BSL in its Social Context
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BSL in its Social Context
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Session 1: Relationship
between Language and Society
What is social context in
BSL? In linguistics we
sometimes might seem to treat language as though it was nothing to do with people. It is seen as a sealed system, subject to its own
rules. Social context recognises
that people use language and that language is a part of society. Social context tries to describe, and account for,
the different ways that different people use language.
Social context looks at
relationships between language and society and looks at language as people use it. It considers the relationship between a person’s
language and their social identity. We observe the way that
people use language differently and try to explain why this is. This explaining is not always easy. Social context asks (a) what variations are
there in a language and (b) why do they come
about? Social context is,
interesting, exciting and fraught with difficulties.
There are very few definite neat answers to things. What we need to do is try to become aware of the
way language varies according to who people are, what they are doing, and the attitudes
they have to their language. We need to
remember that there has been very little research into the Social context of BSL. This course may well raise more questions than it
can answer, but at least we can become aware of the issues involved, even if we cannot
come up with a simple answer. Social context will think
about variety within a language. Everybody
who speaks a language has a very wide linguistic repertoire unless they have very severe
learning difficulties, or are learning the language as a foreign language. This means, they can use language in many
different ways, depending on the situation they are in.
The sort of language that they use also depends on their social background
and social identity. We have said that Social
context looks at the way relationship between society and people and language. What
is the relationship between language and people?
There are 4
possibilities: a) language
influences society and people
b) there
is interaction as language influences people and society and people and society influence language; c) there is no influence of
either so language is just a tool used by people and there is no social effect. ? For
each of these 4 possibilities, try to think of some examples that show the different
influences. When you have done so, look at
some of the ideas I suggest below. When you
have seen my ideas, maybe you can add some more of your own. We can probably discount
number 4: Neither interact with
each other or influence each other. Some linguists would like
to see language as something pure, abstract and untouched by the real world, like a
mathematical formula, but that's just a convenient way of thinking about the structure of
language. As soon as we look at people using
language we can see that the practical version of this abstraction is much more complex. In the end we will
probably need to say that number three: Society and language influence each other Is the correct way to
look at the relationship. Speech and social
behaviour are constantly interacting. All the
time language is changing because of social contexts and social contexts cause the
language to be changed. However, this does
not mean that we should not explore the two other possibilities in some depth, because
they can enlighten us about the relationship of language and society. 1) Language influences
people. There are two views here
- one is more extreme than the other. The
first idea is that language is so powerful that it actually affects how you see the world;
the second is that is influences the way we think and behave. A linguist called Whorf claimed language actually
affects the way you see the world (so language is like a pair of glasses through which we
see everything). This led to the Sapir-Whorf
theory, also called the “Whorfian hypothesis”.
It was based originally on
studies of the Hopi Indians. Whorf said that Hopi and
European had different ways of talking about the world, so it influenced the way they saw
the world. The Hopi language treats the world
as full of things that are “non-discrete” and “flowing” whereas
European languages see them as discrete and countable.
European languages treat time as something that can be divided up into
separate seconds, minutes and days. Trees and
plates can be counted, but water and hope cannot and the language makes distinctions here.
The Hopi language treats time as indivisible so that Hopi will not talk about minutes and
weeks. Trees and water are simply treated
linguistically as non-discrete items. The
result of this (claimed Whorf) was that the Hopi genuinely see the world differently from
Europeans. Their language structure makes
them see the world differently. Unfortunately, for this
theory, nobody asked the Hopi if they really saw the world differently. It would seem that they see it just as we do. After all, what would happen to a bilingual
Hopi/English speaker? Would their world view
shift depending on the language they were speaking? Another example of this
theory is the often-cited fact that Eskimos have lots of different words for snow, so it
means they actually see different kinds of snow, whereas we only see "snow". But this isn't really true because we can use
words to describe the snow if we need to, e.g. hard, soft, wet, dry etc. We aren't tuned to thinking about it that way, but
if it becomes important, we can easily do so. We
might not know the names of different makes of car, but still be able to tell the
difference between a Fiat and a Rolls Royce, for all that.
So could an Eskimo, even if the Inuit language didn't have the exact words. Besides which, Eskimos don't really have all those
words for snow - it's just one of those pieces of information that everyone repeats and
no-one has checked if it's true. If you
check, you find it isn't true! There is an important
lesson here that linguists can learn: don't make great generalisations about languages and
people that you don't know very well. Any
Hopi or Inuit could have told us immediately that this was a load of nonsense, but no-one
ever thought to ask them. Many people,
including linguists have done the same when describing sign languages, too. Often they have said things that people have come
to believe when deaf signers have known it wasn't true. George Orwell’s book
“1984” brought this idea up, with the idea of “Newspeak” which The
Party was introducing to replace “Oldspeak”.
The Party view was that
“the purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes
of thought impossible… A heteretical thought… should be literally unthinkable,
as least so far as thought is dependent on words” Orwell was making a dig
at the Whorfian hypothesis when he wrote about Newspeak.
The point about the story is that this sort of control does not really work,
and cannot work because if we do not have words for our thoughts, we just create them
anyway. Still, some politicians
and businesses do like to believe that the language we use will affect the way we think
about something. In 1976, the British
government replaced “The Official Secrets Act” with “The Official
Information Act”. The name had gone from
“secret” to “information” but the laws were unchanged. After the Second World War, Britain’s
Ministry of War became the Ministry of Defence. It
is also worth noting that a “defence procurement contract” is still an “arms
deal” by another name. So, language doesn't
affect what we can see in the world, but it is still possible that language affects people
and society because maybe language still affects the way we can think. Some people say that sign
languages don't have abstract signs because all signs are iconic and so deaf people can't
think about abstract things (like love, bravery, inflation, investment for the future
etc). IF this was true, then we could say
this was an example of language affecting people. But
it isn't. BSL can express anything that
English can. A linguist called Basil
Bernstein found that middle class children used an "elaborated" code of English
in school. This meant they used more abstract
words, less context dependent words and more complicated sentences. Working class children seemed to use a more
"restricted" code. This meant using more concrete words, more context-dependent
and less complicated sentences. So some
people (but NOT Bernstein) said this means working class children can't think in abstract
ways because their language doesn't allow them to. This,
of course, is nonsense. Just as with deaf
people. All it means is that the children
used different ways of expressing the same thing. One example of the way
that language is said to affect society is in sexist language. The theory is that language affects the way we
view men and women because it treats men and women differently. If you use words like chairman or fireman
it implies only men can do the jobs, so women feel left out. It is worth noting, though, that the form of the
words can influence our view of things. If
you see the word “farmer” you probably picture a man, although there is no
reason why it shouldn’t be a woman. If
you see the word “actress”, though, you immediately picture a woman because of
the form of the word. Another feature of
English that might exclude women is the use of "him" to mean "him and
her". English has to assign a gender to
a pronoun so God has “become” male, and again women can feel left out. In fact the use of “he” to refer to God
has caused us to treat God as in some way masculine to such an extent that if we use
“she”, people are pulled up sharply by the implication. This way the language may
create sexism in a society. But really, it's
more likely that the society made the language sexist, eg using words to put women down
like chick, bird etc. (Bird
used to refer to men and women, but now it is just derogatory to women). BSL does not have gender pronouns to correspond to
he and she,
but does this make the deaf community any more or less sexist? Does it mean that Deaf Christians are less likely
to perceive God as “masculine” or male in some way? It is possible that
signers look at the world differently from speakers, because sign languages are visual and
spatial. If you think in a language that
concentrates on order and space, then you are more likely to look at the world like that. One of the biggest blocks to hearing people
learning signed languages (rather than signed versions of spoken languages) is learning to
think about the world so that it is spatially organised.
Note, though, that hearing people are fully capable of seeing the world
spatially - it's just that they aren't used to building space into their language. We have seen, then, that
to some extent, language can have an effect on the way we think. We need to consider the
attitude that some people have towards their own language, and attitudes that other people
have. The language that we use can make a big difference to the way that we see ourselves,
and the way society sees us. It can also
influence the way we relate to society.
Accent is very important
in Britain. Advertisers on television only
use regional accents for voice-overs if the product is cheap or if the aim is to amuse. Serious things or expensive products use the
voices of middle-class men. During the war,
the BBC had to use "middle class" speakers the read the news because no one
believed the people with regional accents. This
has now changed, which goes to show that social factors in languages do vary and change
over time. However, not all regional accents
have the same social acceptability and "broad" (that is, strong) regional
accents are still cannot be too strong for some media broadcasts. Everyone seems to have an
idea what is a "good" language or variety and what is a "bad" one. This opinion is entirely socially conditioned. Sometimes people with power (e.g. governments or
schools) decide what is a good or bad language.
Sometimes it is just ordinary members of a language community who have
these views. Linguistically they are all the
same, because they can all communicate in the same way, but they just have different
social values. In the past, many deaf
people weren't proud of their language and even denied they used it. Now, there is more pride, but many deaf and
hearing people still think it is not a "good" language, or that English is in
some way "better". English is not
"better" than BSL in any way, except that it does have a higher status in
British society. Social context will look
at the relationship between language and power and attitudes to language. The language that someone uses may influence other
people's attitudes towards them. People have
fought and died for language (e.g. in medieval times people were accused of heresy for
saying that the bible should be translated from Latin into English. In some countries in the world, you can be
arrested for speaking a forbidden language). The history of BSL is
closely tied up with power. We can think of
some of the abuses of children caught using signing in school. We can think of hearing people telling deaf
people that they are stupid because "Deaf English" is influenced by BSL, so it
looks like "bad English". Deaf
people are often denied access to all sorts of jobs, or roles in society (e.g. serving on
juries) just because they don't use English. Hearing people writing in journals and
newspapers about deaf people and get it wrong, but deaf people don't get the chance to
reply because they feel their English is not up to writing a publishable reply. All these are examples of a language being
affected by power. This is the same for many
languages all around the world, for example, minority languages in India. People may think their language is not a good
language because it isn't the one taught in schools and isn't used in business. People who use another language make more money
and other people respect them, so people want to use that language. There may be some ways in
which the language we use influences people and society.
However, it is also possible that: 1) People influence language
and language use We can see this if we
look at the way people in different social groups use language differently. Younger people sign differently from older people;
people from different regions might use different types of language. The number of deaf people
in a society affects the language. In
Britain, BSL has survived so well because about 10% of deaf people come from deaf
families, so children from hearing families learn from them, and the language is passed
on. This core 10% is very important to BSL. But not all languages are the same because not all
societies are the same. In other countries,
there is no central deaf community, so the language is very different. For example, in Nicaragua it would appear that
there is almost no genetic deafness, which means that no deaf children learn sign language
from their parents. (We will come back to
Nicaragua later in the course). In other
societies (like in the old Martha's Vineyard, or in Yucatan in Mexico or Bali in
Indonesia) where there are many deaf people, the language is much stronger. There is a slum area in Mexico City where there is
a very high incidence of deafness. These
shanty-town people are very poor and never go to school, and are too poor even to go to a
deaf club but they have their own dialect of Mexican sign language because they all live
nearby and there are so many of them. We can
see that the number of deaf people and their social situation affects the language that
they use. Power also comes in here
when we discuss the influence of people and society upon a language: if you have power,
you can manipulate the language to suit you. This is important here for sign languages. This is not always a bad thing. Think about De L'Epee and the power he had over
French sign language. Think about the
responsibility of people who shape language e.g. BSLTA, or the people who made the BSL
English dictionary. In the past in Britain,
the missioners had a great deal of social importance, and their signing was respected. In the early 1980s, the production team of the
BBC's See Hear! had power to decide that signing had to be accompanied by speech, even
though many deaf people disagreed. In other
ways, deaf people have always had some power over their language because they have been
the ones who use it every day. READING: I strongly recommend that you read Chapter 9 in
Wardhaugh (pages 218 to 238) to complement this session.
Try to relate what you read to your knowledge and understanding of BSL.
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