An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Ethnographies

10 Ethnographies Speech is used in different ways among different groups of people. As we will see, each group has its own norms of linguistic behavior. A particular group may not encourage talking for the sake of talking, and members of such a group may appear to be quite taciturn to outsiders who relish talk, or they may feel overwhelmed by the demands made on them if those others insist on talking. In contrast, in another group talk may be encouraged to the extent that it may even appear to be quite disorderly to an observer who has internalized a different set of ‘rules’ for the conduct of talk. Listening to thunder or stones, as in the Ojibwa examples mentioned earlier (see pp. 3–4), may appear to be bizarre, even to those who ‘listen to their consciences’ as a matter of course. We must try to understand how different groups of people use their language (or languages) if we are to achieve a comprehensive understanding of how that language (or those languages) is related to the society that uses it. A society that encourages a wide variety of kinds of talk is likely to be rather different in many nonlinguistic ways from one in which speakers are expected neither to waste words nor to use words lightly. In this chapter, therefore, I will look at how we can talk about the various ways in which people communicate with one another, in an attempt to see what factors are involved. However, I will also be concerned with the fact that much of that communication is directed toward keeping an individual society going; that is, an important function of communication is social maintenance. Language is used to sustain reality. Consequently, a second purpose of this chapter is to look at ways in which individuals cooperate with one another to sustain the reality of everyday life and at how they use language as one of the means to do so. Varieties of Talk It is instructive to look at some of the ways in which various people in the world use talk, or sometimes the absence of