Sociolinguistic : Language Choice

Language Choice

The idea that multilingualism is divisive, while monolingualism is a normal

and desirable state of affairs, is still with us today. In a speech made on Australian radio in 1994 Rupert Murdoch claimed that multilingualism was the cause of Indian disunity, and monolingualism the reason for the unity of the English-speaking world. He rejoiced in the fact, however, that Hindi was finally spreading as a major lingua franca, due to the availability of Hindi TV programming being spread by his Asian television company, Star.

A simple model of language choice might recognize the presence of only one factor in each category. It might be thought, for example, that someone with reasonable fluency in several languages would nevertheless choose to speak his mother tongue wherever possible, that being the language with which he is most familiar and comfortable. This natural tendency would be constrained by only one factor: linguistic congruity. A native speaker of Hungarian, for instance, might prefer to use that language wherever possible, but if he should himself in an environment where there are no other Hungarian speakers — in a foreign country, for example — he would be obliged to use his second or third language.

A simple model such as the above does, in fact, serve to explain a large number of language-choice events, but it is woefully inadequate in defining many others. Polyglots do not always prefer to use their native language, and the constraint of congruity does not apply to situations where the participants in a conversation share a knowledge of several languages.

A number of factual anecdotes may help to illustrate the complexity of the problem.

1. A group of people attending a party are holding a conversation in Polish. The Scottish hostess approaches the group to ask how everyone is enjoying the party, and the conversation switches to English. Presently the hostess leaves to talk with other guests, and the group continues to talk in English for several minutes. After a short pause in the conversation one of the members of the group reverts to Polish, and the rest of the group follows suit.

2. A foreigner visiting a Japanese department store approaches one of the shop assistants and asks for something in Japanese. The customer's Japanese is grammatically correct and well pronounced, and the assistant has no difficulty in understanding what the person has said. Nevertheless she chooses to reply in English. For several minutes the conversation continues in two languages, the customer speaking in Japanese, and the assistant persisting in a use of English.

3. On a flight from Honolulu to Tokyo, two young Oriental ladies are discussing, in elementary accented Japanese, the friends they will meet and the shopping they will do when they get to Japan. Their conversation is interrupted when a cabin attendant comes along and asks them, in English, whether they would care for some light refreshment. Both of them answer in fluent unaccented American English, and after the cabin attendant has gone to attend to their order, they switch back to Japanese.

A. Societal multilingualism

Most of the studies of societal bilingualism have taken the nation-state as

their reference point, and have relied on census data to determine the linguistic composition of these units. However, it must be remembered that large-scale surveys and census statistics will yield quite a different perspective on questions of language use from detailed case studies. Whether a variety constitutes a minority language varies according to the scale at which the observation is made, and is relative to the social context in which a language is used.

Multilingualism is not just a characteristic of an individual polyglot. It is also a characteristic of societies. In the majority of the world, multilingualism is the societal norm. Individuals may have varying fluencies in the languages of the region, and use different languages in different spheres of their lives.

The United States is becoming increasingly multilingual, both in terms of proportion of speakers, as well as number of languages spoken. Immigration accounts for some of this societal multilingual ism, but not exclusively so. For instance, in 2010 the U.S. Census bureau recorded 134 native North American languages. There have been a number of rapid shifts in the distribution of languages in the USA. U.S. Census data show that between 1980 and 2010, Spanish, Russian, Armenian, Persian, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese experienced phenomenal growth in number of speakers. In contrast, Italian, French, Hungarian, and German speakers declined by about 20 percent.

B. Domains

In each domain there may be pressures of various kinds, e.g. economic, administrative, cultural, political, religious, which influence the bilingual towards use of one language rather than the other. Often knowledge and use of one language is an economic necessity. Such is the case for many speakers of a minority language, like Gujarati in Britain, or French in provinces of Canada where francophones are in a minority. The administrative policies of some countries may require civil servants to have knowledge of a second language. For example, in Ireland, knowledge of Irish is required. In some countries it is

expected that educated persons will have knowledge of another language. This is probably true for most of the European countries, and was even more dra-matically so earlier in countries like pre-revolutionary Russia, where French was the language of polite, cultured individuals. Languages like Greek and Latin have also had great prestige as second languages of the educated. As is the case with accent, the prestige of one language over another is a function of the perceived power of those who speak it. A bilingual may also learn one of the

languages for religious reasons. Many minority Muslim children in Britain receive religious training in Arabic.

C. Diglossia

Often each language or variety in a multilingual community serves a special-

ized function and is used for particular purposes. This situation is known as ‘‘diglossia’.

In sociolinguistics, diglossia is a situation in which two distinct varieties of a language are spoken within the same speech community. Adjective: diglossic or diglossial. Bilingual diglossia is a type of diglossia in which one language variety is used for writing and another for speech.

In Dialectology (1980), Chambers and Trudgill note that "people who are known to be bidialectal [i.e., those with a facility for using two dialects of the same language] do actually control the two dialects, using one of them in special circumstances, such as when visiting a speaker with a similar 'home' background, and using the other for daily social and business affairs." The term diglossia (from the Greek for "speaking two languages") was first used in English by linguist Charles Ferguson in 1959.

Examples and Observations

"In the classic diglossic situation, two varieties of a language, such as standard French and Haitian creole French, exist alongside each other in a single society. Each variety has its own fixed functions—one a 'high,' prestigious variety, and one a 'low,' or colloquial, one. Using the wrong variety in the wrong situation would be socially inappropriate, almost on the level of delivering the BBC's nightly news in broad Scots.

"Children learn the low variety as a native language; in diglossic cultures, it is the language of home, the family, the streets and marketplaces, friendship, and solidarity. By contrast, the high variety is spoken by few or none as a first language. It must be taught in school. The high variety is used for public speaking, formal lectures and higher education, television broadcasts, sermons, liturgies, and writing.

D. Language shift and death

Language contact sometimes occurs when there is increased social interaction between people from neighbouring territories who have traditionally spoken different languages. But more frequently it is initiated by the spread of languages of power and prestige via conquest and colonisation. Traditionally, language contact has been a subfield of historical linguistics, concentrating on changes in languages due to influence from other languages, rather than internal change. When words, grammatical elements or sounds from one language are incorporated in another language, we call this borrowing.

It is different from code-switching, which is the alternation between two or more languages or language varieties, as the latter requires a mastery of two or more languages and the use of a wide range of rules of the languages being switched. The borrowing of a word does not presuppose knowledge of the language from which it is taken. Once borrowed, the borrowed element becomes part of the borrowing language. Therefore, speakers might not even be aware of the borrowed status of a word, especially when it is assimilated into the pronunciation system of their language. An example is the Dutch word gas, which in English isn’t pronounced with the uvular Dutch g.

Language shift is denotes the replacement of one language by another as the primary means of communication within a community. The term language death is used when that community is the last one in the world to use that language. The extinction of Cornish in England is an example of language death as well as shift (to English). And the demise of Norwegian as an immigrant language in the USA exemplifies shift without death, as Norwegian is of course still spoken in its original setting in Norway.

The course of shift

In the initial phases of the relationship between two languages, they may show specific distribution patterns over specific domains. Public and formal domains may be allotted to the dominant language, with more informal and personal domains allotted to the minority language. The home, religion, folk songs and tales usually are the last bastions of survival for the dominated language.

Speaker competence in language shift

Speakers of a language that is in its last stages may exhibit a range of competence from full command to zero. Three types of speakers are distinguished:

· Young fluent speakers have a native command of the ancestral language, but show subtle deviations from the norms of older speakers.

· Passive bilinguals are able to understand the ancestral language, but are unable to produce it themselves.

· Semi-speakers continue using the ancestral language in imperfect way.

The term ‘semi-speaker’ can be contrasted to the concept of the new speaker, about which you have learned earlier.

E. Code – Switching

Code switching can be defined as the use of more than one language, variety, or style by a speaker within an utterance or discourse, or between different interlocutors or situations (Romaine, 1992:110).

Code switching occurs mostly in bilingual communities. Speakers of more than one language are known for their ability to code switch or mix their language during their communication. As Aranoff and Miller (2003:523) indicate, many linguists have stressed the point that switching between languages is a communicative option available to a bilingual member of a speech community, on much the same basis as switching between styles or dialects is an option for the monolingual speaker.

There are a number of possible reasons for switching from one language to another, and these will now be considered, as presented by Crystal (1987). The first of these is the notion that a speaker who may not be able to express him/herself in one language switches to the other to compensate for the deficiency. As a result, the speaker may be triggered into speaking in the other language for a while. This type of code switching tends to occur when the speaker is upset, tired or distracted in some manner.

Secondly, switching commonly occurs when an individual wishes to express solidarity with a particular social group. Rapport is established between the speaker and the listener when the listener responds with a similar switch. This type of switching may also be used to exclude others from a conversation who do not speak the second language. An example of such a situation may be two people in an elevator in a language other than English. Others in the elevator who do not speak the same language would be excluded from the conversation and a degree of comfort would exist amongst the speakers in the knowledge that not all those present in the elevator are listening to their conversation.

In some situations, code switching is done deliberately to exclude a person from a conversation. It is seen as a sign of solidarity within a group, and it is also assumed that all speakers in a conversation must be bilingual in order for code switching to occur. Bilinguals do not usually translate from the weaker language to the stronger one. Code switching is used most often when a word doesn't "come".

Code switching can be used in a variety of degrees, whether it is used at home with family and friends, or used with superiors at the workplace.

Types Of Code Switching

Code switching can be classified as follows:

1. Inter-Sentential

In inter-sentential code switching, the language switch is done at sentence boundaries. This is seen most often between fluent bilingual speakers. For example: If you are late for the job interview, işe alınmazsın.

2. Intra-Sentential

In intra-sentential code switching, the shift is done in the middle of a sentence, with no interruptions, hesitations or pauses indicating a shift. The speaker is usually unaware of the shift. Different types of switch occur within the clause level including within the word level. Some researchers call it also code mixing. For example: You are sleepy coğu zaman, because you spend a lot of saat in your bed.

3. Extra-Sentential

There is an insertion of a tag from one language into an utterance that is in another language. For example: Turkish students use some boundary words like ama (but) or yani (I mean) while speaking English.

CLOSING

Conclusion

A. Societal multilingualism

B. Domains

C. Diglossia

D. Language shift and death

References

Romaine, Suzanne. 1994. Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Second edition. Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc. New York

http://www.f.waseda.jp/buda/texts/language.html

http://www.cal.org/areas-of-impact/language-culture-in-society/societal-multilingualism

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Code-Switching-Definition-Types-and-Examples-of-Code-Switching

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/multilingual-practices/0/steps/22665

https://www.thoughtco.com/diglossia-language-varieties-1690392