SOCIOLINGUISTICS - MID EXAMINATION

Instructions:

Choose any 10 of the following test items.

Answer the questions clearly in brief sentences.

Submit your work to yanmujiyanto@gmail.com NOT later than 30 April 2017.

Write as your Email Subject, for instance Socio-Mid 2222222 Edy Wahyudi 

1. What obstacles do you see in an attempt to define English as a language when you consider that such a definition must cover region and socio-cultural aspects? 
2. What evidence can you use to show the fact that languages vary? Consider, for example, How many ways can you pronounce variants of and, have, do, of, and for? 
3. Describe some aspects of your own speech which show how it varies from the speech of certain other people. Do you pronounce words differently, or use different grammatical structures? 
4. If men and women speak differently, is it because the common language they share has a gender bias or because part of ‘gender marking’ is the linguistic choices one can or must make? 
5. Standard languages are usually based on an existing dialect of the language. What can you find out about the difficulties of choosing a variety for standardization in Indonesia? 
6. How would you evaluate Singapore English according to the criteria of standardization, vitality, historicity, autonomy, and de facto norms? 
7. The fact that Standard English can be spoken with a variety of accents often poses certain difficulties for the teaching of English in non-English-speaking countries. What are some of the problems you might encounter and how might you try to solve them? 
8. What do you regard as the characteristics of a ‘good’ speaker of English and of a ‘poor’ speaker? Consider such matters as pronunciation, word choice, syntactic choice, fluency, and style. 
9. If someone told you that pidginized varieties of a language are ‘corrupt’ and ‘ungrammatical,’ and that their speakers are either ‘lazy’ or ‘inferior’ how might you try to show that person how wrong he or she is? 
10. Pidgins and creoles have been said to have ‘the grammar of one language and the vocabulary of another.’ In what sense is such a statement true, false, or a bit of both? 
11. Use of the term code allows us to use derivative terms like codification and recodification. Writing systems are said to be codifications of speech. How do the English and Chinese writing systems differ as codifications of their respective languages? 
12. How ‘diglossic’ are classroom situations in which children who come to school speaking only a regional or social variety of English well removed from the standard variety are taught the standard variety and its various uses, particularly its use in writing? 
13. When you visit a foreign country whose language you know either well or poorly, when do you use that language and when do you not? What factors govern your choice? 
14. Describe the linguistic uses of some bilinguals with whom you are familiar. If you are bilingual yourself, in what ways do you identify with people who show the same range of linguistic abilities? 
15. Most of us know someone who has a repertoire of linguistic abilities that we admire, possibly envy. Try to specify some of these abilities that you yourself seem to lack. Why does the other have these abilities and you do not? 
16. Which linguistic variables might be usefully investigated in the world in which you live; that is, what kinds of variation have you noticed around you, and how might you characterize the variation using the concept of the ‘linguistic variable’? 
17. How would you try to place individuals according to their social position in the community in which you live? What factors would you consider to be relevant, and how would you weight each?

My answer could be seen on the PDF file below!