Sociolinguistics And Code Switching

Question 1

Sociolinguistics

Answer 1

The study of the language in relation to be a social factors

Question 2

Sociolect

Answer 2

The dialect of a particular class

Question 3

Overt prestige

Answer 3

A form of social value you get from using standard forms

Question 4

Covert Prestige

Answer 4

A form of social value you get from using non-standard value

Question 5

Explain Labov’s theory and how he conducted his study

Answer 5

Labov walked into 3 different retail shops in New York, one working class, middle class and higher class. He asked questions to make the people/assistants in the shop say ‘forth floor’ then he’d pretend to not here it so he asked for it to be repeated to see if their accent changed due to the expectations they had. He studied to hard ‘r’ sound used in American standard language

Question 6

Explain the Jocks and Burnouts Study and how it was conducted

Answer 6

Penelope Eckert studied the differences if categorised adolescents. She presented the idea that ‘age is not just a number’ and can be measured in 3 ways
- chronologically- how many years have passed since you were born
- biologically- how physically mature your body is
-social- how socially mature you are, links to events such as marriage, having a child or buying a house

The study was done at Detroit high school and studied how teenagers are prone to alter their language to consciously self-identify with their social in group
She studied negation and multiple negation within two groups where negation represents a lack of education due to the non-standard variation

She studied the Jocks (working class, poor, enter blue collar jobs) and the Jocks (enter white collar jobs, socially accepted, likely to go to college)

Findings-
Burnouts used double negative ‘I’m not doing nothing wrong’ 42% of the time whilst Jocks used it 13% of the time

Conclusion-
This implies not a lack of education or knowledge of grammar, but a conscious choice is made to appear as though they lacked the knowledge

Question 7

What is a negation and a multiple negation?

Answer 7

Negation- a negative term of a refusal/denial of something
Multiple negation- general term of referencing to the occurrence of more than one negative term in a clause

Eg - didn’t, won’t, no, nobody , nothing

Question 8

Code switching

Answer 8

A linguistic concept where speakers switch back and forth between two or more languages or language variations in context of a single conversation

Question 9

Explain Bernstein’s study on Social class in 1971

Answer 9

Observed the performance of working, middle + upper class on language where he theorised two types of code that can be used to communicate
- Restrictive and elaborated code

Findings-
-children of all classes understood both codes when it was spoken to them
-working class children speak using restrictive code
-middle + upper class children speak using mainly elaborated code
- working class children are disadvantaged as elaborated code s used for formal situations

-restricted code is found to be used with friends, family + tightly knit groups
-elaborated code is used when there is no prior knowledge or shared understanding so a more detailed explanation is required

Question 10

Restricted code

Answer 10

Suitable for insiders who share assumptions + understanding of the topic

Question 11

Elaborated code

Answer 11

Does not assume that the listener share their assumptions or knowledge so it’s more explained