ENG 298 - Cultural Linguistics

This course offers an introduction to the study of the relationship between culture, language and society. It will cover topics such as: language variation according to different cultures, classes, ethnicities, genders, identities, ideologies; multilingualism; and language policy. We will look at how language is actually used, how people feel about it—how the two are often opposed—and how the structure of language interacts with both. We consider language as a resource to convey cultural and personal identity, and investigate what it reveals of language attitudes and social structures—and therefore of status and inequality in areas such as social class, gender, age, and ethnicity. We will see how social identity illuminates variation in language, and learn about such topics as regional and social dialects, language variation and change, and multilingualism and code-switching.

Credits 1

Connection
Beyond the West