Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

9.1 Vocabulary in social history
Unit 9 Language and society
Section 2 Language variation

A language is constituted of a vocabulary, whose words are all made from a specific set of sounds, and whose words are combined in specific ways into sentences. A language such as ’English’ can be thought of as a group of related dialects, which have many elements in common, but differ to some extent in vocabulary and rules of combination. Dialects usually also differ from each other within a language by being associated with different accents (different ways of pronuncing the words). Which dialects and accents a person is able to use fluently, and when they use those dialects and accents, relate both to geography and social class. As we will see in this chapter, where alternatives are possible in language, the choice of one alternative over another has social implications, relating to ideology, power and social status. These alternatives involve not just choice of dialect or accent, but also choice of word, choice of interactional style and choice of sentence structure.

9.1 Vocabulary in social history

Our experience of the world is shaped for us by our language. Partly this is a question of vocabulary. The emergence of particular vocabulary items in a language helps to bring aspects of reality into focus for its speakers, and a shift between vocabulary items or expressions may reflect or produce a redefinition of that reality. The history of a society, and the struggles within that society, can be manifested in the vocabulary spoken by that society. Raymond Williams showed this in his book Keywords (1988), which traces the history of certain words, and shows how these histories are also social histories (see also Unit 5, Language and time). For example, the word ’family’ has often been at the centre of political debates; while it is often used as though it is unproblematic, this is not reflected in its complex history. It first entered English from Latin in the late fourteenth century, at which time it tended to refer to a household (incorporating not only blood-relations but also servants living together under one roof). It was then extended to include the notion of a house formed by descent from a common ancestor. The specialization of the term to refer to a small kin-group living in a single house is a fairly late development in the history of the word in English (between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries), and may be related to the growing importance of the family as an economic unit in developing capitalism. One of the reasons why words change their meanings through history is because they reflect both the transformations of social structures and the fact that society is not a single entity but differentiated along lines of class, race and gender. The use of the term ’the family’ in recent political debate emphasizes the heterosexual, parenting couple as a self-contained economic unit living in its own home independent of state and social support (the ’nuclear family’) - a sense which tends to exclude single parents, unmarried parents and so on. The fact that such a definition does not accord with the way many people live in English-speaking societies in the twenty-first century goes some way to demonstrating the ideological work to which language can be recruited in an attempt to promote or legitimate particular versions of reality. It seems as if language cannot escape becoming the site of social and political contestation. It gives us categories for organizing experience and understanding the world that may seem neutral and unbiased but are inevitably partial and particular.