Sociolinguistics

At a professional interpreter conference in 2013 a presenter stated, "The interpreter is the sole holder of all information in an interpreted encounter." The information that the interpreter holds is linked to the language and culture of the parties involved. Sociolinguistics is the study of how language interactions between members of social networks and between different social networks. This field also studies how language and culture are perceived by the interlocutors or the audience of the message. It is important for interpreters to remain aware of all parties involved and how their perception of language and culture influence an interpreted encounter. The Social Network Today in the age of mobile phones and constant connection to the…

Using generic criticism in analyzing commencement speeches has also been done. In her thesis, The Development of a Genre: Commencement Addresses Delivered by Popular Cultural Icons, Gault (2008) examined the genre of commencement rhetoric and utilized commencement speeches to determine the significant characteristics of the genre. Establishing the commonalities within the genre of commencement addresses gives the speaker a structure to which he can pattern his speech. For the audience, genres…

It has been proven that for age’s, individuals have had a tendency to form groups or to communicate with those who share the same views, abilities, and language as them. A discourse community is typically described as a group of people with similar goals, customs, and experiences. A person may belong to multiple communities and may very well overlap. I belong to four main discourse communities: Hampton University Student body, McDonald’s crew member, Social media, and Family. Each one of these…

Imagine a world where everyone had a common language they could speak to each other with. Imagine a word where hate crimes could be easily avoided by simply speaking the same language. Imagine conflicts that could have been avoided if we had similar ways of looking at the world. While dying languages are a good source of history, we should not save dying languages they build a barrier between us and would eventually be a waste of time. The foremost function of languages is to communicate ideas.…

The contemporary world has witnessed the onset of the rapid development of the internet and the creation of a global economy that has led to the creation of a globally connected world. The establishment of virtual marketplaces which enable users to purchases commodities from around the world to social media opening up new realms for cultures to intermingle with each other has led a previously unconnected world to become a mesh of different economies and cultures interlocked into one connected…

In other words, it refers to the ability to produce socially and culturally appropriate utterances (including what to say in what context as well as what not to say, how to speak in one context as opposed to another). In the same light, Bachman (1990: 94) states that sociolinguistic competence refers to “the sensitivity to or control of the specific language context”. Similarly, Canale and Swain (1980, 30) admit that sociolinguistic competence refers to the knowledge of socicultural rules of use…

the years as a result of the changes of structures in the world and society. Thus the further explanation of this essay will be on five different fields, there are, Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Semantics and Sociolinguistics. The first field that will be explained is Phonetics.…

Sociolinguistics refers to the study of language that relates with the society and the social factors. Language and dialects are both two different things. Taking into account Linguistic Variation, a language and dialect is differentiated based on mutual intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility refers to two speakers who speak the same language and understand each other but in different dialects. Dialects can be based on regional dialects which means with regards to geographical locations or it…

3.1. Letters as Loot: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Van der Wal et al. (2012) introduce, in their contribution, a recently-discovered collection of Dutch documents from the second half of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. These Dutch documents contain more than 38,000 commercial and private letters. Van der Wal et al, begin by presenting the background to the sailing letters, which are kept in the National Archives (Kew, UK), indicating…

Sociolinguistic anthropologists aim to study the use of languages by different peoples and how such uses form thought and social relationships between individuals. Hence, language can often be associated with power. That is to say that the use of a language differently amongst different individuals can establish a social hierarchy in which certain words become associated with gestures which are indicative of social status. Sociolinguistic anthropologists can study the relationship between power…