Cixiu Duan
When reading the Van Herk’s Chapter 2, I was thinking about the three social group models and the impact that the society has on the use of language.
Speech community, social network and community of practice are three models of social groups from bigger to smaller, or local. Speech community is a group of people who share the same linguistic norms although they may hold different beliefs on other aspects. In addition, people in the same speech community may switch from one language to another under certain circumstance. For example, professors and students at McGill all share the same language – English because it is the language of instruction. They belong to the same speech community at school. However, Chinese students are more likely to use Chinese when they hold party or discuss the group assignment. Students from Quebec tend to use French at local community when they get home. The concept of social network could explain why people sometimes shift from one language to another. People usually participate in multiple networks, thus use different languages when deal with different people. Take myself as example, Shanghainese is my home language. English is school language. I speak Chinese with local Chinese immigrants (e.g. restaurants, markets, friends). And I speak French with local people. It is necessary to change the language according to the social network.
Not only me, but almost all the bilingual and multilingual speakers belong to multiple social groups. Their social identities and languages they use make them tend to be the broker. If the person is powerful in both groups, he/she is more likely to bring the idea from one community into the other.
Another topic discussed in this chapter is the relationship between language and dialect. I would like to share my experience in childhood, from which I feel a strong political force. Shanghainese used to be the only language at home from my birth to the age of six. Then I learned Mandarin from elementary school. Due to the strict language policy implemented in Shanghai, I was forced to speak Mandarin and banned to speak any other dialect at school, otherwise I would get punished. Gradually, all the friends around me speak Mandarin. It was no longer the language policy which affected the choice of language, it was instead the society that pushed me to speak that language.
Sometimes I think I have the choice, but actually I don’t. The society makes the choice for me.
Sometimes it’s tricky to know where the pressures from supposed “language policy” leave off and the pressures from “society” begin—or vice versa! Quebec is a good place to be if we are interested in observing the difference (or non-difference). What began as societal pressures to speak French rather than English developed into the very codified language policies of the 1970s (la Charte de la langue française or “Bill 101”; the Education Act). Then the existence of the policies pressured people to speak differently—like you and friends in your Shanghai school. But now I imagine many of us perceive the pressure to speak French as social, not political…though I don’t know if your francophone classmates or my francophone friends would agree with me.