Introduction to Summary Outline of Lectures

Introduction to Summary Outline of Lectures

Language and Society: What Your Speech Says about You

By Valerie Fridland

Scope:

As a speaker of a language, chances are you haven’t given too

much thought to how it mediates and shapes your experience as a

participant in the social world. But as we will come to see, language

is fundamentally a social resource.

Language allows us to share ideas and relay information, but its greatest

contribution lies in its ability to establish relationships, negotiate social

meaning, and influence perspective. The social categorizing we do when

hearing someone speak is one of the most essential properties of human

language, but we often spend much more time worrying about subject/verb

agreement and parts of speech. We typically don’t realize the vast social

work that language does for us or the valuable social capital it provides.

In this course, we will see how language norms come to be collectively

meaningful and socially powerful.

Using the sounds and categories from theoretical linguistics as our core

units of study, we explore how linguistic variation, both subtle and obvious,

is exploited by all of us in our interactional choices. We start our journey

by looking at how social characteristics, such as gender, region, and class,

have been found to substantially affect the frequency with which linguistic

features occur-features as subtle as rates of verbal contraction (gonna,

hafta) and t-glottaling (“ge’ it” versus “get it”). We will also look closely

at how we construct conversation in rule-governed ways while being

responsive to the ongoing negotiation of meaning. Examining linguistic

differences based on gender, age, and ethnicity, we will see that they reflect

and create longstanding social and linguistic ideologies. Finally, we will take

on the language of the computer age and look to the future of the English

language, both at home and abroad.

As the course progresses, we will come to understand how speakers are

able to exploit linguistic resources to serve both functional and social roles.

We will also examine how and why such variation continues to exist in our

speech communities. A key component of this course is the exploration of

how variation comes to be judged by other members of the larger speech

community and how the complex intersection of language and society leads

to the stigmatization or prestige of linguistic varieties and their speakers. It is

only through careful examination of how language is used that we can begin

to understand its role as strong social capital with both costs and benefits we

rarely consider.

Although we all have access to language, we don’t all have the same

access to language. Language opens doors and it closes them. It establishes

relationships and it severs them. It represents us and it can isolate or embrace

us, depending on our match linguistically with others. In this course, we will

look beyond the system of language to explore the crucial relation between

what we say and how we live.