TTC Video - Language and Society: What Your Speech Says About You

Language is not a passive medium of communication. In fact, it’s the active matrix through which we construct societies, and, within them, our own social lives and realities. It’s easy to view language as simply a system of symbols that describe experience. But a closer look reveals an astonishing truth: language—as we use it in our moment-to-moment living—fundamentally shapes our experience, our thinking, our perceptions, and the very social systems within which our lives unfold.

Ordinarily, we use language without examining how we are using it. But to look directly and rigorously at our language and speech—and how we construct our social reality through them—is to uncover richly illuminating insights into our societies, our social existence, and ourselves.

Nowhere are these insights more in evidence than in the remarkable field of sociolinguistics. This dynamic discipline offers a thoroughly fascinating and different lens for looking at society and our lives as social beings. Sociolinguistics studies language as a social act—how we actually use it in our daily interactions—and its findings are hugely provocative and revealing.

Lectures:

1 What Does Your Speech Say about You?
2 Does Language Influence Worldview?
3 What Is Sociolinguistics?
4 Four Levels of Language Variation
5 How Do Dialects Develop?
6 Language Change: What's New Is Old Again
7 The Origin and History of American Dialects
8 Your Shifty Vowels
9 Vowel Shifts and Regional American Speech
10 Language and Social Class
11 Sex, Age, and Language Change
12 Language Attitudes and Social Perception
13 Language as a Communicative Process
14 Making Sense of Conversational Intentions
15 Analyzing Conversation
16 The Mechanics of Good Conversation
17 Mind Your Manners: Politeness Speech
18 Linguistic Style and Repertoire
19 The Gender Divide in Language
20 Ethnic Identity and Language
21 Socializing Children into Language
22 Language, Adolescence, and Education
23 Textspeak: 2 Bad 4 English?
24 The Changing Face of Linguistic Diversity