Language Use Language Choice

10 Some early linguistics researches observed that our language is potent enough to influence the way we behave. According to this view, language said to be able to influence or determine the behaviors of the users. But sociolinguistics is more to a different direction: the social environment is believed to influence that language uses. The point is, sociolinguistics is the study, which has a relationship between language and social factors in a speech community.

2.2 Language Use

Language use symbolically represents fundamental dimensions of social behavior and human interaction. People use language in patterned ways. People use more formal ways of speaking when talking to someone important. The notion is simple, but the ways in which language reflects behavior can often be complex and subtle. Furthermore, the relationship between language and society affects a wide range of encounters--from broadly based international relations to narrowly defined interpersonal relationships. A slightly different concern with language and society focuses more closely on the effect of particular kinds of social situations on language structure. Another approach to language and society focuses on the situations and uses of language as an activity in its own right. The study of language in its social context tells us quite a bit about how we organize our social relationships within a particular community. It is also possible to examine how people manage their language in relation to their cultural backgrounds and their goals of interaction. Sociolinguists might investigate questions such as how mixed-gender conversations differ from single-gender conversations, how differential power relations manifest themselves in language forms, how caregivers let children know the ways in which language 11 should be used, or how language change occurs and spreads to communities. To answer these questions related to language as social activity, sociolinguists often use ethnographic methods. That is, they attempt to gain an understanding of the values and viewpoints of a community in order to explain the behaviors and attitudes of its members.

2.3 Language Choice

Language choice depends on some factors such as participants, setting, topic, and so on Sumarsono and Paina 2002: 199. Evan Tripp 1972 in Faturrohman 2009 identified four main factors in language choice, they are setting time and place and situation, participants in the interaction, topic of the conversation, and interaction functions. Brown Ford 1961, Sibayan 1984, and Rubin 1972 have done a research about it, and they conclude that in some reasons, they are intimacy level, social statue, situation formal or informal, and location. Fishman’s 1964: 1972a concept of domains language choice behavior was a major breakthrough in the sociolinguistics study of language choice behavior. He describes language choice behavior in stable bilingual setting in terms of the domain allocation of languages a varieties. Domains are linked to particular linguistic varieties where they. As compared to social situations, are abstractions from the intersection between specific role relationships statuses, specific settings locales and specific topics. In some cases, language choice behavior may be motivated by a particular social processes. More recently Scotton 1980, 1983 has proposed another different model to explain language choice behavior. By what she has called a ‘social process’ model, one pattern of linguistic behavior is linked with another pattern of behavior which establishes the right and obligations holding between participants in a 12 conversational exchange. Scotton claims further that language choices are not a function of situation but rather the function of negotiation, and sees speaking as ‘a rational process involving decisions’ Scotton, 1983: 115. According to Scotton, speakers’ communicative competence will include their recognition of code choices as either unmarked or marked in reference to the norms of their speech community. She adds that community norms ‘designate specific linguistics choice as the unmarked realization of a specific set of rights and obligations holding between a speaker and addressee’ Scotton 1983: 115. In all multilingual communities speakers switch among languages or varieties as monolinguals switch among styles. Language choice is not arbitrary and not all speech communities are organized in the same way Romaine 1994: 36. Often this kind of social meaning can only be interpreted by the understanding of what relationship exists between the choices of the particular code to some factors other than linguistic factors, example social as well as situational factors. In fact, sociolinguistic literature has documented several studies which have made use of situational dimensions, social networks, role relations and domains of language behavior to describe the patterns of language choice behavior in various kinds of bilingual and multilingual communities. The choice of styles or language or even the use of appropriate address and kinship terms may indicate the type of social relationship held between interlocutors.

2.4 Speech Community