LING 320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Sociolinguistics, Speech Community, Social Class

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 320
• Professor: Charles Boberg

Document Summary

Midterm review: 58% average - typical, marks will rise after. Section 1: key words: systematic, orderly heterogeneity, standardization, historicity, mixture, reduction, etc 2 of bell"s criteria, dialectologists more rural, older, male - most conservative possible. Section 2: asocial approach assumes social factors have no place, variability might be seen as the result of a mixture of people"s grammars mixing in an urban community. Social class and speech style have a systematic effect (orderly heterogeneity) Variation shows that each speaker uses both forms, suggesting it"s part of speakers" competence. Labov"s study showed lower middle class had highest ling variability: tricky: standard deviations, information on sample size, statistical analysis (t-test, etc) allow us to tell if these are meaningful differences. Part 2 of course: involves multiple approaches to sociolinguistics - macro-sociolinguistics. Shift away from language to society, some topics will be more or less linguistic, many will have ties to other disciplines such as sociology or anthropology.