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This paper provides a diachronic and bibliometric overview of register studies in the past decade. A total of 545 articles were selected from the field of linguistics of the database of Web of Science Core Collection for the analysis. For bibliometric analysis, CiteSpace and VOSViewer were used in order to reveal the co-citation analysis, the high-frequency keywords, keyword clusters, and the timeline of the keyword network in register studies. The results are summarized as follows. First, register studies have been gaining considerable academic attention in the examined years. Second, the major theoretical origins of register studies were text linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Third, corpus analysis and discourse analysis are the main research methods, followed by genre analysis, and conversation analysis. Fourth, important research themes were extracted and classified based on the following dimensions of register studies, namely, linguistic features, register types, register variations and pragmatic function. Furthermore, Teaching and education was an important dimension in register studies. Fifth, the recent research tended to focus on the register variations caused by the audiences, and corpus analysis and discourse analysis were widely used for broad analyses in different register studies. This bibliometric analysis also shows that online registers have become the research hotspot. Plain Language Summary: A Bibliometric Analysis of Register Studies (2012-2021) Research purpose: This paper provides a diachronic and bibliometric overview of register studies in the past decade. Methods: bibliometric analysis. Conclusion: First, register studies have been gaining considerable academic attention in the examined years. Second, the major theoretical origins of register studies were text linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Third, corpus analysis and discourse analysis are the main research methods, followed by genre analysis, and conversation analysis. Fourth, important research themes were extracted and classified based on the following dimensions of register studies, namely, linguistic features, register types, register variations and pragmatic function. Furthermore, Teaching and education was an important dimension in register studies. Fifth, the recent research tended to focus on the register variations caused by the audiences, and corpus analysis and discourse analysis were widely used for broad analyses in different register studies. Implication: The research may be a useful resource for novice researchers and established scholars in the field, and perhaps also critical in assisting journal editors to continue to promote theoretical or methodological advances in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper based on quantitative and qualitative analysis on data on language attitudes and geopolitical orientations obtained in Central and Southern Ukraine shows significant differences between two regions. The assessment of linguistic changes occurred after the collapse of the USSR in both regions is unequivocal: most participants in open interviews noted a positive trend for the Ukrainian language, including the expansion of functional spheres of its use (on television, in politics, in education) and its higher prestige in society. Post-Soviet changes toward the expansion of the use of the Ukrainian language were viewed positively even by predominantly Russian-speaking respondents, who opposed "Ukrainization" in other aspects. Based on the answers to the questions in the "Geopolitics" and "Identity" blocks of questionnaire, two types of respondents were identified using cluster analysis: (1) "pro-European" and (2) "pro-Russian." The language preferences of respondents belonging to different clusters differed in the regions studied: while more Ukrainian speakers, both in the Center and in the South, mainly belonged to the first cluster, and more Russian speakers (to a somewhat lesser extent) to the second, speakers who used a mixed idiom known as Surzhik in the Center, were more "pro-Russian," and in the South, more "pro-European" oriented. That can signal of differences in language attitudes and labeling regarding Surzhik in those regions of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an active learning exercise in sociology education that implements language, interaction, and inequality. The exercise incorporates referential and constructivist perspectives for the interpretation and construction of social relations. The article discusses the role of language in sociology curricula in terms of topics such as culture, stereotypes, social attitudes, and individual thought. Information is also provided on cultural hegemony, language constructions in everyday life, social inequality and stratification, and questioning.

Verbal interaction is related to the task at hand. Language and other social practices are interdependent. Not all students of language use and social interaction, however, will concede that ethnographic material, participant attributes, and patterns of social organization that are constitutive of talk need to be included in studies of conversation or discourse. The researcher can exercise considerable discretion in what the reader will be shown or told about "context." In the present paper, / discuss two senses of "context" as it involves conversational interaction in a bureaucratic environment. This use of the term "context" includes an institutionalized framing of activities or ways that group-derived prescriptive norms pressure and/or channel people with designated titles, presumed competencies, duties or responsibilities into certain physical spaces at certain times in order to engage in a finite number of specifiable activities. Within this institutionalized context or framing of activities, emergent processes of talk appear that creates a more narrow view of "context" in the sense of locally organized and negotiated interaction. I have chosen a conversation between three physicians in a university medical center to underscore the importance of context at different levels of analysis. The analyst's decision to focus on particular sociolinguistic notions rather than the interrelationship between discourse and broader and narrow senses of social structure will frame different expectations for the reader and different substantive conclusions on the part of the researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several earlier papers have discussed the results of a technique for analyzing paralinguistic adaptation of partners in conversation. The previous research showed that in a group of eleven tape-recorded dyadic conversations, where the actual conversation partners have been separated and then scrambled together, a set of computer routines is capable of re-matching a digitized version of the actual conversation partners through an analysis of voice frequency levels. In another paper based upon the same data set and making use of the same techniques of analysis, it was found that the adaptation phenomenon is also capable of quantitatively and objectively selecting out from a scrambled sample of group and non-group members, specific conversations associated with persons who share membership in a consolidated group. Members of a consolidated group in comparison with desparate individuals engage in a kind of paralinguistic crpto-communication constituting a code signifying their membership. These sociolinguistic techniques present innovative new ways of researching a multitude of general social psychological areas such as conversational affectivity, conflict and effectiveness, which obviously specifically influence social interaction between patient and therapist, non-native speakers and native speakers, salespeople and customers, professional interviewers and subjects, as well as a multitude of other diverse applications. Though ideas dealt with here are nor difficult to understand, some of the techniques used are less accessible. This paper explicitly sets forth methods used in this type of research in a less technical manner, in an effort to make techniques more accessible to the social psychological researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recurrent theme in the literature on modernization is the importance of Westernization in non-Western societies-the purchase of Western commodities and the emulation of Western styles. This paper critically examines this theme in relation to a negative case, the lack of Westernization in nineteenth-century China. Three different theories of consumption that have been offered to explain the nonacceptance of Western products in China-an economic theory, a cultural theory and a sociological theory_are analyzed from comparative and historical perspectives. On the basis of this analysis, it is suggested that Westernization during the nineteenth century can often be viewed more accurately as an indicator of stratificational continuity with the premodern era than as an indicator of modernizing changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Political Science Review is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines how immigrants' proficiency in speaking English, and preference for retaining their native tongue as the language of the home, affect their occupational attainment in the Australian labour market. In particular, it investigates how well three approaches - an assimilationist approach, a Neo-Marxist approach, and an ethnic enclaves approach - account for differences among groups in how important language usage and skill are in occupational mobility. The data are drawn from the 1981 Census public use sample. The findings show that monolingual English usage is of no benefit in the labour market and that weak English skills harm the occupational opportunities of some groups much more than others, a finding that is fully consistent with the ethnic enclaves approach. Generalising from the differences among Australian immigrant groups, the paper provides some hypotheses about language effects among immigrants to industrialised societies more generally, and develops some hypotheses about conditions fostering development of ethnic enclaves in such societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparative studies of language proficiency and grades, Filipino second generation youth look relatively successful and assimilated, echoing what we know about their parents: post-1965 Filipino immigrants are predominantly middle-class, college-educated, English-speaking professionals who have integrated easily into U.S. society. Based on fieldwork in two California sites, this paper examines some of the issues and problems confronting second generation Filipino youth. "The family" seems to offer an extremely magnetic and positive basis of Filipino identity for many children of immigrants, yet it is also a deep source of stress and alienation, which for some, has led to internal struggles and extreme despair as manifested by rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. More specifically, by focusing on the gap between family ideology and practices, this paper suggests that many Filipino second generation youth struggle with an emotional transnationalism which situates them between different and often conflicting generational and locational points of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although self-disclosure has been shown to be an important verbal means for conveying and strengthening solidarity in very close relationships, little attention has been paid to other ways in which talk is used to convey and develop solidarity among friends. This paper shows how talk is used to build cohesion by examining collaborative talk, in which an utterance supports or ratifies the previous utterance in some manner. Although collaborative talk occurs in a number of forms, collaborative narratives are of particular interest because the very strategies that are required to produce a coherent narrative also lead to a greater perception and feeling of solidarity among group members. Adolescent females use a variety of strategies when telling personal narratives jointly. Some of the strategies reflect sociolinguistic rules of narratives, such as dividing the different functions of description and evaluation among the different speakers. Other strategies reflect grammatical rules of narratives, such as maintaining coherence through repetition and conjunction. Girls also use sequencing rules to establish coherence when the speaker changes. In all cases the strategies help to enhance solidarity among the narrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that the organization of citizen calls to emergency services reveals how the sequential machinery of conversation is adapted by speaker-hearers to organize, coordinate and exhibit to one another their knowledge and purposes on particular occasions. It is in the way such knowledge is brought to bear, and purposes at hand made evident, that recurrent sequences of interactionally and institutionally relevant activity are built out of local and particular materials. Thus, the sequential organization of conversation is a fundamental resource for social activities directed to matters outside of, but addressable through talk, and for achieving regular, recurrent patterns of action in the face of varying details and circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the interpretive conception of social interaction and examines it in terms of the mode of description required for deductive explanation. It is argued that interpretive descriptions of interaction cannot satisfy the requirements of literal description imposed by the logic of deductive explanation. The consequences of this for interpretive conceptions are outlined. In particular, attention is given to the suggestion that the process of interpretation itself be taken for investigation, as proposed in the study of sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four books, "Order in Court: The Organization of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings," by J. Maxwell Atkinson and Paul Drew; "Language and Control," by Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Tony Trew; "Language and Social Psychology," edited by Howard Giles and Robert St. Clair; "On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity," by Anton C. Zijderveld, reflect several current trends and conditions in sociolinguistic research and publication. A satisfactory review of these books would attempt to locate them in relation to the developing field of sociolinguistics and to articulate sociolinguistics to more conventional sociological concerns, substantive, theoretical, and methodological. In this article, author limits his studies to brief descriptions of the books' contents and passing allusions to location and to points at which articulation might profitably be essayed. Atkinson and Drew are sociologists, and their volume is the first in a projected series of the SSRC, Britain sponsored Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

During the last two decades, sociologists and social psychologists have directed increasing attention to language and its use in social contexts. In fact, from a variety of subdisciplines including cognitive sociology, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking and interpretive sociolinguistics, social scientists have produced a large corpus of work that addresses, in new ways, core problems in sociology and social psychology. To date, however, much of this work has appeared in relatively obscure specialty journals and edited volumes. The special issue of "Social Psychology Quarterly" (SPQ) was commissioned with several purposes—to introduce the data, analytic apparatuses and theoretical perspectives of scholars in the area of language and society to other readers of the journal, and to demonstrate ways in which these data, apparatuses and perspectives may inform the research of these other readers. These purposes are consistent with a recommendation that an ASA Committee on Publications review board proposed for SPQ in 1984 to encourage submission of theoretical manuscripts and those representing nontraditional methodological and substantive approaches within social psychology.

The article presents systematic analysis of books on sociolinguistics. Some of the books included are "In the book "Man's Many Voices: Language in its Cultural Context," by Robbins Burling; "Functions of Language in the Classroom," edited by Courtney B. Cazden, Vera P. John, and Dell Hymes; "The Psychosociology of Language," edited by Serge Moscovici. In his book "Man's Many Voices: Language in its Cultural Context," Robbins Burlin has lucidly presented and thoughtfully examined general issues of language in its social setting, lingustic repertoires and linguistic change. According to the author, his treatment of the formal analysis of analysis of meaning particularly instructive and straight-forward. In this book "Functions of Language in the Classroom," the main topics covered are language varieties and repertoires and communicative strategies The emphasis in this book is on how conflicting intrepretive norms prevent learning. There are number of valuable observations made and numerous theoretical questions are implied.

Abstract: In marketing, Eurasia is currently still an area of terra incognita between the CEE and the Asia-pacific region. This paper deals from a linguistic cultural studies viewpoint with the question of how far Eurasia can be a relevant region for MNE marketing. To this end, the enrichment of the conception of Eurasia in Russia will be researched in its philosophical, political and economic dimensions using the original geographic dimension as a baseline. The individual conceptual components will be scrutinized in detail for their potential significance for regional marketing in post-soviet economic discourse, whereby neo-Eurasianism in contemporary Russian thinking deserves particular significance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The importance of preparing students for citizenship in a global society is well recognized in teaching sociology. Although options have emerged to facilitate such pedagogical experiences, few concentrate on maximizing students' experiences in non-English-speaking nations. How can we help sociology students get the most out of an experience in a foreign language society if they do not speak the language? I propose a critical pedagogical approach to travel- study abroad by presenting a case study of a unique three-week intensive class taught in Cusco, Peru. Following Kaufman `s (2002) four-point model of critical pedagogy, I recommend that understanding, reflecting, analyzing, and engaging in social action can help structure the application of critical pedagogy to travel-study abroad in sociology. My research suggests benefits of such an approach, including working with a native educational institution, pairing sociology and Spanish students, and using home-stay families as in formal teachers. / conclude by offering suggestions for faculty interested in creating a travel-study abroad course, to a developing nation in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This current study reports three multilingual Chinese students' audience design strategies on a populated Social Networking Site (SNS), WeChat. Considering the importance of audiences in shaping multilingual speakers' language choice (Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13 (2), 145–204) and the potential hazard of conflated audiences in social media, as well as the comparative lack of research on Wechat which has different technical affordances from the well-researched SNS, Facebook, this article aims to shed new light on how multilingual speakers harness their linguistic repertoire to cope with the "context collapse" (Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13 (1), 114–133) in semi-public SNS. Data collection and analysis follow an online ethnography method consisting of 588 initial posts from participants' WeChat Moments during 1 year and semi-structured interviews. Theoretically informed by Androutsopoulos's (2014b; Languaging when contexts collapse: Audience design in social networking. Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5, 62–73) audience specification framework, the findings reveal that although the default language in both online and offline interactions is Chinese, Wechat users have a very high sensitivity to different patterns of Chinese–English code-switching and grammatical and lexical choices in English. Meanwhile, Chinese multilingual speakers usually developed highly nuanced audience design strategies to target or partition specific groups of audience, which are far more complicated than the audience design strategies found in previous research on Facebook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interrelation between sociology and language in context to the seminar held at Indiana University in 1964, sponsored by Social Science Research Council, a sociolinguistic committee and Summer Linguistic Institute of Linguistic Society of America. By referencing several books, the article emphasizes the sociological profit of studying language and reports that people in different social categories talk differently in different social context. Different speech forms or codes symbolize the form of the social relationship, regulate the nature of the speech encounters and create different orders of relevance and relation for the speakers. This two-part essay will cover only those representative books: published since 1970; primarily on topics of interest to sociologists; not previously extensively reviewed in the American Sociological Review or in this journal.

The Bristol Inquiry is arguably one of the most important cases of judicial medical investigation held in the United Kingdom (UK), which continues to raise important insights into the social construction of medical and scientific risks. As a way of marking the inquiry’s tenth anniversary year, this article returns to an important conversation held between noted pediatric cardiothoracic and cardiovascular specialists, on days 49 and 50 of the inquiry’s proceedings. Their conversance principally describes a pathway of scientific advancement across four decades (c. the mid-1960s to 1999). Risks, and the avoidance of medical error (iatrogenesis), represent important subtopics of the ensuing historical narrative, within which the experts describe opportunities for error as diminishing in-line with paradigmatic advancement. The telling of this story of risk mitigation involves the expurgation of considerable sensitivities to scientific uncertainty. In analyzing this example of expert scientific witness testimony, the article primarily considers how representations of uncertainty are formulated in language. The article concludes that, in this instance, the social construction of risk and uncertainty were heteroglossically premised upon language catalysts, cognitive metaphors, and logic-based mathematical rubrics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The great German theorist Niklas Luhmann argued long ago that meaning is the central construct of sociology. We agree, but our scheme of stochastic processes-evolved over many years as identity and control-argues for switchings of intercalated bits of social network and interpretive domain (i.e., netdom switchings) as the core of meaning processes. We thus challenge Luhmann's central claim that modern society's subsystems are based on communicative self-closure. We assert that there is refuting evidence from sociolinguistics, from how languages are put together and how languages' indexical and reflexive devices (e.g., metapragmatics, heteroglossia, genres) are used in social action. Communication is about managing indexicalities, which entail great ambiguity and openness as they are anchored in myriad netdom switchings across social times and spreads. In contrast, Luhmann's concept of communication revolves around binary codes governed recursively and algorithmically within systems in efforts to reduce complexity from the environment. We conclude that systems closure does not solve the problem of uncertainty in social life. In fact, lack of uncertainty is itself a problem. Order is necessary, but order at the edge of chaos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The testing of English language learners (ELLs) is, to a large extent, a random process because of poor implementation and factors that are uncertain or beyond control. Yet current testing practices and policies appear to be based on deterministic views of language and linguistic groups and erroneous assumptions about the capacity of assessment systems to serve ELLs. The question Who is given tests in what language by whom, when, and where? provides a conceptual framework for examining testing as a communication process between assessment systems and ELLs. Probabilistic approaches based on generalizability theory—a psychometric theory of measurement error—allow examination of the extent to which assessment systems' inability to effectively communicate with ELLs affects the dependability of academic achievement measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes and discusses Nordic entrepreneurship research (NER). It does so by providing a broader context for conducting entrepreneurship research, including historical, sociocultural, and disciplinary elements substantiating an understanding of “Nordic.” Contextualizing NER this way, we attempt for the article to do what it says, i.e., to also write here in a style we argue is characteristically Nordic. This includes a priority to the local and particular, and a subsequent focus on questions resonant with nominalist research. We thereby enable an experience of NER as a cultural practice, as we argue that this is a crucial part of understanding what it is. Drawing on a tracing of NER in journal publications (in between 2001 and 2005), the article identifies trends and tendencies. We identify three generations of entrepreneurship research and suggest directions for the future development of the third. This way, the discussion and conclusions are drawn toward images of what a Nordic entrepreneurship research might become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview on works that have come out in Italy in the field of ethnomethodology. General introductory works are considered first, with reference to their similarities and differences. Subsequently, the interpretations and discussions concerning the ethnomethodological perspective are briefly presented, and the limited amount of empirical investigations on ethnomethodological questions is mentioned. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology has been the object of a few specific introductory and interpretative contributions. The relationship between ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics has been a further and distinct research theme. Discourse and conversational analysis as a research field of its own has elicited a remarkable flow of research, which is—in contrast to ethnomethodology—not only methodological and epistemological but empirical as well. In particular, a number of authors have studied asymmetrical conversational exchanges in the institutional context provided by an Italian Court of Justice. Conversational analysis also has been instrumental in studying the production of social identity. In the final discussion, some theoretical points Italian students of ethnomethodology and the related disciplines have raised and discussed are presented in a condensed form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse analysis of interaction in a course on language and literacy development elucidates and exemplifies how preschool teachers constructed new knowledge that can be assumed to contribute to the improved literacy instruction observed in their classrooms. An analytic framework rooted in sociocultural theory and interactional sociolinguistic methods foregrounds the issues of whose sentiments and knowledge got taken up on the conversational floor and what specific new knowledge was conversationally constructed. We use this framework to explicate a discussion in which the teachers and the instructor assembled a knowledge structure. The group's emergent response to a question gained propositional content as participants jointly created and used social and informational resources. This approach allows insight into the sociolinguistic processes that contribute to effective professional development experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

G. H. Mead's model of language and mind, while perhaps understandable at the time it was written, now seems inadequate. First, the research evidence strongly suggests that mental operations exist prior to language onset, conversation of gestures, or social interaction. Second, language is not just significant symbols; it requires syntax. Third, syntax seems to be part of our bioinheritance, that is, part of our presocial mind/brain—what Noam Chomsky has called our language faculty. Fourth, this means syntax probably is not learned nor a social construction that is internalized as a cultural template. Fifth, this suggests a basic reversal of the prevailing model of symbolic interaction, mind, language, and perhaps the self as well, although there has not been the time or space to engage that topic here. Therefore, symbolic interaction may turn out to be a more Chomskyan than Meadian process. Given the bioinheritance of our mind/brain we are able to engage in symbolic interaction; it does not appear that symbolic interaction creates our mind or the basic computational algorithms of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In multilingual societies like the United States, the languages people use in daily life are the outcome of a variety of choices and constraints. I view the relative frequency with which members of minority language groups use English vis-à-vis their non-English language as the outcome of two sets of factors: (1) the pressures and incentives that encourage non-English language Americans to use English, and (2) the demographic context that constrains the range of opportunities for non-English language Americans to interact with others who can speak their non-English language. The results, based on data from a large national survey, show that both sets of factors strongly influence patterns of language use. Further analysis shows that the demographic context influences patterns of language use in part by affecting the probability that non-English language Americans have spouses with facility in the same non-English language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes issues related to sociolinguistic research. Sociolinguistics is defined as an interdisciplinary effort which studies language in the context of its use. The routine speech and actions of people in social groups forms the basis of sociolinguists study. Sociolinguists classroom research involves studies of classroom discourse structure, studies related to differential treatment and access to school knowledge and conversational nature of teaching and learning studies. The structure of classroom lessons and the communicative competence of teachers and students is reflected by the analysis of classroom discourse. According to sociolinguistic studies, classrooms presents a unique place in children's lives. An ethnographic study of communication focuses on extended contact with people in the speech community of interest. It is viewed that ethnographic study of communication's adequacy depends on the extent to which the researcher has produced a valid account of cultural knowledge.

Copyright of International Political Science Review is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article reports on the effort to suppress all German language publications in the U.S. The American Defense Society is obtaining thousands of signatures to a petition to Congress for their suppression. William J. Smith, said that it hurts her to think that the language of the enemy is still being used in the country and papers are being daily published in it.

Two different conceptions of social interaction, the "normative" and the "interpretive," are examined in terms of the mode of description required for deductive explanation. It is shown that if social interaction is an interpretive process, descriptions of interaction cannot satisfy the requirement for literal description imposed by the logic of deductive explanation. Consequently, sociological explanations of patterns of action must necessarily be interpretive and purposive, in the sense developed by Weber and Kaplan. In addition, this view of social interaction suggests that the process of interpretation itself be taken as a phenomenon for investigations as proposed in ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the social effects of language and its role in sociation or dis-sociation. Sociological observation have found that a language can unify a group of foreigners and it can equally reflect differentiation and divisions of interest within a social group. It has been also found that speechways are also indices of social distance between different classes of a complex society. In view of the importance of language as a socializing vehicle, speech has been regarded as a personality trait.

The article studies the relation between bilingualism and personality development. The study is based upon seventeen case documents. Some of them are self studies, furnished by bilinguals. Bilinguals are highly intelligent persons, with some training in personal and social observation, and selected because they seemed to show evidence of a certain objectivity of insight into their own personality development. A second group of documents was obtained from members of the subjects' families, such as wife, niece, or cousin, who had opportunity for continued close association with the subjects and who have had some training in the obtaining and recording of social data. To understand the problems of the bilingual, it is necessary to appreciate the sociological role of language. Two facts are of prime importance. First, language is a part of the cultural achievement of a people, comparable to its family system, its economic life, or its religious life. Second, it is also a mechanism which transmits the rest of the culture system.