Language and Society

Our knowledge of Language

In the way of human communication, mostly there is a code that we may call it as a language. The speakers can switch or mix the code and they have a system (grammar) in using their language. In practice, it is not easy for the linguistics to describe the knowledge about the language that people speak and put that as grammatical rules. Today, most of the linguists agree that the speaker knowledge of language is something quite abstract but a communal possession.  It explains about the rules and ways of saying and doing things with sounds, words and sentences.

Relationship between Language and Society

There is variety of possible relationship between language and society. One is that social structure may influence or determine the linguistics structure and/or behavior. The second possible relationship is directly opposed to the first; linguistic structure and/or behavior may influence or determine the the social structure. The third possible relationship is that the influence is bi-directional; language and society may influence each other. A variant of this approach is dialectical in nature. The fourth possibility is to assume that there is no relationship at all between linguistic structure and social structure. Both of them are independent of the other.

According to Gumperz (1971), a sociolinguistics is an attempt to find correlations between social structure and linguistics structure and to observe any changes that occur. Social structure itself may be measured by reference to such factors as social class and educational background, and verbal behavior and performance may be related to these factors.

On the other side, Hymes has pointed out that a mechanical combination of standard linguistics and standard sociology is not sufficient to add a speechless sociology to a sociology free-linguistics may miss what is important in the relationship between language and society.