Sociolinguistics and some of its concepts: a historian's view
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Joan-Lluís Marfany
Abstract
The author takes an outsider's look at sociolinguistics and aims various criticisms at it. He sees the discipline's reluctance to let go of proper sociological and historical questions while at the same time insisting on remaining strictly a branch of linguistics as its first and foremost problem from which the rest ultimately derive. More specifically, he criticizes the idealistic and ahistorical use of such terms as “language” and “dialect” and the failure to see the usefulness of “patois”; the failure properly to define “bilingualism” and “diglossia” and to see the fundamental distinction between them; and the unfortunate confusion created around the idea of “code switching,” which inextricably mixes together (i) sociologically significant language switching (typical of situations of bilingualism), (ii) cases of diglossia, (iii) the would-be monolingualism of as yet imperfectly assimilated immigrant or subject populations, and (iv) a ragbag of banal individual examples too idiosyncratic to be sociologically meaningful.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
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- Streetwise English and French advertising in multilingual DR Congo: symbolism, modernity, and cosmopolitan identity
- Local and global perspectives on overcoming literacy challenges in South Africa
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- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Sociolinguistics and some of its concepts: a historian's view
- A critical commentary on the discourse of language rights in the Naivasha language policy in Sudan using habitus as a method
- Mixed language usage in Belarus: the sociostructural background of language choice
- Expressing age salience: three generations' reported events, frequencies, and valences
- “We should keep what makes us different”: youth reflections on Turkish maintenance in Australia
- From trilingualism to monolingualism? Sicilian-Italians in Australia
- Hong Kong and modern diglossia
- Streetwise English and French advertising in multilingual DR Congo: symbolism, modernity, and cosmopolitan identity
- Local and global perspectives on overcoming literacy challenges in South Africa
- Comparative accounts of linguistic fieldwork as ethical exercises
- Instrumental music and Gaelic revitalization in Scotland and Nova Scotia
- Indigenous students in bilingual Spanish–English classrooms in New York: a teacher's mediation strategies
- Book reviews
