Sociolinguistics Essay Example

Sociolinguistics Essay The book discuses topics on sociolinguistics such as differences in language, language diversity, code-switching, prototype, speech, anthropological linguistics, linguistic and social disparity, gender difference and educational inferences of sociolinguistics. This second edition added up new segment on civility and courtesy, accommodation and samples. He also opened out the discussion about sex differences, association between language and thought and speech. As discussed in his first edition, language variety, speech as a social interaction and its quantitative study keep on.This is a very intriguing book. Hudson makes several statements but conflict with what he wants to articulate. For example, on page 11, he says â€Å"no two speakers have the same language, because no two speakers have the same experience of language† (Hudson, 1996)and â€Å"Effectively, the ‘socio-‘of ‘sociolinguistics is redundant.† This is somewhat in clash with his convention al conception about language, assortment, dialect and speech communities in his second chapter. He disputes the subsistence of them and can’t be used as a theoretical constructs.In some topics, the association of the topics is not intact but rather same topics can be found anywhere within the book. The author seems to â€Å"beat around the bush† where ideas are circling back on itself. The author argue the work of both Labov and Chomsky without clear explanations about what he is trying to say and what he want reader to understand. His arguments about variance of his idea against Labov and Chomsky are incomprehensible arguments. Specifically, his explanations about the section on quantitative study of speech are very poor. In addition, the graphs being used are poorly labeled or unlabeled. In explaining the authors ideas, there’s no precision and exactness. In page 16, For instance, he says â€Å"As for morphology, this is left out altogether, which again makes for ease of learning†¦.† (Hudson, 1996) .A reader can’t grasp how morphology has been left out altogether. There are so many explanations in the book without clear thoughts and sometimes careless.The significant role of the book can be taken seriously in the first two chapters of the seven chapters. For example, he makes significant arguments about varieties of language. He says, in pages 23-24,   that language should be taken into account as â€Å"a phenomenon including all languages of the world and then stresses that there is variety among languages is difficult to hunt down (Hudson, 1996). However, he concludes that varieties are not present. Rather, aspects of language may vary. People have different ways on how they use their language. People have different items on how they utter their language. Every people have a â€Å"part of the set† in the items they have in their language.In chapters three through six, he makes a significant notion of severa l concepts of sociolinguistics. According to Hudson, sociolinguistics deals with the study of language in relation with the society. I find very interesting in chapter three – Language, culture and thought. Specifically, his arguments about prototypes and sexism in the language system are very good which I found to be attractive. It can give details about indistinct boundaries of concepts where critical feature cannot. Language maintenance and alterations are very difficult to analyze. However, due to Hudson’s prototype theory which asserts that it is the groundwork for Fishman’s speech domain concept, the evaluation and investigation of language preservation and modification becomes is being facilitated.Chapter Four, â€Å"Speech as Social Interaction,† is difficult to analyze the ideas presented. Topics under the subject lack thorough discussion on the recent studies on speech acts, speech events and dialogue analysis.I was attracted oh how the author c ould encourage the accuracy of his work by using some statistical methods such as sampling, structured interview and by using variables. Researches conducted by the author add to the reliability of the authors ideas. The concept about sampling is not discussed thoroughly in the book even it does not appear. However, sampling can be implicitly understood in the book. Chapter 5, a quantitative study of speech, where discusses selection of â€Å"different types of housing and a range of social status†¦.† (Hudson, 2007, p.60) can be used to implicitly understand sampling, a selection process of different units from a population, called the sample, to make an inference from the whole population. In other words, it is a process of determining characteristics or parameters of the whole population by selecting a suitable representative part of it (Mugo, 2004).In addition, I found interested on how the author used structured interview for he could make conclusions from a certain research. From the book, I know that this kind of interview, where an evaluator asks same questions to every interviewee offering them the identical responses, is very efficient in data gathering (ERIC/AE Staff, 2007). He emphasizes that structured interview â€Å"have used fewer than a hundred speakers and increasing the number of speakers tends to be counterproductive the analytical (Hudson, 2007, p. 160).The use of the quantitative variable by the author helps to capture the thought about quantitative difference. Linguistic variable refers to â€Å"a set of related dialect forms all of which mean the same thing and which correlate with some social grouping in the speech community† (Britain, 2005).Although the book is used a course text, it must have suggested reading, projects or suggestions for additional information for readers to know. Also, the bibliography and index is poor in construction.The book, first, is a very good example resource for people who want to have background about sociolinguistics, the language with a society and the society with a language. However, I would like to stress some main points. Since the focus of the is mainly on theoretical aspects, it is not best recommended for those who want to take practical research. This could be a great resource about sociolinguistics if it will provide readers the clear and thorough understanding about the subject matter. Another, I like on how the author organized his ideas by making conclusions after a certain topic. The conclusion allows me to check the accuracy of his idea. Also, it gave me the importance of each topic discussed.