SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND THE ESL CLASSROOM PhD Course Assoc.Prof.Dr.Azamat Akbarov
An exploration into the relationship between language and culture Sociolinguistics An exploration into the relationship between language and culture
Fundamental Question What is the relationship between language and culture? b. Humans are the only creature to have culture. c. Humans are the only creature to have language. d. How do the two connect? e. What is language? “what members of a particular society speak”
What is sociolinguistics? It studies why people speak differently according to: - Whom they are talking to? - What they are talking about? - In what kind of context they are talking?
More specifically… 1. Social motivation for language variation: - socio-economic status - gender - ethnicity - region etc. 2. Language contact - Pidgin language - Creole language
Basic concepts you should know: Dialect vs. language: Mutual intelligibility: Situation in which speakers of different language varieties are able to understand and communicate with the other. - Chinese dialect, a special case
Basic concepts you should know: Dialect continuum: (bütün) Situation in which a large number of contiguous dialects exist, each mutually intelligible with the next, but with the dialects at either end of the continuum not being mutually intelligible.
A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the continuum are no longer mutually intelligible.
In sociolinguistics, a language continuum is said to exist when two or more different language or dialects merge one into the other(s) without a definable boundary
Three Views of Language Language as Grammar: Language as communication: Language as thing: