The importance of language in establishing social identity is also shown in the case of slang. One way to characterize slang is as special kinds of intimate or in-group speech. Slang is a kind of jargon marked by its rejection of formal rules, its comparative freshness and its common ephemerality, and its marked use to claim solidarity. Slang regularly transgresses other social norms, making free use of taboo expressions. The use of words like 'fuck' and 'shit' in public media has become a mark of liberation or a sign of revolt, depending on one's point of view. But slang also sets up its own norms, the norms of the in-group, so that the gang is easily able to recognize a lame or outsider, who does not understand or who misuses slang terms. Slang thus serves social functions, setting and proclaiming social boundaries and permitting speakers to assert or claim membership of identity or solidarity groups. Slang is a feature of the speech of the young and the powerless. Its dynamic nature is partly an effect of the need to develop new in-group terms when slang terms are adopted by other speakers.
45 In a phrase "Everyone should bring his lunch" what kind of variety is used? Why do such varieties exist in language? What kind of social circumstances do they reflect?
In a phrase "Everyone should bring his lunch" is used gender. Studies of gender differences have shown the power of stereotyping. The use of generic masculine ("Everyone should bring his lunch, we need to hire the best man available"), however well – meaning and neutral the speaker’s intention may be, reinforces the secondary status of women in many social groups. With the growth of social awareness in this area over the past decades, there have been many attempts to overcome this prejudicial use of language.
46 There are pairs for some words like "poet - poetess", "actor - actress", but sometimes there is no: "doctor -?" Explain why.
Marital status always takes place in every language as an indication of sexism living in a culture. What we mean by marital status as a distinctive feature occurs when we talk about women. Until recently, there was no abbreviation for women that did not reflect their marital status, either Miss or Mrs was used for them that indicates whether they are married or single. Whereas, there is no indication of men's marital status on the title 'Mr.'. This indication of women's marital status is also seen in French as Mademoiselle and Madame; and in German as Fraulein and Frau. Yet, recently, as a solution the title 'Ms.', which has no reflection of a woman's situation, is proposed and in French and German, such terms as Mademoiselle-Madame and Fraulein-Frau have lost their popularity in use. This distinction can also be seen in ID cards in Turkiye, for example, when a woman divorces, her marital status is written as widow but this is not the same for men, since it is writen as single even if they divorce. This discrimination has a great value in many societies since their viewpoints shift towards women in accordance with their marital status. For example, in Turkiye, if you are a widow and live alone, you are to stand trial as a hussy woman. As it is seen clearly language itself may not be sexist, it is the societies who are labelling women as Miss or Mrs.
As for the asymmetries or marked and unmarked forms, English makes distinctions of a sex-based kind, for example, actor-actress, host-hostess, etc. What we understand from asymmetry is that among male/female pairs, most of the male terms are unmarked, whereas, female terms are formed by affixing a bound morpheme or by compounding. As an illustration;
| Male | Female | ||
| Actor Host Author Count Heir Hero Poet Paul Hayri Patron Kral | Actress Hostess Autheress Countess Heiress Heroine Poetess Pauline Hayriye Patroniçe Kraliçe | ||
47 Whose discovery is it? "He found that the percentage of any tendency to pronounce post-vocalic / r / correlated closely with the social level of the customers of the store" Explain the significance of this finding for the sociolinguistics.
While note had been taken earlier of the effect of social class on speech, it was the work of William Labov in New York that established social stratification, the study of class distinction in speech, as a major topic in sociolinguistics. Labov himself started out with a purely linguistic question. He waned to know how, in the terms of the structural linguistics that was in vogue when he was a graduate student, to set up a phonological analysis that included features that were sometimes zero. What were you to do, he asked, in New York City, where speakers sometime pronounced the /r/ after a vowel (post-vocalic /r/) and sometimes didn't? The notion of free variation, the notion that the choice of variant was uncontrolled and without significance, was widely used for such cases, but it seemed an unsatisfactory dodging of the question.
He wondered next whether there was any scientifically observable explanation to the variation. In a clever pilot study (see above, page II), he found that the shop staff (socioeconomically similar in level, but finely varied by the differences in customers and prices) showed regular and predictable variation. The percentage of r-coloration (any tendency to pronounce post-vocalic /r/), he found, correlated closely with the social level of the customers of the store. In fact, in one store, he found a higher percentage of use of the prestige feature among salespeople on the higher, more expensive floors of the store.