3eme PPT

Sociolinguistics: Language Choice, Accommodation, and Diglossia

Sociolinguistics examines how social factors influence language use, focusing on phenomena like multilingualism, language choice, accommodation, and diglossia.

Language Choice and Use

Multilingual speakers constantly make decisions about which language or language variety to use. These choices are influenced by several factors:

• Interlocutor: Who they are speaking to.
• Domain: The social context or situation (e.g., family, religion, education, employment, friendship).
• Topic: The subject of the conversation.
• Location: Where communication takes place.
• Channel of communication: Face-to-face, telephone, email, etc.
• Type of interaction: The nature of the conversation.
• Purpose of the conversation: What the speakers aim to achieve.

The concept of a domain, introduced by Joshua Fishman, helps organize and define social life within speech communities by outlining typical addressees, settings, and topics.

Accommodation Theory

Howard Giles's Accommodation Theory posits that individuals alter their speech behavior to align with their interlocutors. This theory draws on social psychological research regarding similarity-attraction, suggesting that reducing dissimilarities can lead to more favorable evaluations.

Accommodation can manifest in various ways, such as speed of delivery, pitch range, phonological variables, vocabulary, accents, code-switching, and non-verbal cues like gestures and facial expressions. This adjustment can occur on different levels:

• Social dimension: Differences between the speech of different speakers.
• Stylistic dimension: Differences within the speech of a single speaker.
• Audience design: The principle that all language is tailored for its hearer.

Convergence and Divergence

Speakers can either converge or diverge in their language use:

• Convergence: Interlocutors become more similar by adopting linguistic, paralinguistic, or non-verbal features of the other's behavior. Motives include seeking social approval, fostering rapport, making interactions smoother, and persuading the other party.
• Divergence: Interlocutors become more different, emphasizing individual or intergroup differences. This can signal disinterest, dislike, or contempt for the interlocutor or their social group.

Accommodation can also be directed "up" (switching to a recognized language variety) or "down" (switching to a stigmatized language variety). An example like "Policespeak" illustrates how individuals may unconsciously accommodate the language of authority figures.

Diglossia

Diglossia describes a sociolinguistic situation where there is a clear functional differentiation between two or more languages or language varieties within a community. Charles Ferguson (1959) initially defined diglossia based on a "relatively stable language situation" involving a "high" (H) variety and a "low" (L) variety.

Ferguson's Concept of Diglossia

• H-variety: The prestige variety, often standardized, reserved for formal speech situations (e.g., government, education, religion, media). It is learned through formal education.
• L-variety: Used exclusively for informal speech situations in the private sphere. It is typically acquired as a first language (L1).

Ferguson identified key distinctions between H and L varieties, including function, prestige, literary language, language acquisition, standardization, stability, grammar (H-variety often more complex), lexicon, and phonology (L-variety providing the basic system). Examples include Arabic-speaking countries, Switzerland, Haiti, and Greece.

Fishman's Expansion of Diglossia

Joshua Fishman (1967) expanded Ferguson's definition, proposing that a diglossic speech community is not limited to two varieties but can involve more. He argued that diglossia refers to all language varieties with functional distribution, covering stylistic differences, dialects, and even separate (related or unrelated) languages. Fishman differentiates diglossia as a societal arrangement from bilingualism as an individual phenomenon.

In diglossic situations, the L-variety is learned at home, while the H-variety is learned later, often through institutions like school, and is necessary for access to certain social domains. The misuse of H or L varieties in inappropriate domains can breach communicative competence.

Fishman's taxonomy includes four combinations:

	Diglossia +	Diglossia -
Bilingualism +	1. diglossia with bilingualism (e.g., Switzerland)	2. bilingualism without diglossia (e.g., USA)
Bilingualism -	3. diglossia without bilingualism (e.g., Russia historically)	4. neither bilingualism nor diglossia

Fishman's concept of "extended diglossia" allows for genetically unrelated languages to coexist in a diglossic relationship. Examples of H/L variety relationships include classical/vernacular, or written/formal-spoken and informal-spoken varieties.

Medial Diglossia

Another distinction is medial diglossia, which refers to the separation between spoken and written mediums, where one language or variety is primarily spoken and another is primarily written. Research by Susan Gal on communities like Oberwart in Eastern Austria (with German and Hungarian speakers) provides insight into language change and sex roles within bilingual contexts, further illustrating these sociolinguistic phenomena.