Language and society

This chapter is concerned with sociolinguistics, which analyses variation within a language. It looks at differences between speech and writing, and at variation in pronunciation between different social classes. It also outlines divergence between men’s and women’s language. It then discusses multilingual communities and pidgins and creoles.

Sociolinguistics is often defined as the study of language and society. Whereas many linguists concentrate on discovering unity beneath the diversity of human languages, sociolinguists try to analyse the social factors which lead to this diversity. In brief, sociolinguists are interested in language differences, and especially in variation within a particular language.

[]() The notion of a language

Perhaps the first question that a sociolinguist needs to ask is, ‘What is a language?’ Can the notion of ‘a language’ be defined geographically? Can it be equated with nationality? Or should a language be defined by the mutual intelligibility of its speakers?

The answer to all these questions appears to be ‘no’. A geographical definition of a language would separate Australian, British and American English, which is obviously unsatisfactory. Nationality is a vague notion which has little to do with the language a person speaks. []()Numerous Russian Jews, for example, regard themselves as essentially Jewish, yet speak Russian. Mutual intelligibility is of little help, since a Glaswegian and a Cockney are likely to find it harder to understand one another than a Dutchman and a German who are considered to be speaking distinct languages. And there is no objective linguistic criterion which can be applied. Dutch and German are not only mutually intelligible, they are also structurally more alike than some of the so-called dialects of Chinese.

Faced with this dilemma, sociolinguists prefer to start with the notion of a speech community rather than a ‘language’. And they define a speech community as any group of people who consider that they speak the same language. Consequently, Dutch and German must be regarded as separate languages, since, in spite of their similarities, the Dutch consider that they speak Dutch and the Germans consider that they speak German. And all the Chinese dialects must be classified as one language, because, in spite of far-reaching differences, their speakers all consider that they speak Chinese.

[]()Insight

Owing to the difficulty of defining a ‘language’, linguists prefer to talk about a speech community.

[]() Dialect and accent

Within a speech community, there is considerable language variation. The speech of its members varies according to many factors, including geographical location, age, occupation, socio-economic status, ethnic group and sex.

The most obvious type of variety in a speech community is the use of different dialects. A dialect is usually associated with a particular geographical area, such as the Geordie and Cockney dialects of English, which are spoken in Tyneside and London respectively.

The term ‘dialect’ refers to far greater difference than mere []()pronunciation. The Lancashire dialect differs from standard British English in sound system, syntax and vocabulary, with phrases such as I don’t want for to go, summat for ‘something’, and nowt for ‘nothing’. American English ranks as a different dialect from British English, with phonological innovations such as nasal vowels, and constructions such as ‘I kinda figured maybe’ and ‘He said for you not to worry.’

Unfortunately, in everyday usage, the term dialect is often confused with the word accent. An accent refers only to a difference in pronunciation. A Scotsman and a Londoner are likely to speak English with different accents. But if the underlying system and the vocabulary are the same, they will be speaking the same dialect.

[]()Insight

Although a considerable number of local accents are still found in Britain, dialects are dying out, due to the influence of education, radio and television.

[]() From high to low

More interesting to sociolinguists is variation within a single geographical area. This is of two main types: variation within the speech of a single person, and variation between people. These two interact, and it is not always possible to separate them. Let us begin by considering the stylistic variation which exists in the speech of any one person.

Every native speaker is normally in command of several different language styles, sometimes called registers, which are varied according to the topic under discussion, the formality of the occasion, and the medium used (speech, writing or sign).

Adapting language to suit the topic is a fairly straightforward matter. Many activities have a specialized vocabulary. If you are playing a ball game, you need to know []()that ‘zero’ is a duck in cricket, love in tennis, and nil in soccer. If you have a drink with friends in a pub, you need to know greetings such as: Cheers! Here’s to your good health!

In some cases, a relatively normal vocabulary is combined with altered syntax. In newspaper headlines and telegrams, all surplus words are routinely omitted, sometimes resulting in unintentional ambiguity:

[]()Giant waves down Queen Mary’s funnel (British newspaper) Dacoits (= bandits) shoot dead policeman (Indian newspaper)

Specialized speech styles are carried to excess in some cultures, where social situations may follow a high degree of ritual, as among the Subanun, a Philippine tribe. If you want a drink, it is not sufficient simply to give the Subanun equivalent of English ‘Please may I have a drink?’ This utterance might cause a Subanun speaker to praise you for your fluent Subanun, but you would not get a drink! Drinking, particularly the drinking of beer, is a highly ritualized activity which progresses through a number of stages. At each stage, there is an appropriate style of speech, and advancement in Subanun society depends on how well a person copes with this.

Other types of variation are less clear-cut. The same person might utter any of the following three sentences, depending on the circumstances:

[]()I should be grateful if you would make less noise.
[]()Please be quiet.
[]()Shut up!

Here the utterances range from a high or formal style, down to a low or informal one – and the choice of a high or low style is partly a matter of politeness (Chapter 9).

But politeness is just one component of a more general skill, the appropriate use of language. Knowing what to say when is sometimes known as communicative competence. Native speakers just ‘know’ it []()would be odd to say ‘Kindly refrain from smoking’ to a 10-year-old puffing at a stolen cigarette, or rude to say ‘Put that fag out’ to a duchess. Both utterances are equally inappropriate. Children and foreign learners have to acquire this skill over a longish period.

An inability to use appropriate language often makes a speaker sound very funny, so much so that the use of an inappropriate register is one source of humour in English, as in:

[]()Scintillate, scintillate, globule lucific,
[]()Fain would I fathom thy nature specific.

This seems amusing because of the use of a formal style to ‘translate’ a rhyme associated with an informal nursery setting:

[]()Twinkle, twinkle, little star
[]()How I wonder what you are.

In England, the use of an inappropriate level of formality is not considered a serious social blunder in most instances. In any case, there is often a considerable amount of overlap between the use of the different styles. It would not matter whether you said ‘Hallo’ or ‘Good morning’ to your neighbour. In some other cultures, however, the social situation requires a far greater degree of rigidity. An extreme example is found in Java, where society is divided into three distinct social groups. At the top are the aristocrats. In the middle are the townsfolk, and at the bottom are the farmers. Each of these groups has a distinct style of speech associated with it. The top level of speech is used primarily between aristocrats who do not know one another very well, but also by a townsman if he happens to be addressing a high government official. The middle level of speech is used between townsmen who are not close friends, and by peasants when addressing their social superiors. The lowest level is used between peasants, or by an aristocrat or townsman when talking to a peasant, and between close friends on any level. Furthermore, it is the form of language used by parents to their children, so it is the []()style learned first by all Javanese children. However, as they grow up, children are expected to shift to addressing their parents in a more formal style, even though their parents continue to speak to them in the lowest style!

The formality–informality scale overlaps with other stylistic considerations, in particular the medium used. Let us now consider this.

[]() Speech versus writing

Speech and writing differ in a number of ways. Consider the following spoken dialogue:

[]()Speaker A: But the point is she’s not such a strong character.
[]()Speaker B: It’s not the point she’s as str … she’s stronger than what she makes out I’ll tell you now\.
[]()Speaker A: Well maybe.
[]()Speaker B: She’s a lot stronger cos otherwise I would have drived her mad when she lived here but no she’s a lot stronger than what she makes out to you lot I’ll tell you that now\.

The talk is shared between two people. They both assume some mutual knowledge, so we never hear who she is, or where here is located. It’s repetitive: speaker B keeps stressing how strong she is. It’s not composed purely of sentences: the fragment ‘Well maybe’ is treated as a complete utterance. The verbs are all active ones (tell, drive, and so on), and the sentence structures are fairly straightforward. The vocabulary consists mostly of common words, with some colloquial phrases (drive mad, I’ll tell you that).

Now look at a passage from a quality newspaper on a similar theme:

Assertiveness problems are pervasive. For example, marital discontent can arise from the inability of partners to talk assertively about their problems. []()Instead they tend to bottle up feelings, which inevitably leads to hostility. Marital violence also occurs more frequently in men low in assertiveness and may be explained by their inability to be assertive as opposed to aggressive.

The uninterrupted flow of words is written by a single author. It is fully explicit, in that it does not refer to unexplained people or places. The only repetition is the occasional reuse of key words, such as assertiveness, inability. The passage contains only complete sentences. There is a passive verb may be explained by, and the sentence structures are relatively complex, with several embeddings (sentences one inside another, Chapter 7), as in inability of partners to talk, tend to bottle up, which inevitably leads. There is a spate of abstract nouns: assertiveness, inability, discontent, violence, hostility, and several lexical items are of fairly low frequency: marital, pervasive.

These passages contain fairly typical differences between spoken and written language. They can be summed up in the following table:


Spoken	Written
More than one participant	Single writer
Inexplicit	Explicit
Repetitive	Non-repetitive
Fragments	Full sentences
Simple structure	Elaborate structure
Concrete, common vocabulary	Abstract, less common vocabulary

[]()Figure 10.1.

Several of these features overlap with the formality–informality scale, with speech containing informal features, and written language formal ones. Consequently, formal speech has quite a lot in common with informal writing. Readable writers are sometimes said to ‘write as they talk’ – though this is usually an illusion, and apparent effortless spontaneity is often carefully crafted.

Spoken language typically involves []()the characteristics in the left-hand column of , and written language those in the right-hand column – though each can borrow from the other. There is no hard and fast divide. A sermon is likely to have more ‘written’ characteristics than a chat between friends in a pub. One is not ‘better’ than the other; each is appropriate in certain circumstances. Written language is sometimes wrongly thought of as an ideal model for speech. In practice, those who reproduce written language when they speak sound quite odd. Occasionally, recent immigrants are regarded as pompous pedants, primarily because they may have painstakingly learned English from books.

Spoken and written characteristics, then, are another facet of speech styles which efficient speakers and writers control with ease.

[]() Charting phonological variation

Speakers vary not only their vocabulary and syntax, but also the sound structure. Phonological variation, both between speakers and within a single speaker, is important as a reflection of various social factors. Speakers of a language alter their phonology to suit a particular situation, often without realizing it. For example, someone from Devon is likely to pronounce the \[r] in a word such as farm when chatting with friends at home, but would probably attempt to suppress it in a formal interview in London. In this case, the speaker may well be aware of the change in pronunciation. On the other hand, few speakers of standard British English realize that in informal situations they often omit the \[t] at the end of words such as last in phrases such as last thing.

At one time, it was thought that such variation was fairly random, and that no precise statements could be made about it. But an American sociolinguist, William Labov, showed that this was not so. In a piece of work which has now become famous he examined the pronunciation of words such as car, park in New York. New Yorkers sometimes pronounce an \[r] in these words, and sometimes do not. []()Although Labov was unable to tell which words were likely to be pronounced with \[r], and which without, he found that he could predict the percentage of \[r] sounds which each socio-economic class and each age group would use in any given type of speech.

Labov started his work on \[r] in a highly amusing way. First, he found out which departments were on the fourth floor in three New York department stores. He then asked as many shop assistants as possible a question such as ‘Excuse me, where are children’s coats?’ The answer to each of these queries was, of course, ‘On the fourth floor’, which included two words that could each contain an \[r]. It is well known that sales-staff tend to mimic the speech of their customers and, as Labov predicted, he found that in the store that was considered socially inferior, the number of \[r] sounds was low, under 20%. In the middle-ranking store, \[r] was inserted about 50% of the time, and in the store considered socially superior, \[r] was used over 60% of the time. These preliminary results clearly showed that the use of \[r] in New York was a useful guide to social status.

After this preliminary survey, Labov then examined the speech of each class of person in more detail. Perhaps predictably, he found that \[r] was inserted much more frequently in careful speech and in the reading of word lists than in casual speech. This was true of all social classes. There was, however, one unexpected finding. When reading word lists, lower-middle-class speakers inserted \[r] more often than upper-middle-class speakers – even though in casual speech, the situation was reversed, with lower-middle-class speech containing fewer \[r] sounds. This suggests that lower-middle-class speakers are more consciously aware of speech as an indicator of social class, and are making efforts to improve their status.

[]()Insight

The study of differing pronunciations can reveal social stratification, and also social aspirations, since people sometimes try to talk like those they would like to emulate.

[]() Phonological variation in British English

At first, one might assume

[]()

Labov’s results to be unique, in that they possibly reflected an American social situation that was unlikely to be paralleled elsewhere. But in England, a similar state of affairs has been found in the speech of people living in Norwich. Consider the differing pronunciations of words ending in

-ing

. Sometimes, Norwich inhabitants pronounce the

-ing

as in Standard English, and at other times they say

walkin

’,

talkin

’,

singin

’, with [n] instead of [

]. When the distribution of

-ing

was examined more closely, a number of interesting facts emerged. First of all, and predictably, the proportion of

-ing

forms was much higher in careful speech than in casual speech for all social classes. For example, those classified as lower working class used

-ing

around 70% of the time when they were asked to read word lists, but hardly ever in casual speech. On the other hand, middle-middle-class speakers used

-ing

100% of the time in word lists, but only around 70% of the time in casual speech.

Second (and perhaps surprisingly), upper-working-class Norwich inhabitants were found to behave in a very similar way to lower-middle-class New Yorkers. For this social group, there was an enormous discrepancy between the type of speech used in word lists (-ing occurred 95% of the time), and that used in casual speech (-ing occurred only 13% of the time). Once again, speakers with a relatively low social status appeared to be attempting to ‘better themselves’ by speaking in a style they regarded as superior to their normal speech. The Norwich situation is illustrated in .

A further analysis of the use of -ing by upper-working-class speakers revealed an unexpected sex difference. Women were found to use -ing more often than men. This suggests that ‘changes from above’ (Labov’s term for changes of which speakers are consciously aware) may well be initiated mainly by women. There is further evidence that other changes are taking place ‘from below’, that is, below the level of conscious awareness.

[]()

Figure 10.2.

These changes appeared to be

[]()

initiated by working-class men. For example, in Norwich, the vowel sound in words such as

night

rye

side

, is moving towards the sound

I]. This change is furthest advanced in the speech of working-class men. It has been suggested that, perhaps unconsciously, people admire working-class men and associate them with strength and virility, and, without realizing it, adopt features found in their speech. This pattern seems not to be unique to Norwich, but a general phenomenon found in other areas of the world also.

These examples of phonological variation are highly informative. They provide an objective reflection of various social factors such as socio-economic class, ethnic group, age and sex. The effect of any one of these factors on language can be analysed, and so can the interaction between them. For example, in one study of the interaction between ethnic group and age in Boston, a particular pronunciation of \[o] was found to be []()associated with elderly Jews, and with Italians of all ages. The younger members of the Jewish community, who were mostly highly educated, had abandoned it, perhaps because they regarded it as non-standard. The Italians, on the other hand, tended to favour it as a mark of Italian identity. Such studies can shed interesting light on the pressures and attitudes within particular communities.

[]() Social networks

Labov-type surveys rely on collecting data from a random sample of individuals. Their speech is analysed for various key characteristics, which are then correlated with their socio-economic background. The result, perhaps not surprisingly, suggests that human society is somewhat like a layer-cake, with different socioeconomic layers stacked up on top of one another. In one respect, this is a useful insight into the way societies function. But, as with many surveys, the result is oversimplified. In practice, people do not normally live in such clear-cut layers: someone from the so-called working class might well have middle-class friends and neighbours.

In fact, human beings tend to cluster into social networks, groups of people who regularly interact with one another. A detailed study of the social networks within one particular speech community can provide a useful corrective to Labov-type studies, which tend to suggest humans are rigidly stratified. Network studies can provide a more realistic picture of the way people interact in real life. Furthermore, if a sociolinguist manages to be introduced into a network, its members are more likely to chat in a natural way than in a Labov-type survey in which it is sometimes difficult to observe people speaking ‘normally’.

[]()Insight

Social network studies can provide a useful picture of how members of a community interact with one another.

The British linguists Jim and Lesley []()Milroy pioneered the linguistic study of social networks with a study of three communities in Belfast. Lesley was introduced into each group as ‘a friend of a friend’. This ensured that she was accepted, and that people would talk relatively normally in front of her: when one youth tried to show off by talking in a somewhat affected way, his friend punched him and shouted: ‘Come on, you’re not on television now, you know.’

Networks can be of high density, when the same people tend to work, play and live together. On the other hand, they can be of low density, when people only have a small amount of contact with any one network, in that they may live in one area, work in another, and travel elsewhere for their social life ().

[]()

Figure 10.3.

When the Milroys examined their data, they discovered a number of things which would not have been detectable in a Labov-type survey. For example, Labov’s work suggested that men and women’s speech tended to differ, with women on the whole being closer to the prestige norm. The Milroys found this pattern also in Belfast overall, but with some interesting subtleties. When Lesley examined the three communities separately, and charted the occurrence of the way \[a] was pronounced by people of different ages and both sexes, she found some modification of the overall pattern. In the oldest, most tightly knit and most traditional community, she found that the predicted pattern of male–female difference was most prominent. But in the other two, which were newer, and fairly loose-knit, this pattern was less evident, and was even reversed among the younger women []()of one community. This suggests that a blurring of sex differentiation in language may be linked with the break-up of close-knit networks. Findings such as this indicate that linguistic variation needs to be considered from at least two angles: from the point of view of a broad Labov-type survey based on a random sample of people, but also from a close-up view of a number of social networks.

[]() Language and sex

Possible sex differences in language usage have recently attracted a lot of attention.

First, we need to sort out whether women really do speak differently from men. People’s impressions are not necessarily correct: it is often assumed, for example, that women talk more than men, whereas almost all research on the topic has demonstrated the opposite, that men talk more than women. Similarly, it is sometimes claimed that women use ‘empty’ adjectives, such as divine, charming, cute, yet this type of description is possibly more usually used by (presumably male) writers in popular newspapers to describe women.

The most consistent difference found between men and women within the Western world is a tendency for women to speak in a way that is closer to the prestige standard. In colloquial terms, they speak ‘better’ than men. No one is quite sure why this is so, and several explanations have been proposed, which may all be partially right. For example, women may be pressurized by society to behave in a ‘lady-like’ manner, and ‘speaking nicely’ may be part of this. Or because they are the main child-rearers, they may subconsciously speak in a way which will enable their children to progress socially. Or they may tend to have jobs which rely on communication, rather than on strength. All these factors, and others, appear to be relevant.

[]()Insight

In recent years, particularly among []()employed women, the differences between men and women’s speech appear to be diminishing.

Furthermore, some characteristics attributed to women turn out to be far more widespread. For example, women have been claimed to use more hedges, tentative phrases such as kind of, sort of, in place of straight statements: ‘Bill is kind of short,’ instead of ‘Bill is short.’ They have also been accused of using question intonation in response to queries: ‘About eight o’clock?’ as a reply to: ‘What time’s dinner?’ Yet this insecure style of conversation seems to be typical of ‘powerless’ people, those who are somewhat nervous and afraid of antagonizing others. Powerless people come from either sex.

But there is an alternative explanation: such speech may be supportive. A question intonation promotes the flow of conversation. A comment such as: ‘It’s cold today, isn’t it?’ encourages an easy-to-make response, such as: ‘Yes, I even put my winter boots on.’ ‘Powerless’ speech can therefore be viewed as friendly and cooperative, and powerful speech as insensitive and authoritarian.

Friendly speech may also reflect the setting. At a meeting, fairly formal speech is the norm. At home, or in the shops, informal conversation is more likely. Traditionally, men are more likely to be at business meetings, and women at home, though this is partly changing.

Supportive speech is more often associated with women than with men. Friendly females are likely to help the conversation along by saying ‘mmm’, ‘aha’, ‘yes’ – so-called ‘minimal responses’. These encourage the speaker, by showing that they are being listened to. Simultaneous speech can also be supportive, when the speaker’s message is reinforced by the listener, as in the following overlap about going to funerals:

[]()Speaker A: Perhaps they would want you to go, you know …
[]()Speaker B: yeah for their comfort …

Such supportive speech contrasts with its []()opposite, power talking, whose characteristics are outlined below.

[]() Power talking

[]()Speaker A: Now tell me what you’re going to do.
[]()Speaker B: Yes, well, first …
[]()Speaker A: Louder, please, we all want to hear.
[]()Speaker B: I’d start by cutting this here.
[]()Speaker A: What do you mean ‘this here’?
[]()Speaker B: The place where …
[]()Speaker A: Have you washed your hands?

‘Powerful’ speakers typically control the topic, interrupt others, and demand explicit explanations. Occasionally, this may be justified if someone is chairing a meeting, or in some teaching situations. Yet quite often, as perhaps in the example, above, the ‘controller’ goes over the top, and tries both to dominate and flatten the confidence of other participants.

Power talking may be used by either sex, though it is more typically male. Male speakers not only talk more, they also interrupt more, even though they may not perceive themselves as doing so.

Men also issue more direct orders. In a study of doctor–patient interaction in the USA, men used explicit commands in about one-third of the directives, as: ‘Lie down’, ‘Take off your shoes and socks’. Women preferred to phrase commands as joint actions: ‘Maybe we should just take the top of your dress off?’, ‘Maybe what we ought to do is stay with the dose you’re on,’ and so on.

[]() Change in language styles

The social situation is not necessarily static. []()Any change in the social relationships is likely to be mirrored in changing language styles. An example of a change of this type occurred in the gradual meaning change in the two forms of the pronouns you in European languages.

Originally, in Latin, there was a singular form tu and a plural form vos. For some reason (the cause is disputed), the plural came to be used as a polite form of address for speaking to a single person in authority. One theory is that when there were two Roman emperors – one in Constantinople, the other in the west in Rome – it became customary to address each of them as vos, since both emperors were implicitly being addressed at the same time. This began a general trend for using vos to anyone in authority. It gradually became customary for a working-class person to address a member of the aristocracy as vos, while the upper classes still used tu to a lower-class individual. Meanwhile, as a mark of respect, the aristocracy began to address one another as vos, although the lower classes continued to address one another as tu. This situation is shown in . This linguistic situation reflected the social situation. There existed a feudal society in which the power of one class over another was all-important.


	To upper class	To lower class
Upper class	vos	tu
Lower class	vos	tu

[]()Figure 10.4.

However, as feudalism died out, so did this structuring of tu and vos. Gradually (according to one theory), people ceased to feel such respect for those in power, and instead, they merely felt remote from them. Vos (it is claimed) came to be not so much a mark of respect, as one of non-intimacy. Tu came to be thought of as indicating intimacy, companionship and solidarity. []()People involved in friendships or close relationships started to call one another tu irrespective of the power situation. And this is the state of affairs today in the numerous European languages which have two forms of the word you.

The ‘power’ to ‘solidarity’ switch is possibly only one of several factors involved in the change from vos to tu, and some have disputed its importance. However, a similar phenomenon seems to be occurring in other parts of the world also: in India, in the Hindi and Gujarati languages, there was formerly a power pattern shown in the non-reciprocal nature of the forms of address between husband and wife, and older and younger brother. Nowadays this is dying out. Reciprocal relations are gradually becoming more important than the power of one person over another, and members of Indian families are beginning to address one another with the intimate you forms.

[]()Insight

A ‘power’ to ‘solidarity’ shift is taking place worldwide, in that people have become friendlier to one another, and are less impressed by authority.

[]() Multilingual communities

‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse,’ is a saying attributed to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. As this quotation suggests, in some cultures a changed social situation is marked by a change in the actual language spoken, a phenomenon known as code-switching. Sociolinguistically, this is not very different from stylistic variation within a single language. Sociolinguists have therefore become interested in studying code-switching in bilingual and multilingual communities.

For example, in Sauris, a small community of north-eastern Italy, high in the Carnian Alps, a quite remarkable linguistic situation exists. The inhabitants use three different []()languages in the course of their everyday life: a German dialect, Italian and Friulian (a Romance dialect). Italian is the language of organized religion, and also that used in schools. Friulian is the language used by men in the local bars. And German is the language in the home. It is highly unusual to hear German outside the home, though it was observed on one occasion when a furious woman burst into a bar and upbraided her husband for not having returned home at the time he was expected!

A study of the ways in which these multiple languages are used is particularly important for language planning, a situation in which a government or education authority attempts to manipulate the linguistic situation in a particular direction. This is more likely to be successful if existing uses of a language are gradually extended, since the sudden imposition of a particular language by decree may well result in failure.

However, multilingual societies in which all the speakers are proficient in all the languages spoken are something of a rarity. Quite often, one language, or simplified language, is adopted as a common means of communication. This can happen either naturally, or as a result of language planning. A common language of this type is sometimes known as a lingua franca. A couple of millennia ago, Latin spread around the Mediterranean countries in this way. In India today, English tends to be a lingua franca: Hindi speakers from the north are likely to communicate in English with people from the south who mostly speak one of the Dravidian languages. The artificial language, Esperanto, is sometimes proposed as a candidate for a world lingua franca.

[]() Pidgins and creoles

Adopting a lingua franca is not the only solution to the problem of communication between groups of people speaking different languages. In some cases, a pidgin develops.

A pidgin is a restricted language system []()which arises in order to fulfil essential communication needs among people with no common language. It is no one’s first language, and is used at first in a limited set of circumstances. Such a system typically develops on trade routes and in coastal areas.

A pidgin is usually based on one language, though it soon acquires an admixture of other languages, as well as independent constructions of its own. For example, Tok Pisin (also known as Melanesian Pidgin English and Neo-Melanesian), which is spoken in Papua New Guinea, is based on English, and many of the words sound somewhat like English ones:

[]()Mi go long taun. ‘I go/went to the town’.
[]()Yu wokabaut long rot. ‘You walk/walked along the road’.

But there are plenty of others, which cannot be predicted from English, such as lotu ‘church’, diwai ‘tree’, susu ‘milk’. In addition, it has acquired syntactic constructions which do not figure in English. For example, there is a consistent distinction between verbs with an object (‘transitive’ verbs) which take the ending -im, as with bagarapim ‘wreck’, and those without (‘intransitive’ verbs) as in bagarap ‘collapse’, ‘break down’:

[]()Mi bagarapim ka bilong mi. ‘I crashed my car’.
[]()Ka bilong mi i bagarap. ‘My car broke down’.

Another innovation is the particle i which sometimes has to be placed before the verb (as in the second sentence above).

The phonology, syntax and lexicon are simpler in a pidgin than in an ordinary language. There are fewer phonemes. In Tok Pisin, \[p] and \[f] are often merged, so are \[s] and \[∫], and there are only five vowels. English ‘fish’ was borrowed as pis, and English ‘ship’ as sip. In order to avoid confusion, ‘piss’ (urinate) became pispis, and ‘sheep’ became sipsip. There are few word endings, the sentences have a simple structure, and there is a small vocabulary. One or two items stretch over a wide area, as with the following uses of the word pikinini ‘child’:

[]()pikinini man ‘son’ (lit. child man).
[]()pikinini meri ‘daughter’ (lit. child woman).
[]()pikinini hos ‘foal’ (lit. child horse).
[]()pikinini pis ‘minnow’ (lit. child fish).
[]()pikinini bilong rais ‘rice kernels’ (lit. child of rice).
[]()pikinini bilong diwai ‘fruit of tree’ (lit. child of tree).

Sometimes, pidgins die out of their own accord. []()At other times they increase in importance, and become used in more and more areas of life. If someone then acquires a pidgin as a first language – perhaps because of intermarriage between people whose only common language is the pidgin – the language has then become a creole.

Once it has become a creole, the system tends to develop rapidly. Speech is speeded up, the syntax becomes more complex, and extra vocabulary items are created. Fairly soon, if it continues to develop, a creole is likely to be indistinguishable from a ‘full’ language.

In some circumstances, however, a creole can be devoured by its parent. If a creole is spoken in an area where the base language is also used, then there may be social pressure on the creole speakers to speak the base, which often has more prestige. Therefore, little by little, the creole becomes decreolized, as words and constructions from the base language replace the creole ones.

The study of pidgins and creoles has grown rapidly, because their implications and interest spread far beyond sociolinguistics. They are valuable for the insights they provide into language change, and some people have claimed that they shed light on language universals – that they present language in a stripped-down and basic state. This claim is controversial, but the interest it has aroused has increased the attention given to the topic.

However, language universals are more commonly associated with the study of language and mind. This is the topic of the next chapter.

[]()[]()THINGS TO REMEMBER

[]()Sociolinguistics analyses the social factors which lead to diversity within a language.
[]()The term ‘dialect’ must not be confused with ‘accent’, which refers only to pronunciation.
[]()Every native speaker normally controls several different registers (styles) which are varied depending on the situation, the topic, or the medium (speech or writing).
[]()Appropriate use of language takes time to develop.
[]()Sociolinguistic variation is not random, and can be reliably charted.
[]()Social network studies can show how humans interact.
[]()Men talk more than women, even though popular views often assert the opposite.
[]()Tentative speech is often supportive, and not powerless as is sometimes assumed.
[]()Some multilingual cultures use different languages for different purposes.
[]()A pidgin, which is a restricted language, may develop into a full language.