Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics by Romaine Suzanne (1994-02-17) Paperback

by Suzanne Romaine

Why have 1500 separate languages developed in the Pacific islands of Melanesia? Why do Danes understand Norwegian better than Norwegians understand Danish? Why is a Cornish accent rated higher than Cockney speech but lower than Oxford English? Are British and American English different languages? Linguistics tends to ignore the relationship between languages and the societies in which they are spoken, while sociology generally overlooks the role of language in the constitution of society. Suzanne Romaine provides a clear, lively, and accessible introduction to the field of sociolinguistics, emphasizing the constant interaction between society and language. She discusses both traditional and more recent issues such as language and social class, language and gender, language in education, pidgins and creoles, and language change. She shows how our linguistic choices are motivated by social factors, and how certain ways of speaking come to be vested with symbolic value. In her examples she draws on studies of cultures all over the world, including her own extensive field work in Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, and Britain.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Language, Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

She is Merton Professor of English language at the University of Oxford.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a much easier read than the other book I read by her recently. In places it covers quite similar ground – and the last chapter and conclusion are thirty pages I wish I had read six months ago when I was worrying over the problem of linguistic deficit, I must say she covers this misinterpretation of Bernstein’s theory much better than either Bernstein or Halliday do in the second volume of Class, Codes and Control (or perhaps I’m just more ready to hear the message now). The message, as I’ve come to myself over the last while, is that neither the elaborated code nor the restricted code are bad in themselves for learning – it is just that no one teaches according to a restricted code, and so if you don’t have access to an elaborated code you simply won’t have access to education. This is not at all the same as saying that having only access to a restricted code is the cause of educational deficit. A teacher’s job, therefore, is to do two things – communicate subject content and build student language skills toward the understanding and use of an elaborated code. The sad fact is that the second of these tasks is something that is rarely understood as part of a teacher’s role – An elaborated code is seen as something that is supposed to develop ‘naturally’ – and so it does, with a certain class of students, however, with others the message system of school is confusing at best and at worst a confounding mess.

There were things in this book I’d never really thought about before. We tend to think of people having ‘nationalities’. I watched a Youtube clip the other day of a Cain rally where someone sang the second verse of The Star Spangled Banner and all those around him stood and put their hands over their hearts. Those people would have no doubt that there are such things as nationalities in the world and that those nationalities are linked to language. This book details many furious campaigns in the US to ensure that only English is used to teach in schools, on the strongly held belief that if the US is to be one nation it needs to speak one language. Whether this means that the students learn anything at all at school is almost beside the point. A terrifying instance is detailed in this book of a group of Mexican students who were defined as being mentally retarded due to their failing a test. The test had been given to them in English, even though they spoke Spanish. Nonetheless, failing the test proved them to be mentally retarded.

But the thing that I hadn’t really thought about before has to do with the number of nations that there are in the world – about 150 give or take – and the number of languages there are in the world, I don’t know, say ten times more. The relationship between language community and nation is complex, to say the least. But I think we tend to assume that a nation is a place with a single language – at least, we in the monolingual West do. Of course, much of the rest of the world is multi-lingual. I also found it fascinating that people tend to mis-report the language they speak. This seems bizarre, but if you speak four or five languages you may say the language you speak at home is not the language you normally speak, but a high prestige language – particularly say, Arabic for Muslims (Classical Arabic being the language of the Koran), rather than say Farsi.

The relationship between prestige and non-prestige languages is a constant theme of the book. We tend to think that there are languages that are better at helping people to engage in thinking – English being the ‘best’ language say, because it has so many more words than other languages and therefore allows greater definition, or German being the best for Philosophy, because its grammar is so rigorous – but actually even Tok Pisin, with its remarkably limited lexicon, does not bar a speaker from conceptual understanding. What is much more important is that the language be a written language – that it have a codified version of the language. This allows reflection on both the language itself and is a stepping-stone towards the logical structuring of concepts. This seems to be the key.

However, prestige structures are socially determined. The victors may or may not get to write history, but they certainly get to decide what is the proper way to speak and which are the ways that are without class (or as one person refers to it in the book, talking rough). One of my favourite examples is that in the UK it is symptomatic of RP to drop the post-vowel ‘r’, one ‘drives their cah to the bah’. In the US pronouncing the the post vowel ‘r’ is the high prestige form. This isn’t used in the book just to prove the arbitrariness of these variations. The author shows how these prestige styles often lead to hypercorrection (generally something common in lower middle-class people – that is, those closest to the abyss that is falling back into the working class. These lower middle-class people over-do their class distinguishing linguistic characteristics, often with near comic results). For example, not only will people in the US say, “I’m off to the baR in my caR” – but they will also add an ‘r’ where it simply doesn’t belong. Just who is this ShaR of Iran, anyway? The added ‘r’ being a hypercorrection.

The basic thesis of the book is that language is essentially a social activity and needs to be understood according to the social interactions it enables. This leads to the obvious point that learning ‘correct’ grammar is a function of social use of language, and so the Chomskian distinction between competence and performance understates the real issue. As she says at the end of the book, this book is called language in society, not language and society. She is surprised that someone like Chomsky, someone clearly interested in social and political change, has created a theory of linguistics that has nothing at all to say about social interaction other than that it is about ‘power’. This is something I’ve wondered at as well.

This is a fascinating book – the stuff on Pidgin and Creole languages is probably the most interesting part of the book, though. Particularly if you haven’t read Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which covers much the same territory.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had to read this book for a 3rd year university class. It is a fairly easy read.

[Synthia Salomon, Ed.S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for one of my favorite classes (EDU 409) Language and Literacy in Education. I learned a lot from this book including what no bedtime story means (narrative skills at home and school).

[Banana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, never read something about this topic and very enlightening.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book's topic (sociolinguistics) fascinated me, and the author presented the material in a skilled and excited manner. I would recommend it to any lay person who is interested in how culture, age, gender, and other social factors affect languages and language use around the world!

[svitlana ⟡]

I have no idea how to rate such books, especially given that I’m not a linguistics student and therefore a few bits in it bored me. But it had a lot of ideas/facts that were completely new to me, which is great.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though it's not very big, it's packed with lots of useful information.

[marta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me he leído solo el capitulo 1 para clase pero bastante interesante ✨