The Sociolinguistic Notions of Linguistic Heterogeneity and Homogeneity in the Speech Community - Essay Example

The Sociolinguistic Notions of Linguistic Heterogeneity and Linguistic Homogeneity in the Speech Community Every society organizes itself through verbal means or, in other words, through a language, which is comprehensible to its members. The relationship between society and language is an important aspect of development of both language and speech community. In this essay I will dwell on the issues of linguistic heterogeneity and linguistic homogeneity within the framework of a certain speech community. Considering that a communicative function is the most important function of language, the relationship between language and society has always been a spot question in linguistics. First of all, let us define sociolinguistic notions of a speech community, linguistic heterogeneity and linguistic homogeneity and then proceed to the examples of linguistic heterogeneity and linguistic homogeneity in a speech community within the context of sociolinguistics. It must be noted that the definition of speech community sparks controversy among notable linguists to date. Early definitions of a speech community proceeded from the basis that a speech community is a group of people residing within the area of compact settlement, which is densely inhabited by those who share the same vernacular language and tend to use the same standardized language for communication. According to the notable American linguist, William Labov, who is regarded to be the father of such discipline as variationist sociolinguistics, a speech community is a group of people who share the same language norms that do not depend on social context changes.1 However, it is important to understand that the dependence of a language on social processes can be manifested in a set of different language subsystems (i.e. forms of existence and functioning of a specific language), bilingualism or diglossia, availability or nonexistence of a written language, language policy, etc. These are important but not exclusive manifestations of the connection between a language and conditions of its functioning. Lexicon, grammatical structure and the evolution of linguistic styles exert a substantial influence upon the use of language within a speech community as well. A speech community tends to share a certain set of norms of the language use, which is manifested in the process of communication within the framework of a certain group of people who are bounded by the same lifestyle, profession, interests or represent the same social stratum, which resulted in a long-term delusion, according to which a speech community is always characterized by linguistic homogeneity. However, the most widespread approach in historical linguistics to speech communities as mostly localized and homogeneous entities made some researchers like Gumperz and Levinson, for instance, rethink the role of sociocultural contextualization of language and come to conclusion that a speech community might as well be characterized by linguistic heterogeneity, which, in turn, became a new page in the development of sociolinguistics.2 All in all, there is obvious dependence of language upon society but it may reveal itself in different forms. The relationship between language and society is not linear and a language does not reflect directly either the structure of a society or the logic of language development and its application rules. Despite the fact that speakers might share common ethnic and social background, unexpected patterns of language use at the level of single speakers can impede their communication.3 Thus, the role of individual variation within the context of a speech community cannot be disregarded as well. It must be noted that nowadays the point of view, according to which a speech community must be a group of people sharing the same language norms (just because they live together within a bounded community) has long come into disuse and the up-to-date scholarship tend to look at speech communities as a group of people, which may be either unconsolidated within the framework of a definite area of compact settlement or have group-members, who can be a part of various sub-communities simultaneously within the same society and speak different languages or dialects depending on social context. Thus, group-members of a speech community may also belong to other speech communities at the same time,4 which brings us to sociolinguistic notion of linguistic heterogeneity in a speech community that will be analyzed in detail down below. Linguistic heterogeneity is the use of one or more languages or different speech variants of the same language variety by group-members of the same speech community or different speech communities at the same time (in case members of these speech communities share at least one common language that enables their communication). As Peter Auer noted, the linguistic heterogeneity might imply the use of more than one language in a conversation by bilingual speakers or the selection of features from various linguistic systems (such as dialects), which are structurally closely related.5 A belonging to certain social stratum can predetermine the use of a particular dialect of language within a certain context, which has nothing to do with a speakers national identity but rather implies a sociocultural contextualization of language. At the same time, the existence of contrasting speech forms of the same language variety used by representatives of different social strata like, for instance, working class, middle class or upper class speakers in New York City presuppose that there is no understanding gulf between such speakers and they tend to adjust to linguistic habits of each other.6 It must be noted that the aforementioned speakers are usually able to understand one another with little or no difficulties at all without any code-switching because they share the same vernacular standardized language, even if they choose to communicate by using different speech forms of the same language variety. Thus, it is hard to define whether the abovementioned case is an illustration of linguistic heterogeneity or linguistic homogeneity, - which I will dwell on in more detail below, - because the boundaries between these sociolinguistic notions get blurred in this very situation. As a matter of fact, this is an explicit illustration of the case when speakers of the same grammatical and lexical system like English, for instance, have different systems of indexical interpretation.7 According to Gumperz and Levinson, the signalling media, the linguistic triggers may themselves be different across cultures and even across speakers of the same language from different social networks.8 On the other hand, when the use of different speech forms of the same language by speakers within one conversation depends on the national identity of speakers rather than social context, misunderstandings are likely to happen, which, in turn, may impede communication. As Gumperz and Levinson note, speakers of Indian English highlight parts of an utterance in a different way - using pitch register and/or loudness shifts that extend over an entire phrase while standard British English-speakers use syllable accent.9 Linguistic homogeneity is the use of one standardized language by group-members of a single speech community or various speech communities at the same time that may use dialects of the same standardized language under various circumstances but share the same vernacular literary language. It has to be noted that such a practical definition is used for the purpose of this research. In fact, the sociolinguistic notion of linguistic homogeneity is quite hard to define empirically because language is not a static phenomenon and is constantly changing; thus, pure homogeneity is rather an abstraction that can be strongly marked in dead languages, such as Latin, for instance. On the other hand, as it has been mentioned above, linguistic homogeneity is more of a characteristic feature of a single language community, the members of which share the same vernacular language, than a language per se. And even this definition of linguistic homogeneity is quite ambivalent because it is not an easy task to find a speech community in the present-day world, which could be characterized by unalloyed linguistic homogeneity. Linguistic homogeneity may be formally contained within the national boundaries of such countries as Germany, Italy, France or Iceland, but when it comes to real life a single language community of each of these countries is split into a great number of smaller speech communities with lots of dialects spoken; thus, sometimes the members of smaller communities that share different linguistic norms can hardly understand each other, although they formally have the same vernacular literary language. In fact, a speech community, the members of which share the same linguistic norms can be treated as a linguistically homogeneous entity. And it does not really matter whether a standardized language or a dialect, which group-members of such a speech community tend to use for ordinary communication, is in question. Let us proceed to an example and look at the speech communities of the English-speaking world. For instance, New York City speakers belong to the same speech community despite social or ethnic background because they tend to look at post vocalic [r] as prestigious and attach the same social value to lots of other linguistic elements, while in Southern England, for example, the highest prestige accent would be non-rhotic.10 Thus, the members of the aforementioned linguistically homogeneous communities observe the same linguistic norms and share the same linguistic behavior within the framework of their speech communities: what is acceptable in one community in terms of the language use may not be acceptable in another community and vice versa.11 All in all, such phenomena as sociocultural contextualization of language or diglossia make it hard at times to define whether a speech community is a linguistically heterogeneous or linguistically homogeneous one as the boundaries between the sociolinguistic notions of linguistic homogeneity and linguistic heterogeneity within the framework of a single speech community are sharply circumscribed in theory but rarely occur in their pure form in practice. As a matter of fact, the dependence of a language on social processes and conditions of its functioning often creates a situation when members of one speech community belong to another speech community simultaneously. Reference List Auer, P., Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co, 2007. Labov, W., The Social Stratification of English in New York City, 2nd edn., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Gumperz, J., and S. Levinson, Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, Current Anthropology, vol. 32, no. 5, 1991, pp. 613-623. Schreier, D., The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary: Individuation, Linguistic Heterogeneity, and Sociolinguistic Eccentricity in a Small Speech Community, Journal of English Linguistics, vol. 34, no. 1, 2006, pp. 26-57. Wardhaugh, R., and J. Fuller, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 7th edn., London, Blackwell Publishing, 2015.     Read More