Multilingual speech communities

Language Choice in Multilingual Communities

Choosing your variety or code:

There are different factors involved in choosing one code rather than another:

1 -the social factors,

2 -the characteristics of language users, and

3 -the participants involved .

An example:

Pat: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Chris: I give up.

Pat: To get to the other side

There are certain social factors that affect the user of language when choosing the kind of language he is needs, such as:

1 -who you are talking to,

2 -the social context of the talk, and

3 -the topic of discussion .

Domains:

domains of language use is a term popularized by an American sociolinguist, Joshua Fishman. It involves typical interactions between typical participants in typical settings about a typical topic. Examples: of these domains are family, friendship, religion,

education and employment .

Examples of multilingual countries:

-From Africa:

1 -Cameron: English and French (official)+ Cameroonian pidgin .

2 -Chad: Arabic & French (official) + more than 100 African languages .

3 -Algeria: Arabic (official) + French+ Berber language (national language in the constitution) + French

(media, education and business) .

4 -Egypt: Arabic (official) +English & French and Egyptian Arabic.

Domain is clearly a very general concept which draws on three important social factors in

code choice:

1 -participant,

2 -setting,

3 -topic, and

in bilingual and multilingual speech communities .

Other social factors affecting code choice:

-The components of a domain do not always fit with each other. They are not always

‘congruent .’

-Within any domain, individual interactions may not be ‘typical’ in the same sense in which ‘typical’ is used in the domain concept.

-People may select a particular variety or code because it’s easier to discuss a particular topic, regardless of where they are talking.

-It’s called ‘leakage’, suggesting it is in some way irregular-the code associated with one domain is ‘leaking’ into another.

- Particular topics may regularly be discussed in one code rather than another, regardless of

the setting .

What’s affecting choosing a certain code:

1 -the social distance,

2 -the status relationship between people,

3 -the dimension of formality, and

4 -the function or the goal of the interaction .

Code-switching:

-it is to move from one code (language, dialect, or style) to another during speech for a number of reasons such, to signal solidarity, to reflect one's ethnic identity, to show off, to hide some information from a third party, to achieve better explanation of a certain concept, to converge or reduce social distance with the hearer, to diverge or increase social distance or to impress and persuade the audience (metaphorical code-switching)

-Before considering code-switching, however it is useful to relate to the patterns described so far to the important sociolinguistic concept of diglossia.

-Diglossia: communities rather in which two languages or language varieties are used with one being a high variety for formal situations and prestige, and a low variety for informal situations (everyday conversation). Diglossia has three crucial features; two distinct varieties of the same language are used in the community, with one regarded as high (H) variety and the other as low (L) variety. Each variety is used for quite distinct functions; H & L complement each other. No one uses the H variety in everyday conversation.

Example: the standard classical Arabic language is the high variety in Arab countries, and it is used for writing and for formal functions, but vernacular (colloquial) Arabic is the low variety used for informal speech situations.

-Diglossia is a characteristic of speech communities rather than individual .

-It describes social or institutionalized bilingualism, where two varieties are required

to cover all the community’s domains .

Polyglossia:

-It involve two contrasting varieties (high and low) but in general it refers to communities that regularly use more than two languages.

-In speech community there are two H varieties and a number of L varieties in a complex relationship.

-It is a useful term for describing situations where more than two distinct codes are used

for clearly distinct purpose .

Lexical borrowing

-it results from the lack of vocabulary and it involves borrowing single words – mainly nouns. When speaking a second language, people will often use a term from their first language because they don't know the appropriate word in their second language. They also my borrow words from another language to express a concept or describe an object for which there is no obvious word

available in the language they are using .

Examples:

1 -Diem (1974: 26) indicates that borrowings occur out of necessity: certain vocabulary might be lacking in the dialect and are borrowed from SA. Owens’s (1991: 25) findings in Jordan support the view that borrowings from SA are “motivated to a great extent by need.” Owens provides examples that started to be used with the opening of the Yarmouk University in Jordan in 1976, e.g.

masāq ‘course’ and qā‘a ‘classroom. ’

2-Wilmsen (1995) also asserts that such borrowed words are completely assimilated into the dialect. Abu-Haidar (1992: 104) emphasizes this point in Baghdad, where words such as muӨaqqaf ‘educated’ and taqaddom ‘progress’ have been assimilated into the everyday speech of Baghdadis.

Al-Ani concludes that /q/ is not a replacement for /g/, but it is used as a result of the literary influence on the dialect. The /g/ remains the dominant phonetic feature and it occurs in high frequency words.

-Al-Ani, Salman H. (1976). The development and distribution of the Arabic ‘qaf’ in Iraq. In Readings in Arabic Linguistics (1978), Al-Ani, Salman H. [Ed]. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club

-Abdel-Jawad, Hassan. (1981). Phonological and Social Variation in Arabic in Amman. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

-Code switching involves a choice between the words of two languages or varieties, but Lexical borrowing is resulted from the lack of vocabulary.

-Metaphorical switching is for rhetoric reasons, drawing on the associations of both codes because people use metaphors to

represent complex ideas .

-Bloomfield (1933) broadly defined bilingualism as the “native-like control of two languages.”

Thank you

Nidaa mohammad