Speakers and Communities Conformity and individualism A society consists of individuals and it cannot exist without individuals.

According to Hudson ( ) both sociologists and sociolinguistics would agreed that a society cannot exist without individuals rather individuals are center of interest of a society. To know about how the individuals behave it is necessary to know how they work. Therefore, it is essential to know that why individuals are given importance in sociolinguistics. We can be sure that no two speakers have the same language because no two speakers have the same experience of language and differences lie between them because of the universal characteristics of a language. It is happened because an individual moulded much more because of s/he experience than by genetic make-up and because of speech produced by the other individual speakers. But how does s/he gets this uniqueness and it is happened not only because of difference in experience but also because of unconscious mental map of the community multi-dimensional space like linguistic differences, linguistics parameters and variables of other types ( p. 11). So, people with different sociolinguistics backgrounds will be led to construct correspondingly different maps relevant to language and society. However, s/he is not simply a social automation and nor is the map of itself rather individuals filter their experience of new situations through their existing map ( p. 11). Thus according to sociolinguists a society is structured from a sociolinguistic point of view, in terms of a multi-dimensional space (p. 11 &12) and can be classified more or less independently according to the dimensions of age, region of origin, social classes and sex in which each dimension is relevant to language. language is only one part of the picture, but a particularly important part because it gives us a very clear structured set of symbols which we can use in locating ourselves in the world. In other words at each uttereance your speech can be seen as an ACT OF IDENTITY in a mlti dimensional space (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). It is important to point out that degree of similarity generally found between speakers goes well beyond what is needed for efficient communication and for that pronunciation and syntactic restriction on the use of particular words will be more or less exact copies as those of the people we take models for example well be late, or were likely to be late but not*were probable to be late. Perhaps the show-piece for the triumph of conformity over efficient communication is the area of irregular morphology. The two forces which we have now considered, one leading individual differences and the other leading to similarities between individuals, may be referred to for convenience as INDIVIDUALSIM and CONFIRMITY. The term FOCUSSING and DIFFUSION have been suggested for these two kinds of situations(Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). Focusing is gound where where there is high degree of contact among speakers and agreement on linguistic norms or of societies wherehere is a highly standardized written language such as English or French. Diffusion on the other hand, is found where

neither of these conditions holds, an extreme example being Ronmany, the gipsy language. Rather they are thee names of two ends of a scale on which any society, or part of it may be located. Interestingly, it has never been suggested that individuals can be more or less conformist so far as language is concerned though it is of course convenciable that such differences exist. Some individuals reject the model of their parents since this probably because they are conforming to a different model rhater than to no model at all. The differences lies like in to create new vocabulary etc. however, such creativity seems to take place against the background of a normal, conformist language system. Conformity extends to some unexpected areas of our linguistic behavior of which perhaps the most surprising is swearing, shit and blood, oh dear, hurray. These words as dangerous can be seen in the fact that swear words are ranked with sex and violence as the three dangerous elements in terms of which TV shws, films and videos are classified. On the other hand, our individualism is relevant as well because we choose to ignore the do not use! Rule a nice example of the principle that rules exist in order to be broken. 2. The sociolinguistic development of the child. Although we may assume that each speaker has a unique experience of languge and on this basis develops a unique grammar, a number of generalizations can be made about the stages through which people may be expected to pass in their sociolinguistic development. The first generalist ion concerns the linguistic models which the child follows. For many children, the pattern is as follows: first parents, then peers and then adults. With in the peers as models phase we can distinghish between childhood and adolescence, giving four life-phases: babyhood, childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Babyhood. In this stage the models are parents and other care takers and a baby talks like gee, gee etc. Childhood. In this stage theses children speak differently from the parents, the childerns model generally is the one which is actually adopted. This leads to what is called AGE GRADING (Hockett 1950). The language used by primary children is full of archaic forms which were in use by children of the same age , who then stop using when they grow older. Perhaps because of this obsessive conformism with the local model , children can learn a new language or dialect perfectly. Two other facts about this stage are important; the preference given to members of their own sex and to recognize the social significance of different linguistic norms. Adolescence. Before that we have already laid down the foundations of languagefor most people it is to late to develop/learn a new languge or dialect perfectly (cahmbers 1995: 60). Unlike children adolescencts aim to be different from all previous adolescent, which gives rise to the constantly changing picture of teengage slang (Chambers 1995: 171). It is essential to the self respect of a fourteen year old to be different from the ex-teenager twenty year olds and identified in terms of alternatively life-style models.

Adulthood. At this stage they offer competing modes which we may either avoid or copy. There is still change required for learning to use more or less standard speech for work purposes under the pressure of the linguistic market place ( Vourdieu and Boltanski 1975, explained well in Chambers 1995: 177 ff). however, by now we are all more or less stable linguistically, with a personal language which defines our place in the social world in terms of region, age, sex, social class and other characteristics.

How children adapt to the very varied linguistic world into which they are born. First at what age do children become aware f the social significance of different speech forms? There are social differences between them I from an early age . children brought up in a bilingual environment have been reported as being aware that two separate language systems were being used even at eighteen months ( Romaine 1989). But it seems a fair assumption that they are at least capable of being aware of such differences by the time they start to model themselves on thierpeers. And wil be aware of dialect differences to the extent that the speech of their parents and of their peers is different. How long does it take to become aware of the positive and negative prejudices that grown up have towards some of these varieties? And how long does it take children to adopt these prejudices themselves? Again the evidence is sketchy and to some extent contradictory, but we shall see that there is some evidence at least which suggests strogly that there are communities in which many children as early as age three have not only already become aware of such prejudicies but have adopted them themselves. Indeed there seems to be o reason for thinking that the process ever stop completely. What about the childerns own speech? How does this develop in relation to the social environment? It is clear that children from an extremely early age adapt their speech to its social context (Anderson 1990). Moreover from a very earl age- in the first year, before they have leanred any of adult formsthey use different noises for different purposes, such as asking for something or saying the equalivent of I say, just look at htat! (Halliday 1975). By age three the children of bilingual parents will probably be reasonably efficient at keeping the two languages separate form each other in their own speech and started to adopt the rolesof baby, doctor, or cowboy (weeks 1971). And a four year child is already remarkably versatile as described by Jean Berko Gleason (1973).