Questions tagged [sociolinguistics]
The study of societal effects on language use and of language use on society.
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Do unschooled people use cases correctly, e.g. in Germany and in Russia?
I wonder if the case system is devised/imposed by literates and not really natural: it is said that the vulgar Latin that most people really used didn't have e.g. the cases (or all of them) of the '...
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Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
This old CollegeHumor sketch highlights an interesting phenomenon: it's often frowned upon or disapproved of, at least in the US and England, to pronounce a loanword according to the phonetics of the ...
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Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?
Many languages have pronouns that reflect gender, and some have pronouns that reflect relative social hierarchy or formality. (To pick an example I actually know, in Dutch the second person singular ...
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How powerful is literacy to slow down language change?
The degree of literacy of a certain community of speakers is generally proposed as one of the factors that affect the pace of language change. More specifically, literacy would slow down change, since ...
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Why do rhotics pattern together?
Looking at the IPA, many different types of sounds are given symbols based of of the Latin R,r: approximants, trills, taps/flaps; both coronal and uvular segments.
Sometimes, these sounds are ...
user325
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What is the relation between the words "Cossack" and "Kazakh"?
These two words in English would appear to refer to foreign peoples / cultures known to the Rus within recorded history.
The Russian wikipedia pages indicate a surface similarity in spelling:
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Why did England not maintain French as a spoken language?
In many countries around the world, especially in Africa, the people natively speak both an indigenous language and French due to French colonization.
The Norman conquest of England left us with many,...
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What explains the Icelandic language conservatism?
The Icelandic language is often used as an example of a very conservative language, compared to other Indo-European languages, in general, and to other North-Germanic languages, in particular, all of ...
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At what point does a language become its descendant?
With the possible exceptions of constructed languages, languages seem to evolve. As a real-world example, we note that Latin has evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.
What ...
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Is anyone studying change in constructed language?
Is there any serious work being done on linguistic change in constructed languages (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua, Lojban)?
I would imagine it might be difficult given the small population of native ...
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Are American English and British English growing closer together or drifting further apart?
I'm mostly wondering about vocabulary (e.g. truck vs. lorry; apartment vs. flat) but I suppose I'd be interested to learn about pronunciation too. Intuitively I feel like this could go either way. ...
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How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?
Among historically low income/education groups in the US and in my native Mexico City, "ghetto talk" is heavy on the use of pitch to convey meaning. I've always attributed this to people compensating ...
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Is linguistic change pushed by humor?
Through "meme culture," young people are inventing all sorts of new linguistic constructions purely because they think they sound funny. The interesting thing is that these jokes don't end at a ...
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What exactly is diglossia?
Any language has a formal variety, primarily (although not exclusively) used in writing, and one or more informal varieties, used in everyday speech. Yet, for some languages, like Norwegian and Arabic,...
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The current status of Irish Gaelic in Ireland
In addition to all the usual phonology, grammar, and vocabulary one has to learn for a new language there is the social situation, among many things when is it appropriate to speak in one register or ...
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Is there any evidence that modern telecommunication slows dialect differentiation?
Consider the area that includes Western Washington and Western Oregon. As many of us know, most English-speakers who were raised in this area speak more or less the same variety of English. ...
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Correlation between politeness of a culture and its languages
In the question Is there any reason why English doesn’t add respectful words in every sentence? that was asking why there's more respectful language in Korean and Japanese compared to English, the ...
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Is there an equivalent to the Flesch Kincaid test for measuring quality and understandability of speech?
I want to measure the quality of speech: is it higher level/lower level (vocabulary grammar etc.) and also the understandability of the speech, i.e. is the teacher using language above a student's ...
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Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
An answer to a different question pointed out that the vast majority of search engine queries coming from Ukraine, before the invasion, seemed to be in Russian. That was despite the fact that the ...
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Is this natural: gender concord of direct objects with the past participle in French?
Phrases in French like la photo que j'ai prise (instead of que j'ai pris) have always struck me as unnatural. I've heard a lot of French people who fail to follow this rule when speaking spontaneously,...
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Is urbanization correlated with language innovation?
In Brazil, the Portuguese dialects spoken in rural areas preserve, despite their own innovations, several features of the language that were common in the 16th century. This phenomenon is particularly ...
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In what ways do the fields of linguistics and sociology overlap?
I'm a linguistics major and I'm considering a minor in sociology (among others). In what ways do these fields overlap? More specifically, what types of sociology classes are good for a linguistics ...
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Why did the pronunciation of the rhotic phoneme /r/ change after the 2ndWW in public speech?
For example why did radio presenters roll the r on the BBC before the war and not after? Why did Brecht roll the r extensively? Why did Hitler roll the r extensively? My perspective is from the ...
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What is the term for, and a list of, "continuous dialects"?
I remember reading that Portuguese and Spanish are really just extremes on a continuum of a dialects. That is, if one travels slowly from (for example) Madrid to Lisbon, one would note nothing more ...
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why did the Franco-Provençal language decline in Switzerland?
In France, the Franco-Provençal language is endangered. The general dialect leveling in France proper is sometimes thought to be a consequence of public policy, the French government having been known ...
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What parts of speech do professional jargons tend to mint?
Many English-based jargons include newly created nouns, verbs and adjectives; and re-appropriate existing English nouns, verbs, and adjectives to new ends.
I can't come up with an example of a newly ...
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Is redundancy in language really impossible? (Case of the Spanish imperfect subjunctive)
I have heard time and again that languages will reject words and structures that are redundant. That is, for example, if though two words may seem like they are perfect synonyms (e.g., rotund and ...
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In cultures where genders speak different language varieties, how do genders quote each other?
In some cultures, females and males speak different language varieties[1].
When retelling, for example, what a man said, would a female say it in the male variety or translate it into the female ...
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Do animals have foreign languages?
Humans living in different parts of the world develop different languages; humans living in the same area speak the same language in order to be able to communicate with each other.
We know that other ...
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Sociolinguistics of pre-handover Hong Kong cinema and dialogue in non-Cantonese Chinese “dialects”
I have always heard that mutual intelligibility between the Sinitic languages of China is low. However, I am confused by the sociolinguistics of Hong Kong cinema in 1980s and 1990s. Films from that ...
user21126
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What strategies for efficiency are adopted by languages with minimal phonemic inventories?
As the size of a phonemic inventory decreases, the information rate allowed by the inventory should likewise decrease. So are there any (semantico-)pragmatic or morphosyntactic strategies that ...
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Is honorific "uncle" common across the languages of the world?
In Russian and English (and as far as I know Chinese) it's customary for kids to use honorific "uncle" when addressing elders by name (as a kid, you'd rather call an adult "uncle John" than "John", ...
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Why are sound changes regular?
Say, there is a word that used to be pronounced [ten] but gradually shifted to [tin]. I get it. There is always variety in how people pronounce words. Throw in some population dynamics, and the median ...
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Is it usual for facultative phenomenons to be socially connoted?
The sandhi phenomenon known as liaison in French bears a strong social connotation, that is to say when its realisation is facultative, it is a marker of a high social class.
Are there facultative ...
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Strong accents and rural areas correlation
(I'm not a linguist, just a Stack Exchange user who thought this site is the one for this question)
It is often the case that people living in rural areas (in any country) have a "stronger", less ...
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How do Latin American Spanish speakers acquire vosotros forms?
In travels throughout Latin America, during which I spoke Spanish learned in Spain, local people had no problem understanding my use of vosotros forms even if they lived in very isolated rural areas ...
user41876
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Is there a general term for certain words or phrases that are socially acceptable for some groups to say, but not others?
There are some words or phrases that are socially acceptable for some groups to say, but not others. A famous example in American culture is the N-word, which is acceptable for blacks to say, but not ...
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What are the differences between theoretical perspectives of the uses of the term "register"?
I'd be interested in asking people about their understanding of the term register and what this signifies for them. This would be a discussion about a specialised term and I'm sure there are multiple ...
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Reference request: ways of indicating disagreement
There are lots of ways to indicate you disagree with some aspect of an utterance. I'm thinking here of the spectrum that includes "No, not-X," "Well, not-X," "Hey, wait a minute! Not-X!" "Yes, you're ...
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Are there languages with no euphemisms?
I feel that euphemisms are a function of how society views certain aspects of life and feels that they should not be talked about directly. So are there languages with no euphemisms?
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Is author profiling based on gender possible for English?
I was recently told by a friend who works in IT that certain neural networks can be trained to predict the age and gender of authors from anonymous texts written by them (cf. arXiv:1707.03764). The ...
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Plural form as respect form - based on what?
Many languages use the plural as respected mood for a singular (even English use "you" which is basically a plural form of thu).
Now my question is: based on what those who started to speak in ...
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Comparing writing systems by ease of encoding/decoding information
Considering the variety of systems of writing, the ease with which someone can receive written information in one system of writing is not precisely identical to that of any other, and I am curious to ...
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For the 'ch' sound in Chilean Spanish, do these symbols differ?
I am researching dialects in Chilean Spanish , and one feature that is often mentioned (and one that you can hear all across Chile in conversation) is the varying pronunciation of the 'ch' sound. I ...
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Have there been any reconstructive efforts of proto-languages, where aspects of historic culture have been inferred for languages other than PIE?
I'm not sure if this is the right SE to ask this question (possibly History SE?), but here goes!
Similar to the source material for this video, have there been any efforts to infer aspects of culture ...
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What is the historical-linguistic origin of the high variety of the Burmese language?
In Myanmar (Burma), a state of diglossia exists.
How did the high (formal) variety originate historically? Did it use to have native speakers at some point in the historical development of the ...
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Languages with no past tense?
Is there a name for languages that have no specific past tense? For example, in the language of Kiribati there is no separation between past and present tense. To indicate the past, one must specify ...
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Is there a recognized foremost social factor from which idioms are derived?
I've heard some people posit that the reason a large amount of idioms in American English come from sports terminology (e.g. "ballpark figure" or "the whole nine yards") is due to the "competitive ...
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Is grammar the main barrier to Japanese people understanding English?
Although a much higher proportion of Japanese people understand English than people from English-speakering countries understand Japanese, it isn't as high as the Scandinavian countries.
I wouldn't ...
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Rejecting writing down a language for various reasons
I remembered reading somewhere about a language that its speakers believe the written words are sacred (or some other reasons) they chose to refrain from putting spoken words into written forms even ...
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