Multilingual speech communities

Multilingual speech communities

Lecture : Mr. Imam Ghazali M,Pd.

By :

Jumhani

2014034060013

FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION

ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF JEMBER

2017

Domains: domains of language use, a term popularised by an American sociolinguist, Joshua Fishman. A domain of language involves typical interactions between typical participants in typical settings about a typical topic. Examples of these domains are family, friendship, religion, education and employment.

Domains of Language Use

People often make language choice decisions based on norms governing appropriate language choice in various domains. A domain is an abstraction which summarizes a sphere of activity for specific participants in specific times, settings and role relationships. The term was popularised by Fishman (1971). Fishman identified five types of domains. They are the family, friendship, religion, employment and education.

Setting: the physical situation or the typical place where speech interactions occur (code choice), settings such as home, church, mosque, school, office, etc.

Diglossia: communities rather in which two languages or language varieties are used with one being a high variety for formal situations and prestige, and a low variety for informal situations (everyday conversation). Diglossia has three crucial features; two distinct varieties of the same language are used in the community, with one regarded as high (H) variety and the other as low (L) variety. Each variety is used for quite distinct functions; H & L complement each other. No one uses the H variety in everyday conversation.

Example: the standard classical Arabic language is the high variety in Arab countries, and it is used for writing and for formal functions, but vernacular (colloquial) Arabic is the low variety used for informal speech situations.

The term ‘diglossia’ is used to explain the relationship between two or more varieties of the same language which are used in a community in different functions. The two varieties are characterized as H(igh) and L(ow).

Examples of Diglossia

Greece (pre-1975)       :           Katharevousa (H)                    Dhimotiki (L)

Switzerland                 :           High German (H)                    Swiss German (L)

Haiti                            :           French (H)                               Haitian Creole (L)

Egypt                          :           Classical Arabic (H)                Colloquial Arabic (L)

Polyglossia: basically polyglossia situations involve two contrasting varieties (high and low) but in general it refers to communities that regularly use more than two languages.

Code-switching: it is to move from one code (language, dialect, or style) to another during speech for a number of reasons such, to signal solidarity, to reflect one's ethnic identity, to show off, to hide some information from a third party, to achieve better explanation of a certain concept, to converge or reduce social distance with the hearer, to diverge or increase social distance or to impress and persuade the audience (metaphorical code-switching)

Lexical borrowing: it results from the lack of vocabulary and it involves borrowing single words – mainly nouns. When speaking a second language, people will often use a term from their first language because they don't know the appropriate word in their second language. They also my borrow words from another language to express a concept or describe an object for which there is no obvious word available in the language they are using.

* Code switching involves a choice between the words of two languages or varieties, but Lexical borrowing is resulted from the lack of vocabulary.

Speech Community

In the literature of sociolinguistics, the term ‘speech community’ is a recurrent one. For ‘functional’ sociolinguistics, the speech community is the basis of analysis. Fishman (1971:28) defines the speech community as “one all of whose members share at least a single speech variety and the norms for its appropriate use”. Hymes (1972:54) definition is very similar, “a speech community is defined as a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety”. For Gumperz (1972:16), a speech community is regarded as a situation where “speakers who share knowledge of the communicative constraints and options governing a significant number of social situations, can be said to be members of the same speech community”.

Ethnography of Communication

Critiquing the above approach to language choice, Sankoff (1972) indicates that the opposite bottom-up interpretation, from language use to the on-going social interaction, does not always work either. It cannot accommodate a linguistic situation where more than  one code is acceptable and unmarked like those found in her research in Papua New Guinea, where two languages (Buang and New-Melanesian) are used interchangeably in public.

Hymes (1967) elaborately presents situational components of interpersonal communication, which he puts together under the acronym SPEAKING.  These components are:

a)      Setting and scene, which refer to the general physical make-up of the speech event, such as the time, location and atmosphere;

b)      Participants, which consist of the speaker, the addressee(s) and the hearer(s) in the speech event;

c)      Ends, which refer to the speaker’s and the addressee’s goals in participating in the speech event as well as the real outcome of such participation, which might turn out different from the targeted goals;

d)     Act sequence, which consists of how and what is said in the speech event;

e)      Key, which represents the manner and mood of the communication in progress;

f)       Instrumentalities, which include the channels of communication (spoken or written) and the speaker’s language variety, which will surely influence the listener’s and/or hearer’s variety in case they have to produce their own utterance;

g)      Norms, which include the standard procedure of the interaction in the speech event (e.g. is interruption permitted or not?); and

h)      Genres, which stand for the linguistic forms of that particular speech event (e.g. a sermon requires a linguistic genre different from what a lecture does).

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