LANGUAGE AS A SOURCE OF SOCIAL MARKERS: A STUDY OF LANGUAGE USE VARIATION

Abstract

Language is indeed an important source of social markers. By using language, people do not only communicate meanings but also establish and maintain social relations. This means that when somebody says or writes something, the linguistic and even the extra-linguistic features involved in his speech and writings can convey some information about his social affiliation whether in the dimension of socioeconomic class, gender, age, ethnicity and personality. This paper is concerned with this sociolinguistic phenomenon but within the scope of learners of English as a Foreign Language. Formal Standard English is the dialect spoken by educated people, and RP is the accent normally taught to foreigners seeking to learn English. But at the same time, virtually no one in Britain speaks the exact pure version of the Standard. Trudgill (1999: 124) estimates that only 12-15 per cent of the population of England use it. The current study seeks to represent the students’ attitudes towards the variation used by native speakers of English. The data were collected from students’ writings. The researcher asked 100 students in the University of Diyala, College of Education for Humanities, Department of English, third grade to answer a group of questions in the questionnaire. The findings of this paper prove that the students are more aware of the physical markers (age and gender) than social (ethnicity, class) and psychological markers (personality).