Among many eye-opening perspectives, the work of sociolinguistics points out the following facts:

Language is strong social capital, and our linguistic choices carry both costs and benefits we rarely consider.
Our identity is strongly tied to the speech we use and our perceptions of the speech we hear.
Our children are raised, our relationships are made, and our careers succeed, in large part, through how we use language.
Language embodies a worldview: your linguistic system reflects and affects the way you organize and understand the world around you.
Language opens doors and it closes them. It establishes relationships and it severs them. It represents us and locates us firmly within our social universe. It builds and rebuilds our societies. And all of these powerful capacities of language reveal themselves when we explore the crucial relation between what we say and how we live.

Uncover the Hidden Functions of Language in Our Social Existence

Explore the True Power of the Words You Speak

In her teaching, Professor Fridland demonstrates both a deep knowledge of the work of sociolinguistics and incisive understanding of what its findings reveal. In numerous contexts, she presents intriguing and often startling evidence showing the importance and implications of our linguistic behavior:

Our beliefs about speakers can actually influence our perception of what we hear, as shown in studies where listeners who believed a speaker was Canadian reported hearing different vowel sounds than those who believed the speaker was American.

Throughout the lectures, Professor Fridland engages you with illuminating questions, such as:

How did Northern and Southern American speech develop?
Why is there such a huge disconnect in English between spelling and pronunciation?

--

1 What Does Your Speech Say about You?
2 Does Language Influence Worldview?
3 What Is Sociolinguistics?
4 Four Levels of Language Variation
5 How Do Dialects Develop?
6 Language Change: What's New Is Old Again
7 The Origin and History of American Dialects
8 Your Shifty Vowels
9 Vowel Shifts and Regional American Speech
10 Language and Social Class
11 Sex, Age, and Language Change
12 Language Attitudes and Social Perception
13 Language as a Communicative Process
14 Making Sense of Conversational Intentions
15 Analyzing Conversation
16 The Mechanics of Good Conversation
17 Mind Your Manners: Politeness Speech
18 Linguistic Style and Repertoire
19 The Gender Divide in Language
20 Ethnic Identity and Language
21 Socializing Children into Language
22 Language, Adolescence, and Education
23 Textspeak: 2 Bad 4 English?
24 The Changing Face of Linguistic Diversity

More Info:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-and-society.html

---

Tags: TTC, Language, and, Society