Everything people do requires the involvement of other people, directly or indirectly. What we find, then, is a huge range of ways of talking that promote
the formation and maintenance of social relationships. They have to remind themselves about how important groups and relationships are to living their lives.
2. Language and Society
In understanding language, the aspect of society has to be involved. Chaika 1982: 1 states
“language and society are so intertwined that it is impossible to understand one without the other. There is no human society that
does not depend upon, is not shaped by, and does not itself shape language ”.
Furthermore, Dunbar 2004: 104 argues: Language is concerned with the exchange of information; that, after all, is
what it or, at least, grammar is mainly designed to do. However, linguists and those in most other disciplines interested in language have
traditionally assumed that the information to be exchanged is factual knowledge about the world; in other words, language evolved to allow our
ancestors to exchange information about aspects of the physical world in which they lived.
The definition above explains one further key feature of language is particularly important to the bonding of the large social groups, namely the fact
that language allows people to exchange information. That, after all, is what language itself is basically designed to do. Its role in social bonding is that it
allows them to keep track of what is going on within their social networks, as well as using it to service their relationships.
Meanwhile, a society is any group of people who are drawn together for a certain purpose or purposes. People use language to reveal or conceal their
personal identity, character, and background, often wholly unconscious that they
are doing so. As a result, every social institution is maintained by language. Law, religion, government, education, the family
– all are carried on with language. The definition of language includes in it a reference to society. When
people have to talk about the relationship of language and society, they must acknowledge that a language is essentially a set of items, what Hudson in
Wardhaugh, 2006: 10 calls linguistic items, such entities as sounds, words, grammatical structures, and so on. On the other hand, social theorists, particularly
sociologists, attempt to understand how societies are structured and how people manage to live together. Thus, they use such concepts as ‘identity,’ ‘power,’
‘class,’ ‘status,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘accomodation,’ ‘face,’ ‘gender,’ ‘politeness,’ etc.
3. Language Variety
Hudson in Wardhaugh, 2006: 25 defines a variety of language as “a set
of linguistic items with similar distribution, ” a definition that allows people to
say that all of the following are varieties: Canadian English, London English, the English of football commentaries, and so on. This definition also allows people
“to treat all the languages of some multilingual speakers, or community, as a single variety, since all the linguistic items concerned have a similar social
distribution. ” As its own name implies, language variation focuses on how
language varies in different contexts, where context refers to things like ethnicity, social class, sex, geography, age, and a number of other factors.
Besides, Ferguson in Wardhaugh, 2006: 27 also offers another definition of variety: “anybody of human speech patterns which is sufficiently
homogeneous to be analyzed by available techniques of synchronic description
and which has a sufficiently large repertory of elements and their arrangements or processes with broad enough semantic scope to function in all formal contexts of
communication.” Complete homogeneity is not required; there is always some variation whether people consider a language as a whole, a dialect of that
language, the speech of a group within that dialect, or ultimately, each individual in that group. Such variation is a basic fact of lingustic life.
Hudson and Ferguson in Wardhaugh, 2006: 25-27 agree in defining variety in terms of a specific set of ‘linguistic items’ or ‘human speech patterns’
presumably, sounds, words, grammatical features, etc. which people can uniquely associate with some external factor presumably, a geographical area or
a social group. Consequently, if researchers can identify such a unique set of items or patterns for each group in question, it might be possible to say there are
such varieties as Standard English, Cockney, lower-class New York speech, Oxford English, legalese, cocktail party talk, and so on. One important task, then,
in sociolinguistics is to determine if such unique sets of items or patterns do exist. According to Elgin 1993: 21, a variety of language consists of idiolects,
dialects, registers, and genderlects.
a. Idiolects
The term idiolect means the language behavior results from using that idiosyncratic grammar Elgin, 1993: 21. Every human being has grammar that is
different from the grammar of every other person speaking the same language. Words in idiolect will inevitably have slightly different meanings from words in
