Essays on Sociolinguistics

Writing as Performance

Writing as Performance The article Texting Africa is an inspection of African multilingual practices from the perspective of sociolinguistics, and it focuses specifically on a fairly new phenomenon: texting. In brief, surveys of people who use the medium of texting more than average have shown that they tend to do so in multiple languages, and with multiple meanings. As the paper notes, people who are seen as good at texting are noted for their swift replies, and their ability to play with the languages that they use, indicating that they are capable of utilising various languages, and the cultural ...

Background

Mad Men is a renowned American television series show about men and women at an advertising company. It is created by Matthew Weiner and produced by Lionsgate Television. The series consists of 7 seasons and 92 episodes. The events of the series are set around late 1950s and early 60s in the New York City. Mr. Don Draper is the main character in this series who owns an advertising agency in Madison Avenue in New York. He is struggling to stay on top of the heap in the competitive sphere of Madison Avenue advertising firms. Don faces a dilemma ...

Sociolinguistics is one of the most interesting aspects of linguistics in a society. This is perhaps because it is the study of linguistics that takes on a broader perspective on linguistics. By assessing the impact that the society has on the linguistics of a certain group of people, sociolinguistics is able to draw significant conclusions regarding the use of language in a community, and the social variables that determine this use of language such as religion, socioeconomic status, regional dialects, speech communities and age, just to name a few (Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin 32). Through the analysis of these ...

The language of rights as identified by Mills (2002) involves the manner in which language is approached today. Policy documents, as well as various academic literature, put language rights at the heart of their analysis. Language right-based policies are displacing traditional language planning while sociolinguistics studies have become studies of language rights. Language rights are additionally discussed as human rights, inspired by the remarkable expansion of international human rights advocacy over the last couple of years. Human rights have been looked to as values of ‘godless’ or post-political age (Klug, 2000). In recent decades, radicals and reforms have turned ...

Language and Identity

Languages are viewed as universal abstract systems that are considered as independent and self-sustainable such that they can be extracted from an individual. The implication is that, whereas the language systems are of the individuals, they can be extracted and studied independently of the users for clearer insight. Individual plays no role in shaping the language systems as they are independent of the users. However, they can manipulate them to communicate and express themselves as they deem fit. Identity is a significant component of a language; it refers to the ay an individual perceives his or her relationship to ...