LINGUIST 101G Language and Society

Schedule
Schedule B: Humanities and Social Sciences

Semester
Semester One

Campus
City Campus

This course is about language in its social and historical context. Topics may include language variation, language and gender, language and social identity, language contact, language in the media, language maintenance.

This course is for students who are interested in how we use language as a social tool and social resource. The course explores a range of topics related to this:

• We will see how the kind of language we use can tell us things about who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be.
• We will see that how other people perceive us has an effect on how they perceive the way we talk.
• We’ll consider how we learn to be competent members of a speech community and how variation in language is an essential component of what we know when we “know” a language.
• We will try and explore not only academic research into these topics, but also identify ways that this knowledge can be taken out of the linguistics classroom and into everyday life, or other academic disciplines.

At the end of LINGUIST 101G, you should be able to:

• Describe how differences in language use can manifest themselves at different levels of structure.
• Explain why we can say that there are no ‘single style’ speakers.
• Discriminate between and define key terms in the field, eg, code-switching, politeness, apparent time, macro-sociolinguistics, micro-sociolinguistics (and others).
• Explain clearly the relationship of different topics in the readings to each other.
• Apply data (texts and recordings) to problems in language and society.

• Week 1: Why study language in society? Speech communities.
• Week 2: Acquisition of language – Where and how do we learn language? How do we become members of speech communities?
• Week 3: Style in language – Attention to speech; attention to others. Presenting identities.
• Week 4: Perceptual dialectology and lexical shift; eye dialect.
• Week 5: Politeness – TU/VOS systems; different theories of politeness.
• Week 6: Societal multilingualism and code-switching; affective dimensions of multilingualism.
• Week 7: Code-mixing and language shift.
• Week 8: Language change – real time and apparent time.
• Week 9: Language as a social marker – social class and social networks.
• Week 10: Communities of practice; language in new media.
• Week 11: Gender and sexual identities.
• Week 12: What’s the point? Taking linguistics outside the university.

The course is delivered by means of lectures and tutorials.

Assessment is by combination of final exam (50%) and two short essays (c.500 words) each worth 25% (total 50%).
 

There is one required text for this course: Meyerhoff, Miriam (2010). Introducing Sociolinguistics, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Additional readings will be available on the course Library page.