Summary of " Sociolinguistics and Multilingualism "

           Sociolinguistics as the study of language in relation to society . It is a part of the overall study of language, linguistics and that linguistics differs from sociolinguistic in only taking into account the structure of language to the exclusion of the social contexts in which it is learned and used. In particular, sociolinguistics allows the beginning of an analytical frame-work to be worked out, containing  terms such as language ( a body of knowledge or rules ), speech ( actual utterances ), speaker, addressee, topic and so on. And of course personal experiences is a rich source of information on language in relation to society. Because it is easy to see that people speak differently  according of his place of origin, education, social group, generation, and even occupation to mention few.

            Language and society are so intertwined based on human societies depend on and are shaped by language, and language itself is shaped by society.  In result the sociolinguist learns how a given society is stratified , that is , what groups make up that society to understand the conditions, values and beliefs that have helped shape the groups. It also explain the sociolinguistics phenomena about the relationship between language and society. As societies interact with one another in a variety of ways and to varying degrees and language , even in a single society is constantly undergoing change. There in no language that has ever been studied that does not show evidence of change.

Hudson mentions several broad areas of overlap between language and society with three question such as first there a question as relating language as wholes to speakers?, second, there is the question of discourse : how is speech used in social interaction? And third is the question  of the relation of language to culture. In the fact in our world multilingualism is widespread and this makes it hard to decide who is a speaker of a given language because there are five thousand languages in the world but less than 200 nation-states.

In speech communities, language is as fundamental to the organization of society as it is to the expression of the culture, for language is primarily social. But there is a different statement between speech communities is groups of individuals who habitually interact with each other linguistically with each other linguistically and language communities is a group defined by mutual intelligibility. The dominant theoretical model in linguistics during last three decades is generative grammar, because generative grammar is focused in structure of language and not its communicative function. Individual users of language are almost always well-learn in the norms and patterns of interaction in their societies. Bolinger ( 1975) says is not limit to the ways human beings group themselves for the purposes of self-identification and definition it allows for the possibility of more than one speech community within any geographical area.  Speech communities is particularly  suited to describing multilingual speech communities. In multilingual communities, the norms will include all of the above plus considerations such as which language to use on what occasion and with whom.