ON LANGUAGE USE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Abstract

The emerging field of sociolinguistics is a response to numerous roadblocks encountered in the more specific area of linguistics. One of the more important of these roadblocks occurred in attempts to provide a linguistic explanation of bilingualism through interpreting languages in contact in terms of an interference perspective. Such a perspective emphasizes structural aspects of languages as explanations of changes in either (or any) language within the contact situation. The language contact situation, however, made extremely evident that explanations of language use must include social factors. In the case of bilingualism, the more general sociolinguistic perspective emphasizes inter-relations between language use and socially constructed situations at the micro level. At the micro level, language forms can be viewed as tools with which social meanings are constructed and communicated, each utterance thereby containing an information aspect (which is obvious) and a more general social aspect. At the macro level, language forms become markers of the relations between and among complex social groups and, in this sense, reflect the more purely sociological concerns of class and stratification. The upshot of this new perspective is that all utterances come to be viewed as tools and containers of social meaning regardless of whether those utterances come from one recognized language or from six recognized languages; people use their sounds to discriminate meaning and will accomplish that discrimination with whatever system they have at hand. Hence, through a sociolinguistic perspective, bilingualism becomes but a special case of this process. The purpose of this discussion is to illustrate some relationships between language forms and social structure in such a way that the former may be used in understanding the latter. The core assertions in this discussion are two: (1) That language forms are tools with which social structure is made sensible to members, and through which it is constantly re-created by members; and (2) that those language forms can be made sensible to the observer and used as indices of that created social structure.