Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

Language and Society

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Antara11:
                                                  Two Language Phenomena


1)   Ethnic Destruction

Language is modeled on the loop of projection and introjection. This makes possible a destructive cultural phenomenon. When a foreign language is imposed on a group (or ethnic minority) that group is eventually destroyed. When a person changes his primary language, or even his culture, he automatically changes his pattern of projection and introjection. Hence his needs change. His old way of life disappears.
There are two qualifications to this view. The rate of change depends on how related the languages are: the more related they are, the more gradual is the change. Secondly, immigrants may only speak their adopted language in their adopted society; they many retain their ethnic language in their family settings. This retention of the ethnic language slows down the cultural destruction of the group.
 Abandoning native languages leads to a ‘melting pot’ pattern of immigrant assimilation. This pattern cannot work in the long-term, since the immigrants’ sense of identity is destroyed. A new sense of identity cannot be created without community support, and this is often lacking for the immigrant.
A cosmopolitan culture is much better than a melting pot culture, and is better suited to the widening possibilities in choice of values that is opening to the modern world. Therefore, in today’s age of cosmopolitanism, it is bad politics and bad psychology to try to persuade immigrants to abandon their native language.

2)   Pursuit of Truth

Times of change produce a special phenomenon: the pursuit of truth. In times of change, social values (representing tradition) and language values begin gradually to diverge because they begin to reflect different needs, those of tradition and those of modernity. Within this ‘gap’ arises the possibility of pursuing the search for truth. This gap allows the spectator to view both social values and language as separate realities that are running on parallel courses. Truth is always the result of comparing the old with the new.
In a static society, social values and language are one ; there is no means of attempting a re-evaluation of existing values. Tradition is the only mode of knowledge.

Antara11:
                                                           Sociology of Language

Sociology of language focuses on the effect of language on the society. It is closely related to the field of sociolinguistics, which focuses on the effect of the society on the language.
A sociology of language would seek to understand the way that social dynamics are affected by individual and group language use. It would have to do with who is 'authorized' to use what language, with whom and under what conditions. It would have to do with how an individual or group identity is established by the language that they have available for them to use. It would seek to understand individual expression, one's (libidinal) investment in the linguistic tools that one has access to in order to bring oneself to other people.

shipra:
Good post, very useful for beginning level.

bayram kocabas:
thank you mss

nafrin:
as usual informative

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