Sociolinguistics as a Major That Has Been in Existence - Essay Example

Sociolinguistic This research investigates sociolinguistics as a major that has been in existence. The development of English as a language remains a remarkable phenomenon. It is said that when Caesar stepped the soil in Britain, English was not even in existence. Later, after approximately five hundred years, Englisc was perhaps spoken by very few individuals as presently Cherokee is spoken, or other native Australian or American language. Approximately after one-thousand years, during Shakespeare tenure, English was one of the native speeches of around seven million individuals. Currently, it is spoken by not less than 750 million individuals and half of them are native speakers. English has turned to be the planet’s most spoken language. Some critics provoked a huge amount of interest in the unpredictable manners in which young people appropriate and apply linguistic resources consciously in greatly marked identity forms through a process that can be called styling. English, just like any other language has made tremendous steps globally; a fact that is widely supported since English is regarded to be the language that is used in transforming the entire world. Introduction Sociolinguistic is a term used in referring to the study of the relationship connecting society and language. It is the duty of sociolinguists to explain why individuals speak dissimilarly in different social contexts. The phrase “sociolinguist” was arrived at by the social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the year 1963 to distinguish its new advisory committee. The term was a psycholinguistics’ analog, the interdisciplinary major it had magnificently brokered a decade earlier. Whatever sociolinguistics has to avail to studies of English as a language, shall be defined by emerging developments, and not the older ones. The new ones pose a great challenge to the study of English. A lot of changes have contributed to the emergence of some terminologies used in a particular language. Just like any other discipline, sociolinguistic shelters a tremendous variety of approaches. In other parts of sociolinguistics, it seems as very little has taken place for the past couple of decades; however in others, there are new developments witnessed and they are up-coming at a speed flouting that of publishing, resulting to most people downloading working papers ad disbursing PowerPoint presentations instead of finished work. This paper has focused on the kind of languages used by most people; for this case, slang and original English. The scope of this study has also touched on different accent such as Mexican, Indian, and Arabian. The paper has also concentered on the kind of language most Americans use on the streets. The study ends with looking at the kind of language the Middle East use. One of the significance of sociolinguistic is that it takes up the social cosmos in studying language regarding topics that most linguistics normally keeps in the background. In general, a sociolinguistics would distinguish France French from Canadian French as well as various dialects within the republic of France and the manner in which they interact with one another. Method Sociolinguistics should incorporate everything including ‘who speaks or writes what kind of language to when and whom and to what end,’ that is, the social distribution of items of linguistic to considering the way a specific linguistic variable may relate to the formulation of a certain grammatical rule in a specific dialect or language, and also to the procedures through which languages undergo changes. Anything entailing sociolinguistics must be oriented toward both theory and data; this means that, any conclusion that has been settled upon must be supported with evidence. Generally, the research must be enthused by questions that are answerable in a certified scientific manner. Since sociolinguistic is an empirical form of science, the study has been based on adequate database. Literature review Languages used by most people Linguists approximates that there are nearly over six thousand different languages that are spoken in the world currently. The imprecision in this approximation is largely because some dialects are in the phase of deviating and it is not clear whether they have entered the stage of being distinct languages. English remains largely distributed than all other languages that are spoken. Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language having a lot of speakers. English is an official language in over fifty countries together with several small territories and colonies. English is dominating due to the fact that it is the first foreign language learned by most children in the European Union. Almost a third of world’s population understands and is able to speak English and to some extent, it has become the most useful language to get to learn for the reasons of international travels and at the same time, it is currently the de facto diplomacy language. English speakers have not spared English when it comes to speaking slang language. Slang is a very informal language that is often used by youths. It is challenging to keep up with slang since it keeps on ‘mutating’ and almost each generation come up with its own vocabulary. The language changes each and every time. New phrases and words appear and advance. The way it is spoken by the youths may be very hard for adults to understand. Additionally, it differs from country to country; for instance, the English slang spoken in Britain greatly differs from that spoken in the US. An example of slang; ‘who loves ya, baby? ’ and ‘ A hoodie will mean a young person wearing a jacket with a hood’. Slang expressions are basically created in the same manner as standard speech. Both the speaker and the listener must originate from the same culture. Slang expressions may take the form the same as metaphors. Language accents An accent is simply a technique of pronouncing a language; this implies that it is impossible to speak minus an accent. Others may think that they don’t have an accent; the underlying fact is that each and everybody have an accent. An individual’s accent comes as a result of where, how, and when one learned the language being spoken; this gives an impression about an individual to other people. There is no singular Mexican or Mexican – American accent because Mexican Spanish speakers differ in their ability to learn and speak English just like any other person. However, in its extreme form, Mexican accent cannot repeat the English th, sh, and y sounds or differentiate between the long and short vowel sounds used in English. Thus a sentence like: “Put the box back on the self” will sound like “Poot dee bahck on dee chelf”. Indian accents differ greatly. Part of Indians speak English having an accent that is almost close to Standard British accent; some lean toward an increased ‘vernacular’, native tinted, accent for the speech they use in English. With regard to several world English, an Indian English has been shaped by features of native speaker languages. The ‘t’ and ‘d’ of the speakers are pronounced in a very funny way. There are so many Arabic dialects that do exist. In most of their pronunciation for instance, “p” is pronounced like “b”. there is no letter “p” in the Arabic alphabet, most of English speaking Arabs experience difficulty in pronouncing this particular sound; so instead of saying ‘pepsi’, they would say ‘Bebsi.’ Language used by most Americans A lot of languages are spoken in the United States of America and the most frequently used language is American English. Other languages such as Spanish and German have taken tall in some other states. Most Americans use several vocabularies that cannot be found in the dictionary, this is especially in the streets which have seen the birth ‘slang’. Young people are at the fore front in making slang take the lead. Some sort of slang language has also been used to extent of some users looking for their meanings in the dictionaries. Native American dialects are enunciated in minute pockets of the nation, but the population is reducing, and the languages are nearly used widely outside reservations. English remains the de facto nationwide dialectal of the USA, however, there is no formal language present at the federal level. Over a million Americans as well occasionally speak Taglog, French, Korean, German and Vietnamese. Among the top spoken languages by Americans in the streets is one that has been broadly used in the Nation long before Spain and English arrival; it is called Navajo. Languages of the Middle East There are four major languages spoken in the Middle East namely; Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Turkish. Arabic is the most commonly spoken language in the Middle East, being an official language in eighteen Arab countries. Arabic has a large number of specific dialects like Egyptian Arabic, Leviathan Arabic, Moroccan Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are used for publication, universal business, and overall communication among speakers of various dialects. Hebrew is Israel’s official language together with Arabic. It is a Semitic dialectal of the Afro Asiatic language clan. Being the Jewish language, Hebrew has two forms; classical ancient Hebrew and Modern Hebrew mainly used for the purpose of religious matters. Up to today, Ancient Hebrew is still being studied and is never regarded as a dead language. The second most spoken language is the Persian language. While it has been confined to Iran and some border regions in some neighboring countries, Iran remains to be one of the regions’ largest and the most popular. Persian is an Aryan dialectal of the Indo-Aryan branch of the family of Indo European languages. It is greatly influenced by Arabic through Islam and Aramaic, a pre cursor to Arabic. The third most robustly spoken language is Turkish language. Turkish is cramped to Turkey, which is also a very large country and has a huge population. It is a member of the Turkic languages, which originates from Central Asia. There are other several languages spoken in the Middle East though they are minutely used. They include Armenian, Syriac, Berber, and Azerbaijani among others. Conclusion Language remains one of the most powerful emblems of society’s social behavior. In the usual information transfer through language, language is used to send crucial social messages about who we are, who we associate with and our origin. It is normally shocking to find out how extensively one may judge an individual’s background, intentions and characters based on simply upon an individual’s dialect, language, or in some cases, even the choice of one word. Having the social role of language, it remains to reason that a single strand of language study is supposed to concentrate on the role language play in the society. Sociolinguistics has turned to be an increasingly necessary and famous field of study, since some cultures around the universe expand their base of communication and intergroup and inter-individual connections take on mounting significance. The main concept underlying in sociolinguistics is somehow simple: Use of Language symbolically represents fundamental dimensions of our social behavior together with human interaction. The concept is very simple, but the manners in which language reflects behavior may often be subtle and complex. Additionally, the relationship between society and language affects a wide series of encounters, from broadly based global relations to narrowly defined interpersonal relationships. Works Cited Andersen, Gisle. Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam [u.a.: Benjamins, 2001. Print. Read More