2 - Power, social diversity, and language

Summary

This chapter discusses the inspection of the relevance of language to power and social diversity. It explores the elastic impact of power on the social life of living languages. Sociolinguists and historical linguists have demonstrated that linguistic evolution has been shaped by many forces, including political circumstances that are not egalitarian. Einar Haugen promoted the study of language within its ecological context. Some critics of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics have noted that scholars who classify speakers based on pre-ordained social categories, like race, may miss important nuances in linguistic behavior that defy easy circumstantial classification. Hymes affirmed that communicative events demand a high degree of communicative competence as related to language usage throughout the world. William Labov's study of the social stratification of English speakers in New York City is illustrative of urban linguistic stratification. The majority of speech communities throughout the world set the indigenous standard linguistic norms.