is also used with the same meaning. Definitions: 1- John Lyons: speech community: all the people who use a given language or a dialect. 2- Charles Hockett: each language defines a speech community: the whole set of people who communicate with each other, either directly or indirectly via a common language. If two communities both speak the same language but have no contact with each other at all, they will count as different speech communities. 3- Leonard Bloomfield: a speech community is a group of people who interact by means of speech. 4- John Gumperz defines linguistic speech community as a social group which may be either monolingual or multilingual held together frequency of social interaction patterns and set off from the surrounding areas by weakness in the lines of communication. 5- William Labov: referred speech community to shared norms and abstract of variation and shared speech behavior. 6- William Labov: speech community refers to groups in society which have distinctive speech characteristics as well as other social characteristics. All the above definitions allow us to define speech community as a set of people who have something in common linguistically. (Language or dialect) Accordingly, it is very hard to imagine that a community sharing nothing but the common language. According to Labov, a single speech community can be treated with reference to which a large number of generalizations can be made.

Languages I

Language and dialect

Widely recognized types of language varieties: language, dialect and register. According to Einar Haugen, dialect was borrowed from Greek in the Renaissance; thus, we may see the distinction between language and dialect as due the influence of Greek culture. Dialect refers to regional varieties which are written and have a literature. ( French dialecte) There is a difference of size because language is larger than a dialect. That is, language contains more items than dialect. The other contrast between language and dialect is a question of prestige for language having prestige which dialect lacks.
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Compiled and elaborated by MR. El Farmaki Ahmed Standard language is not a dialect at all, but a language, where as the varieties which are not used in formal writing are dialects.

II-

Standard Languages

The only kind of variety which would count as a proper language is a standard language. Standard languages are the result of a direct and deliberate intervention by society. Standardization produces a standard language where before they were just dialects. Standard languages are interesting as much as they have a rather special relation to society. Standard language must pass through the following processes: 1. Selection: a particular variety must have been selected as the one to be developed into a standard language. The choice is a matter of great social and political importance. 2. Codification: academy must have written dictionaries and grammar books to fix the variety, so that everyone agrees on what is correct, and to learn the correct forms and not to use in writing any incorrect forms we may have in our native variety. 3. Elaboration of function: to use the selected variety in all the functions associated with educational and political writing. This may require extra linguistic items to be added to the variety as technical words. 4. Acceptance: the variety has to be accepted by the relevant population as a national language. Language can be manipulated by society. Many people might describe standard languages as pathological/ compulsive in their lack of diversity.

III-

The delimitation of languages

Standard English in Britain consists of all the items used in any of the English-speaking countries.