Lanuage, Identity, and Ideology

Social class and identity

                In about a week my linguistic anthropology class will be talking about Language identity and ideology. Language ideology is the study of how different influences like gender and social class change linguistic data. The most intriguing example to me would be social class and how languages all over the world have changed in their own ways to show maybe how educated someone is or where they may live in the area where that language is present. A perfect example of where a language has changed due to social class from the book is when John Gumperz was studying a small village named Khalapur of just a couple thousand people. This culture had developed into 31 different social classes and the language had differed between most social classes (Salzmann, Stanlaw, Adachi, 2015). Social class isn’t the only thing that influences language like this either. There is gender, race and where you grew up are all factors on how you talk pertaining to the original language. These examples are responsible for some dialects and how people may treat other people. These influence change how we see each other and maybe even how we judge people if they talk different then us.

References

Salzmann, Z., Stanlaw, J., and Adachi, N (2015). Chapter 14: Language, Identety and Ideology II: Variations in Class. In Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (pg.390). Westview Press.