Ch.10 Language and Society
and some related issues
授課老師：蘇以文
I-wen Su
【本著作除另有註明外，採取創用CC「姓名標示
－非商業性－相同方式分享」台灣3.0版授權釋出】
The “Work” under the Creative Commons
Taiwan 3.0 License of “BY-NC-SA”.
English with accent
 IPhone 4S (04:22)
Accent
 In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to
a particular individual, location, or nation.
 differ in quality of voice, pronunciation of vowels and consonants,
stress, and prosody
 Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language
characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word 'accent'
refers specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the
word 'dialect' encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences.
 Often 'accent' is a subset of 'dialect’
 An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside (a
geographical or regional accent), the socio-economic status of its
speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first
language, and so on.
English as L1 or L2
 Currently, there are approximately 75 territories where
English is spoken either as a first language (L1) or as an
unofficial or institutionalized second language (L2) in fields
such as government, law and education.
 It is difficult to establish the total number of Englishes in the
world, as new varieties of English are constantly being
developed and discovered.
World Englishes: The use of English as an
international and intra-national language
 Refers to the emergence of localized or indigenized varieties of
English, especially varieties developed in nations colonized by
Great Britain or influenced by the United States.
 Varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts globally,
and how sociolinguistic histories, multicultural backgrounds and
contexts of function influence the use of colonial English
 The issue of World Englishes was first raised in 1978
 to examine concepts of regional Englishes globally
 pragmatic factors considered: appropriateness, comprehensibility and
interpretability
 International Committee of the Study of World Englishes (ICWE) was
formed in 1988, at a TESOL conference in Honolulu, Hawaii
Singlish
 I not stupid
 I Not Stupid (Chinese: 小孩不笨 xiao3hai2 bu2 ben4) is a
Singaporean comedy film about the lives, struggles, and
adventures of three Primary 6 pupils who are placed in the
academically inferior EM3 stream. Its satirical criticism of the
Singaporean education system and social attitudes in Singapore
sparked public discussions and parliamentary debates that led to
reforms in the education system.
 Part 1 (Singlish) (1:20) breakfast scene
Language Policy
(in a multi-lingual society)
 I not stupid too
 I Not Stupid Too (Chinese: 小孩不笨 2; xiao3hai2 bu2
ben4 II) is a 2006 Singaporean film and the sequel to the
2002 film, I Not Stupid. A satirical comedy, I Not Stupid Too
portrays the lives, struggles and adventures of three
Singaporean youths—15-year-old Tom, his 8-year-old
brother Jerry and their 15-year-old friend Chengcai—who
have a strained relationship with their parents. The film
explores the issue of poor parent-child communication.
 Part 1 (14:38) (learning English/Chinese and social status;
education in Singapore )
Language Policy
 Designed by a nation to favor or discourage the use of a particular
language or set of languages.
 Language Policy is what a government does
 officially through legislation, court decisions
 or to determine how languages are used, cultivate language skills
needed to meet national priorities
 or to establish the rights of individuals or groups to use and maintain
languages
 Historically often used to promote one official language at the
expense of others
 Now designed to protect and promote regional and ethnic
languages whose viability is threatened
Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language
 In 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the Chinese
Proficiency Test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004.
 From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and
Northern Ireland taking Advanced Level exams in Chinese
increased by 57%.
 The USC U.S.-China Institute cited a report that 51,582 students
were studying the language in US colleges and universities. While
far behind the more than 800,000 students who study Spanish, the
number is more than three times higher than in 1986.
 An estimated 40 million people are now studying Chinese as a
second language around the world
Code Switching
 I not stupid too
 Part 3 (13:52) (Code switching of the principal [English and
Mandarin], and of the neighbor [Hokkien, Mandarin and
English]; education in Singapore)
Code switching
 The concurrent use of more than one language, or language
variety, in conversation, in a manner consistent with the
syntax and phonology of each variety
 In 1940s and 1950s, code-switching was considered a kind of
sub-standard language usage.
 Since 1980s, code-switching is deemed as a kind of normal,
natural product of bilingual and multilingual language use.
 Code mixing is a term for a related concept, used
 Either as synonymous term for code-switching,
 Or as a term denoting the formal linguistic properties of said
language-contact phenomena, whereas code-switching is to
denote the actual, spoken usages by people who are multilingual
Social motivation for code switching
 Code-switching sometimes indexes social-group membership
in bilingual and multilingual communities.
 Some sociolinguists describe the relationships between codeswitching behaviors and class, ethnicity, and other social
 Conversational analyst Peter Auer suggests that code
switching does not simply reflect social situations, but that it
is a means to create social situations
Language shift
 language transfer/ language replacement
 The progressive process whereby a speech community of a
language shifts to speaking another language
 The data is used to measure the use of a given language in the
lifetime of a person, or most often across generations within
a linguistic community.
 The process whereby a community of speakers of one
language becomes bilingual in another language, and
gradually shifts to the second language is called assimilation.
 When a linguistic community ceases to use their original
language, language death is said to occur
Education
 Movie: Three Idiots
 Plot
Farhan Qureshi and Raju Rastogi want to re-unite with their
fellow collegian, Rancho, after faking a stroke abroad an Air India
plane, and excusing himself from his wife - trouser less respectively. Enroute, they encounter another student, Chatur
Ramalingam, now a successful businessman, who reminds them of
a bet they had undertaken 10 years ago. The trio, while
recollecting hilarious antics, including their run-ins with the Dean
of Delhi's Imperial College of Engineering, Viru Sahastrabudhe,
race to locate Rancho, at his last known address - little knowing
the secret that was kept from them all this time.
Three Idiots
 Part 1 (09:00)
 Part 3 (09:00) (the president's orientation speech; the
definition of machine)
 Part 4 (9:11) on school and getting grades
 Part 14 (9:00) father and son (Joshi) on career change (to be
a photographer); Sherman Joshi Interview
My Fair Lady
 PLOT
Gloriously witty adaptation of the Broadway musical about
Professor Henry Higgins, who takes a bet from Colonel Pickering
that he can transform unrefined, dirty Cockney flower girl Eliza
Doolittle into a lady, and fool everyone into thinking she really is
one, too! He does, and thus young aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill
falls madly in love with her. But when Higgins takes all the credit
and forgets to acknowledge her efforts, Eliza angrily leaves him
for Freddy, and suddenly Higgins realizes he's grown accustomed
to her face and can't really live without it.
 My Fair Lady- Audrey Hepburn (7:40) (with Japanese subtitle)
 Introducing Eliza Doolittle
Language and Social Status
 Why can't the English (Standard English vs. the Cockney
dialect) (2:32)
 Eliza Doolittle's accent (2:22)
 The rain in Spain (2:36)
Dialect
 Refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a
particular group of the language's speakers
 Applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect
may also be defined by other factors, such as social class
 A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and
pronunciation (phonology, including prosody). Accent is
appropriate, not dialect, refers to situations when a distinction
is made only in terms of pronunciation.
 The particular speech patterns used by an individual are
termed an idiolect.
Globalization
 The Call Center Movie (12:45)
(English and globalization; Indian English)
 Funny Call Center Agent (5:34) cartoon
Sociolinguistics
 The descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of
society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context,
on the way language is used, and the effects of language use
on society.
 Also studies how language varieties differ between groups
separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion,
status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation
and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals
in social or socioeconomic classes.
 Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and
was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US
and Basil Bernstein in the UK.