Why is linguistic competence often used as a measure and scale of social categorization - Essay Example

?Why is linguistic competence often used as a measure and scale of social categorization? Social categorization is a tool that is used by sociologists to help understand the complexities of human social existence. While some categories such as gender, age, class, ethnicity and economic position are relatively easy to define and use, there are nevertheless a number of complicating factors which make it difficult to understand the connections which may exist between such categories. In some cases these categorizations even appear to contradict each other, and so more subtle means of categorization would be useful to researchers in illuminating the differences and similarities that exist in and between different social groups. This paper examines the variable of linguistic competence, and suggests why it is so often used in combination with other measures and scales of categorization in studies of complex modern communities. In the last few hundred years, the world has become increasingly connected, due to factors such as industrialisation, urbanisation and now the advent of the internet and an international and largely capitalist market characterised by globalisation. People travel more, and there is significantly more interaction between different groups, especially in urban areas which attract people because of the possibility of employment and economic success. In more isolated and rural societies, social categorization is a fairly straightforward process. Categories are more enduring, and people can be allocated quite distinctly into separate analytical spheres. Nowadays most Western societies and increasing numbers of developing countries have seen a huge shift to urban lifestyles, and connections are now much more extensive, with the result that sociologists have difficulty in finding frameworks of analysis which explain exactly how society is changing over time. It is important, therefore, to find new categories which take account of greater diversity in populations, and help to see the order that exists within an apparently chaotic situation. One key insight was contributed by Labov, who realised that language variation is a socially regular phenomenon, and that this is true both in smaller, homogeneous societies, and in large, linguistically heterogeneous cities. (Labov, quoted in Milroy and Milroy, 1992, p. 1.) While social class is a useful categorization, especially for large scale political and economic processes, it has limitations when it comes to the detail of how people interact at a personal level. Milroy and Milroy take the view that a smaller scale and finer approach is to be found in the analysis of linguistic and social variation which occurs within networks that people construct in their day to day lives. The study of linguistic variation is a tool can be used to describe how people express their affinity with certain groups, and their separateness from other groups. This more refined approach does not negate the macro level social class distinctions of classical sociology, but rather enhances and complements them, with a view to finding out more specific types of information that tends to get lost in these larger categories. A complicating factor in this field is the differing conceptions that researchers have of society itself. It is possible, for example, to integrate sociolinguistic theories into the views of Marx, positing an eternal struggle going on between hegemonic forces and resistant forces. Social class plays a big role in this world view, because higher class groups exercise power over others and can exploit those who are economically weaker. This political understanding can explain some of the variations that can be observed over longer periods of time. It illuminates why people can be categorized in groups of according to their compliance with dominant norms, for example in some countries such as Italy and Germany there is a distinction between standard language and regional dialect language which is related to social class. In these countries there is a relation of hierarchy which makes exclusive use of the standard language more of an upper class habit, while exclusive use of dialect is used by lower classes, and people who use both demonstrate how this situation is evolving over time. Trudgill points out that everyone speaks a dialect, which reveals the regional social background of that person, and claims that no dialect is superior to any other dialect. (Trudgill, p. 2) This may be true in a linguistic sense, since the history of linguistics has shown how dialects and languages grow and decline, becoming new or obsolete as the fortunes of dominant groups fluctuate over long periods. The very definition of what is a dialect and what is a language is a somewhat arbitrary distinction based on political and historical events rather than any inherent superiority of the one over the other. The fact remains, however, that even though Trudgill avoids the use of the phrase “social class” and uses the less precise word “background,” he still cannot entirely ingnore the role of social class. The way a person speaks automatically ties that person into categories of class as well as identity, due to the hierarchical nature of modern social relationships. An alternative view of society is that of the structuralists and post-structuralists. From this perspective, individuals help to construct the systems that they live in, and to some extent they agree between themselves certain behavioural norms, including linguistic ones. The work of Bourdieu has focussed attention on the concept of “cultural capital” which takes the Marxist view of exchange of goods and the accumulation of wealth and puts it into the domain of intellectual and social achievements. According to Bourdieu, the individual’s possession of non-monetary capital, in the form of education, ideas and ability to manipulate language, is an important indicator of that individual’s ability to rise through the ranks of society. This theory hypothesizes that the more cultural capital a person has, the higher in society that person can rise. One way of measuring this invisible “cultural capital” is to analyse the way that people use language, since this is how so much of this accumulated cultural wealth is mediated from person to person. In Bourdieu’s view, categorizing people according to class is too simplistic, because people operate in multidimensional social spaces, and the types of language that they use can be valued differently from place to place, having symbolic meanings that are traded, as if in a market place. This means people are born into a specific part of a system in which they acquire linguistic capital which has a particular symbolic value in that context, and they can also build on that , by acquiring additional features and symbolic meanings through education, migration etc, which give them additional opportunities to move within the social hierarchies that exist. The prevailing education system ensures that some languages or types of language are more highly regarded, and therefore more valuable, in this linguistic marketplace, but there is potential for change and movement within this framework. (Bourdieu, pp. 55-57) Social scientists have at times been reluctant to accept the validity of the discipline of linguistics perhaps because of its ability to operate across conventional sociological classifications. There is plenty of evidence, however, to support the view that of all the social sciences, linguistics can be said to have the soundest basis in scientific methodology. The eminent social anthropologist Levi Strauss argued that etymology, which delves into the origins of words, can contribute much to the field of anthropology, because the language retains echoes of types of relationship which may have disappeared in society, and speaks highly of superior empirical methods that are used in linguistics (Levi-Strauss, 1958, p. 31) The discipline of linguistics has the advantage of being scientifically sound, since it depends on the analysis of hard linguistic data that can be gathered in the field, and it offers a rich source of qualitative information on how people define their identity in relation to each other. Through methods such a video and audio tape recording, and quantitative analysis of features like pronunciation, stress patterns, lexical variation, and a host of other markers, linguists can very accurately pinpoint through language what kind of networks any individual belongs to. This method can be so accurate that it is even used by criminal investigators to track down offenders when they have samples of the person’s writing or recorded speech. Quite a lot of data used in sociology comes from questionnaires and interviews, in which the respondents have to formulate answers themselves, which involves a certain amount of judgement. The potential for giving misleading answers, whether consciously or unconsciously is therefore always present. The advantage of pure linguistic data is that it is largely unmediated by the respondent or subject’s own conscious mind. When a large corpus of material is available, then linguists can trace even the tiniest details of linguistic variation. This on its own is interesting, but when matched up with demographic information, these can provide evidence of key linkages and contrasts. The particular importance of linguistic competence has been argued by Milroy and Milroy (1985) because it is a factor which can be used to show how a particular society, or sub-section of society, is changing over time. The basic linguistic theory is that “change appears to affect contextually defined subsets of phonological classes in a (generally) regular way, spreading through the community in waves…” (Milroy and Milroy, 1985, p. 340). What this means is that it is possible to detect sociological change while it is actually happening, by tracing these wave- like shifts in the way that people speak. The word competence is used here in the narrow sense of the ability of a person to switch to these emerging forms, and incorporate them into their daily speech. Conservative and innovative linguistic forms co-exist in society, but their distribution is uneven, and sociologists are particularly interested in where and why the innovations occur, or do not occur. It has been noted, for example, that the middle classes, and younger speakers, are more likely to innovate than the upper and lower classes, or older people, and this is interesting because it runs counter to the usual hierarchies of sociological classification. Notions such as prestige, and status within a network, rather than social class, or negative labels such as “peer pressure” (Eckert, 1983) are helpful in understanding this type of categorization and this insight liberates social sciences from inhibiting and over-strict categories that have been inherited from political analyses of the past. There has been some interesting work done comparing speaker competence of males and females, such as the work of Milroy and Milroy (1985) on Belfast dialects, for example, which shows males and females adopting linguistic changes at different rates, but only in very clearly defined geographical areas. This suggests that geography and gender are interacting with each other in very complex ways. The theory is that people are influencing each other through various formal and informal networks, and that they are using language to identify themselves as belonging to one particular network and not another. From purely phonetic data, therefore, theories about shifting networks in society are emerging. This methodology of examining linguistic competence is proving to be a useful tool for exploring complex social interrelations. It has some limitations, as for example its ease of use in strong network ties, where a group is cohesive and its lack of suitability for measuring weaker ties, for example when people are attached to multiple and looser networks. On the other hand it offers significant potential for examining how one strong group can influence another. Technology has moved on considerably from the time of writing of most of the research on the value of linguistic competence as a tool in sociological research, and it is surely time for more investigations along this line in which linguists and sociologists join forces to examine global phenomena which can be tracked using these language competence models. Work on the different ways in which African American linguistic forms and being adopted, for example, can illuminate some inner city networks of both white and black youths, in America and beyond. These linguistic features carry large amounts of Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” and they are being spread across modern media like commercial music, television programmes and the internet. Linguistic competence in these forms is evidence of a new, possibly global and largely virtual network, that carries commercial as well as ideological implications. Studying these phenomena with the tools of linguistics provides novel ways of categorizing these largely invisible group relationships and this is likely to provide fascinating insights into the way societies are adapting to globalisation. A start has been made by Alim and Baugh (2007), who trace the use of inner city black language from its origins as a form of resistance through waves of influence reaching into popular music and increasingly also education and other fields. The symbolic meaning of the variant linguistic forms is evolving, as successive social groups appropriate them, and this is evidence of large scale sociological change. Looking at how this is dispersed, and who is passing on these forms is an area of fruitful research for sociology, and traditional categories would not be adequate to trace these changes. In the light of this discussion above, it can be concluded, therefore, that linguistic competence is increasingly being as a measure and scale of social categorization for three main reasons. First, it provides a source of pure data which can be gathered directly from speakers, without needing to be filtered through a questionnaire process; secondly it allows a much more refined differentiation of groups thanks to its ability to focus on tiny variations in competence, and thirdly it complements somewhat fixed and static demographic data with a much richer set of evidence which captures how people and societies change. Its methods allow researchers to track and examine these changes in more detail, and to formulate new hypotheses to explain novel developments, and this makes it a very useful tool for sociology. References Alim, H.S. and Baugh, J. (Eds). 2007. Talkin black talk: language, education and social change. New York: Teachers College Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Eckert, P. (1988) Adolescent Social Structure and the Spread of Linguistic Change. Language in Society 17 (2), pp. 183-207. Levi-Strauss, C. (1958) Structural Anthropology. Allen Lane: Penguin Press. Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1985) Linguistic Change, Social Network and Speaker Innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21 (2), pp. 339-384. Milroy, L. and Milroy, J. (1992) Social network and social class: Toward an integrated sociolinguistic model. Language in Society 21, pp. 1-26. Trudgill, P. (1996) Dialects. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Routledge. Read More