SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationships between language use and social structure. It investigates the correlation between linguistic (i.e., phonological, lexical, and grammatical) variables and social (i.e., gender, age, status, and ethnicity) variables. Since sociolinguistics is concerned with both linguistic and social aspects of language, researchers identify two main distinctions in sociolinguistic inquiry. Micro-sociolinguistics focuses on the social aspects of language, while macro-sociolinguistics examines how linguistic features can provide explanations for certain social phenomena. In other words, micro-sociolinguistics investigates how society influences the way people communicate, while macro-sociolinguistics studies society in relation to language.

Sociolinguistics is a relatively new branch of linguistics. Despite a long tradition of dialect research dating back to the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1960s that sociolinguistics became a recognized area of language research. This came about as a result of the projects that were carried out by William Labov (1966, 1972) in the United States and Peter Trudgill (1983) in the United Kingdom. Labov, in his studies in New York and Martha's Vineyard, investigated linguistic change and variation as social phenomena. For example, he found that in New York, people who were less secure about their social status were more likely to pronounce the "r" in words such as "car" and "fourth." He found that such pronunciation was treated as newer and more prestigious. Trudgill, in his study of Norwich, England, found that women used more "correct" and prestigious forms of language than did men. He attributed this difference to the differences in the roles and expectations that society placed on men and women. In society, it is "normal" for women to speak "better" than men. Both Labov and Trudgill found evidence of the interconnectedness of language and society and demonstrated that it is possible to find social explanations for linguistic structure and change.

Sociolinguists do not seek to find and prescribe the "correct" or "standard" variant of a language. Rather, they aim to describe the variety in language against a systematic correlation between linguistic and social variables. Labov, for example, in his influential study of black English, argued that African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is not a poor or illogical way of talking but a rich variant of English that is governed by specific rules.

Unlike theoretical linguists (e.g., Noam Chomsky), who disregard "real-life" conversations and instead study language in terms of ideal speakers who are situated in a homogeneous community, sociolinguists find it difficult and artificial to separate language from the rest of society. Thus, sociolinguistics, without necessarily rejecting the main premises of theoretical linguistics, looks beyond prescribed phonological and grammatical rules at language that is produced by real speakers in a real world.

Regional Dialects

A native speaker of a language in many instances can identify where his or her conversational partner grew up or is currently living. Such identification is based on pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. A variation of language spoken in a specific geographical area is a dialect; more specifically, it is a regional dialect. A dialect should not be confused with an accent, which is usually associated with the speech of a nonnative speaker whose native language phonetics penetrates into the target language.

Mutual intelligibility is often used as a criterion to distinguish between a language and a dialect. For example, if a person who is speaking Spanish cannot understand a person who is speaking French, they are said to speak different languages. However, if a person from the southern part of the United States can understand a person from the northern part of the United States, they are said to speak different dialects of the same language. The distinction between language and dialect is not always so clear-cut. For example, Danes and Norwegians understand each other well, but Danish and Norwegian are considered to be two different languages. At the same time, a speaker of Cantonese would not understand a speaker of Mandarin, but Cantonese and Mandarin are both recognized as being dialects of Chinese. Thus, the distinction between a language and a dialect does not lie in mere intelligibility. The distinction is also related to political, historical, social, and cultural factors. Furthermore, Richard Hudson (1998) argues that mutual intelligibility is not between linguistic varieties but between people who are either motivated or not motivated to understand each other. Motivation can be said to be the speakers' attempt to minimize cultural differences and stress similarities.

Social Dialects, Style, and Register

Dialect varieties are not limited to geography; they are also related to the age, social class, and gender of the speakers. All play a significant role in the way people speak. The term "social dialect" is used to describe a speech variety that is associated with a certain social group. For example, Standard American English is a social dialect that is associated with the educated middle-and upper-class population, so it is, therefore, considered to be more prestigious. A nonstandard or vernacular language is usually ascribed less societal prestige. For example, the form "getting" (which is associated with the standard variant) is generally considered to be more prestigious than "gettin'" (which is associated with the nonstandard variant). However, "lower-class" speech, especially that of men, has what Labov called "covert prestige," which is different from the standard or "overt prestige" and is associated with group solidarity. Trudgill (1983), in his study of Norwich, found that women are more status conscious and concerned with overt prestige, while men are more concerned with acquiring covert prestige.

Language variety plays an important role in conveying information about a speaker. A person's identity is created, to a large extent, in and by conversation. Identity, however, is not fixed and static; it is fluid and dynamic. Its fluidity depends on the context in which communication is taking place and the social relations between the communicants. For example, the same person can demonstrate different linguistic styles as well as extralinguistic behavior when speaking to a subordinate, a boss, a relative, or a neighbor. Thus, a person can express approximately the same meaning using different language styles that depend on the relationship between the communicants and the level of formality of the situation. Consider the phrases "I have purchased some refreshments" and "I got something to drink." In both cases, the meaning is more or less the same, while the level of formality is different. Where the first is formal and appropriate for official conversation, the second is informal and appropriate for a conversation among friends.

Charles Ferguson (1994, p. 20) states that groups of people who share common interests or jobs develop "similar vocabularies, similar features of intonation, and characteristic bits of syntax and phonology that they use in these situations." This shared language variant is a register. While some researchers do not distinguish between register and style, others see the difference as being essential when examining the language of a particular group of people who are united by interest or occupation. Style, register, and dialect are not mutually exclusive. For example, a person can speak as a doctor to another doctor in informal style and with pronunciation characteristic of her or his dialect. Moreover, a given person can use a variety of registers, such as being a carpenter and a musician. With all of the complexity that is created by dialect, style, and register, it is amazing that people are still so skillful at using speech to identify other people's status, profession, class, and so on.

Multilingualism, Bilingualism, and Diglossia

A person who has the ability to use more than two languages is a multilingual; a person who can use two languages is a bilingual; and a person who uses only one language is a monolingual. The number of bilinguals and multilinguals in a given country depends on many factors, such as proximity to other countries, the language policy in the country, and patterns of immigration. However, it has been estimated that half of the population in the world is bilingual.

People who are bilingual or multilingual do not necessarily have equal linguistic ability in all of the languages that they use; however, people whose competence in two or more languages is approximately equal are balanced bilinguals or multilinguals. As the result of the limited use of a language or languages for an extended period of time, some people may become dormant bilinguals or multilinguals; that is their linguistic competence in that language or languages "gets rusty." (Dormant bilinguals or multilinguals usually can restore their linguistic competence by placing themselves in an environment where their subordinate language or languages are used constantly.)

Another interesting aspect of bilingualism and multilingualism is code-switching. A language or its variant is often called a "code"; thus, code-switching refers to the situation when a person switches from one language or dialect to another in the same utterance or conversation. For example, a professor from France delivers a lecture in English at one of the universities in the United States; however, during the informal meeting after the lecture this professor may switch back and forth from English to French in conversations with French-speaking colleagues and students. Bilinguals or monolinguals turn to code-switching to establish solidarity and rapport with their conversational partners; moreover, code-switching helps them to maximize their linguistic expressiveness. In code-switching, bilinguals and multilinguals preserve the rules of all of the languages that are being used. In code-mixing, a person uses elements of one language in a conversation that is being carried on for the most part in another language. Nancy Bonvil-lain (1993) has identified examples of code-mixing in Kannada, a Dravidian language in South India. For example, some speakers incorporate English words in conversations in Kannada by adding the Kannada suffixes to English words, such as "educated-u," "control-ma," and "sacred occasion-nalli." Bonvillain states that such code-mixing has a social function. People who make use of English words in Kannada try to associate themselves with a more prestigious group of the population because, in India, English is perceived as being the language of those who are more educated and refined than the general population.

Another situation where people use different linguistic codes in different social contexts is diglossia. The term "diglossia" was introduced in 1959 by Charles Ferguson to indicate situations where two varieties of the same language exist in the society and are employed in different sets of social circumstances. Moreover, one of the two varieties is a more prestigious "high" variety (H), while the other is a less prestigious "low" variety (L). For example, Classical Arabic (H) is used in delivering official speeches, while colloquial Arabic (L) is used in everyday communication. Joshua Fishman (1970) extended the concept of diglossia to include not only two varieties of the same language but bilingual and multilingual situations as well. The linguistic situation in Paraguay, where diglossia exists between Spanish (H) and Guaraní (L), can serve as an illustration. In most of the situations, high form (H) is appropriated through formal education and in public domains, while low form (L) is acquired before formal education and is practiced in private domains. Ronald Wardhaugh (1998) suggests that in contrast to code-switching, which reduces differences, diglossia reinforces them. He explains that code-switching often happens on the subconscious level (when a person is unaware of a switch), while diglossia involves speakers who are aware of the switches that are being made from one variant to the other. Overall, choosing a code is not a matter of linguistic preference per se; rather, it is a social act because the code that is chosen creates and re-creates one's social identity.

Lingua Franca, Pidgins, and Creoles

When people who speak different languages have to communicate with each other, they must find a language that they all know, a lingua franca. Any language can become a lingua franca. For example, in the former Soviet Union, Russian was used as a lingua franca in the interactions between non-Russian speakers of the country. In East Africa, Swahili helps people from different tribes to trade with each other; thus, it is "a trade language" between people who do not otherwise share a common language. Due to globalization, and to globalization of the media in particular, English has become an international language—a lingua franca for much of the world.

People from different cultures and with different native languages, when they are in contact with each other over an extended period of time, often develop some common, often simplified code that they use as a medium of communication. This code is a pidgin, or a "reduced" language. Therefore, a pidgin is a contact language. Trade and colonization are considered main reasons for the development of pidgin languages. Thus, many pidgins are based on the languages of people who were involved in travel and trade (e.g., English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and are influenced by the languages of people with whom they came into contact. For example, there are more than sixty varieties of English-based pidgin languages; Tok Pisin, a pidgin English spoken in Papua New Guinea, is among them. It should be noted that pidgins are not "bad" or "inferior" languages. Though simplified or "reduced," they are not languages without structure; they are rule governed.

When a pidgin is widely used by the community and serves as a native language for second and future generations, it becomes a creole. Thus, while a pidgin has no native speakers, a creole is the mother tongue—the first language that is acquired by the community of speakers. For example, French creoles are spoken by people in the Caribbean and in some parts of Louisiana. It is estimated that from seven million to seventeen million people in the world speak creole languages. Pidgins and creoles have certain typical characteristics, such as multifunctionality of words, semantic broadening, little or no inflectional morphology, and polysemy.

Researchers of pidgins and creoles do not have a unified theory of the origin of pidgins and creoles. The fact that pidgins and creoles demonstrate certain similarities among them is explained differently by two main theories. Monogenesis (one origin) theory argues that the source of the similarities lies in the development of pidgins and creoles from a single source. Polygenesis theory, or relexification, views these similarities as the result of similar circumstances of their origin. There are, however, theories that explain the development of pidgins and creoles by the inability of non-Europeans to acquire European languages. Extensive studies of pidgins and creoles indicate that they are not deviations from other languages caused by inferiority of their speakers; they are languages with their own rules and systems. According to Suzanne Romaine (1988), many countries experience the phenomenon of recreolization, which is the conscious effort of teenagers who spoke standard English in childhood to speak creole and to listen to songs in creole.

Language and Culture

One of the areas of sociolinguistic research is concerned with the relationship between language and culture. The word "culture" in this context does not mean art, music, or literature of a particular time or society; rather, it is used to describe "any of the customs, world views, language, kinship system, social organization, and other taken-for-granted day-to-day practices of a people which set that group apart as a distinctive group" (Scollon and Scollon, 1996, p. 126). There is no agreement, however, among researchers about whether language determines or at least influences the way in which people experience the surrounding world, or if language merely reflects people's experiences.

The claim that language and its structure influence the way in which people who use it view the world goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, to the work that Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf did in relation to Native American languages. This influence of language on perceptions of the world is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It should be noted that similar ideas were expressed by William Humbolt, a prominent linguist of the nineteenth century. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is also called the principle of cultural relativity. That is to say, people are influenced by their native languages in the process of perception of the surrounding world. Sapir (1949a, p. 162) states, "human beings do not live in the objective world alone, not alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society."

Sapir, in his study of the language of Paiute (in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah), noticed that for some geographical terms the English language does not have comparable words, so a descriptive translation is required. For example, English does not have words that directly correspond to "canyon without water, plain valley surrounded by mountains, rolling country intersected by several small hillridges" (Sapir, 1949b). Whorf's studies of Hopi, the language of Native American people in Arizona, demonstrate that the notion of time in Hopi does not correspond to the notion of time in English and any other Standard Average European (SAE) language. Thus, while in English, time is a three-tiered division of past, present, and future, in Hopi, time is more indicative of the manner in which the events occur. The focus is on the events in the world as a continuous process where fixed distinctions between tenses are minimized (Whorf, 1956). Though the ideas put forward by Sapir and Whorf have been criticized for their deterministic view on language, their studies have inspired extensive research on the interrelationship between language and culture.

Different kinship systems and color terminology are just a few fascinating areas of research on language and culture. Every language has ways of expressing kinship relationships; however, some kinship systems are more detailed than others. For example, in English, the word "mother-in-law" is used by both wife and husband to identify the mother of the spouse, while in Russian, the husband calls his wife's mother tjoshcha and the wife calls her husband's mother svekrov'. Some languages have separate linguistic terms for older and younger siblings, for maternal and paternal relatives, and so on. Kinship systems reflect social relations within the family. In general, the more extensive the social contact is between the family members, the more detailed is the related kinship terminology.

According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969), who put forward a universal principle of color classification, most but not all languages have a term for each of the following colors: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, and gray. Berlin and Kay noted that there are no languages with only one color term. However, they also pointed out that the more cultural and technological changes that a society undergoes, the more detailed the color terminology tends to become. For example, Jale (New Guinea) has two terms (black and white); Tarascan (Mexico) has five (white, black, red, yellow, green); and Javanese has seven (white, black, red, yellow, green, blue, brown). Thus, if a language uses only two terms to identify colors, they are white and black; other colors are added systematically. This finding supports the view of many sociolinguists that color naming in all languages and cultures is a systematic, rule-governed process.

Power and Solidarity

Every language has a system of expressing power and solidarity relations between people. When people speak, they make choices among different linguistic markers to signal their social distance or closeness with their communicants. Social distance may indicate a difference is status, rank, education, or age. While distance often establishes power relations between the speakers, closeness tends to establish solidarity. Address forms are among the most distinct linguistic choices that reflect power or solidarity relations. When someone is addressed by his or her first name, the addresser usually signals solidarity. The use of titles such as "Mr.," "Ms.," and "Dr." demonstrates that the addresser recognizes the addressee as deserving more respect. An important element in the choice of an address form is the level of formality of a given situation. For example, students in many U.S. colleges can often call their professor by his or her first name during class discussion, but most of those same students would likely address the professor with a formal title during an official ceremony.

Languages differ in their familiar versus polite distinctions. Many languages differentiate between "familiar you" (T) and "polite you" (V). In English, for example, a person who wants to get somebody's attention can say, "Excuse me, you forgot your book," while many languages with familiar versus polite (T/V) distinction are less flexible. Unlike English, which has no T/V distinction, Tu/Vous in French, Ty/Vy in Russian, and Du/Ni in Swedish make a speaker choose the form that is appropriate for the addressee and the situation. The T form is usually reserved for symmetrical relations and indicates solidarity, while the V form usually signals asymmetry and power. However, the relationship between symmetrical/asym-metrical and power/solidarity cannot be reduced to a simple formula where asymmetry indicates power and symmetry indicates solidarity. Power and solidarity are often expressed by the same form; that is, people who are close can address each other using the V form, including their titles, as an indication of solidarity. For example, two professors who happen to be friends might address each other using "professor" and the V form during a conference. However, when an employer addresses an employee by first name and the T form while the employee uses "Mr." or "Ms." and the V form in return, it is a signal of power imbalance and asymmetry. Therefore, the reciprocity is one of the most important markers of solidarity.

The choice of an address form and/or T/V form is influenced by sociocultural norms. For example, after the October Revolution in Russia, people addressed each other as "comrade" to indicate solidarity. However, even before the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the address form "comrade" ceased to exist, which was as an indication of changes in society. Thus, different address forms and the T/V form are not a static category; rather, they change in accordance with social changes.

Politeness

While social closeness and distance are factors in people's choices of formal or informal forms of address, politeness is the decisive factor in degree of friendliness and amount of imposition in communication. Social psychologist Erving Goffman (1956, 1967) and linguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) worked extensively on the phenomena of politeness. Goffman introduced the notion of "face," an image that is produced by a person in social contacts with other people. Goff-man differentiated between a "positive face" (i.e., the need to be appreciated) and a "negative face" (i.e., the need to be not disturbed). Brown and Levinson identified positive and negative politeness, where "positive politeness" is a warm friendly behavior toward others and "negative politeness" is the avoidance of imposition. Both negative and positive politeness, thus, can be understood as consideration for another person's face.

Any demand, request, and even advice can be seen as a face-threatening act (FTA), which threatens a person's public image, or face. For example, if a speaker issues a direct command to the listener, "Send this letter immediately," this directive might threaten the listener's face. Politeness repairs the damage that is inflicted by FTAs. Polite people try to avoid FTAs or minimize their effect. For example, they soften commands by making them less direct, "Could you send this letter immediately"; they use compliments and stress solidarity between them and their listeners, "I really appreciate your work." Thus, politeness explains the indirectness of human communication as people's desire to save their communicants' and their own face in interactions; moreover, politeness helps to understand presequencing, or the preparation to a request, question, and so on. For example, some speakers, instead of directly requesting something from a listener, start with a prerequest:

Prerequest by A: Do you have a minute?

"Go ahead" signal by B: Sure.

Request by A: Could you send this itinerary to Green?

Accept by B: Okay.

In the interchange above, the prerequest by A is a face-saving maneuver for both A and B. If B indicates that she or he is busy, it eliminates the request and accept stages, and A does not receive a refusal to the main request, which would have caused A to lose face. Speakers use similar strategies in preannouncing ("You will never guess what happened today") or preinvitations ("Are you busy this weekend?"). Politeness is analyzed in a greater detail in pragmatics, the study of the relationship between language and its users. Pragmatics is concerned with how meaning is communicated by the speaker and is interpreted by the listener.

Language and Gender

While the term "sex" refers to the biological differences of women and men, the term "gender" indicates the psychological and sociocultural significance that is attached to those differences. Since ancient times, scientists from different fields of human research have been interested in determining if men and women think, act, and speak differently or alike. It has been reported that only male and female Carib Indians from the West Indies speak different languages, whereas in other parts of the world, women and men are reported to speak the same languages with some differences, mainly in vocabulary. It should be noted that research on gender and language is not limited to male-female interactions; it also studies gay, lesbian, and other gender communication.

Robin Lakoff (1973) noted that it is more typical of women to use such color words as mauve, beige, and lavender and more emphatic expressions such as adorable, lovely, and divine. Lakoff also claimed that in word pairs (gentleman-lady, bachelor-spinster, master-mistress), female parts acquire a more negative meaning. Research on language and gender has contributed to uncovering sexism in language. For example, as recently as the early 1970s, it was normal in English to use the pronoun "he" and words such as "chairman," "policeman," and "mankind" in a generic manner or to address women as "Miss" or "Mrs.," but these have all subsequently come to be known as elements of sexist language. Researchers have also found differences in covert and overt prestige in language use between women and men. Gerhard Leitner (1997) has discussed the dynamic role of media in creating awareness of gender-specific language. According to Leitner, the ABC network's pioneering ruling in 1984 on the avoidance of gender-specific (sexist) language was unfavorably met by both the audience and the media, but ABC adhered to its new policy.

The main division of the study of gender can be classified as either culture/difference or power/dominance theories. According to the first approach, the clear-cut division of labor and, consequently, same-sex socializing promoted the development of different communicative strategies and, more broadly, different cultures. To achieve understanding, women and men have to learn and respect the cultures of each other. The second, focuses more on the power imbalance in society. According to this critical feminist approach, the language in a male-dominated society is created by and for men. In general, these researchers view power imbalance as the key impediment that prevents women and men from successful communication both at work and in private relationships.

Ethnography of Communication

Because of their common interest in human communication, the ethnography of communication unites linguistic and anthropological studies. This framework stresses the mutual responsibility of the speaker and the listener for successful communication. Dell Hymes (1974), the founder of this approach, proposed the acronym SPEAKING, where each letter stands for an important component of communication:

S = Setting or Scene

P = Participants

E = Ends

A = Act Sequence

K = Key

I = Instrumentalities

N = Norms of Interaction and Interpretation

G = Genre.

"Setting" refers to the physical circumstances (time and place of the event), while "scene" refers to the subjective definition of the event (psycho-logical or cultural). "Participants" refers to the speaker-sender-addresser and hearer-receiver- audience-addressee. "Ends" refers to the outcome (both conventional and personal). "Act sequence" refers to the form and content of the message (i.e., what is said and how in relationship to the actual topic). "Key" refers to the tone and manner (e.g., serious, light-hearted) of the delivery. "Instrumentalities" refers to the channel (e.g., oral, written, telegraphic, and so on). "Norms of interaction and interpretation" refers to the specific behavior and properties that are attached to speaking (e.g., formal, casual). "Genre" refers to the types of texts (e.g., poems, prayers, lectures, editorials, and so on).

Each component of SPEAKING is important in communication. To be a competent communicant, a person must know when and in what setting it is appropriate to speak and when to be silent, how to issue a request and accept an apology, and how to address a person of the same or different status and age. The ethnography of communication is closely connected with social and cultural norms and rules, which are different in different societies. Thus, to prevent the failure of cross-cultural communication, a person should not limit himself or herself to the rules of his or her society but instead should take into consideration the rules of the society of his or her communicant.

Language and Media

According to Allan Bell (1991), media are dominating presenters of language in society. Advertisers use language to persuade people, and news organizations attempt to influence the attitudes of people. Thus, the media use language as a tool in shaping and reflecting people's values and people's perceptions of themselves and others. In presenting information, the media target the audience, their tastes, and beliefs. Bell argued that instead of targeting the individual, media cater to a social group—specifically, to a stereotypical social group. This means that the language of presentation reflects linguistic features that are stereotypically associated with a certain social group. For example, a program that targets women would use a "typical" female linguistic variant to establish rapport with its audience. Traditionally, the relationship between media and audience is presented as unidirectional, where media send messages to the target audience. Joshua Fishman (1974, p. 1644) stated that the standard language is the most appropriate variant for the media, government, legal, and educational networks because this variety is "the 'safest' for those communications in which the speaker cannot know his diversified and numerous listeners." However, with the development of new interactive media such as the Internet, the diversity of the target audience cannot be disregarded.

Bell (1991) indicated that research on the linguistic styles of several British newspapers showed that upmarket papers (e.g., The Times, Financial Times, Guardian) operate on distance and negative politeness, while the downmarket papers (e.g., Daily Mirror, Star, Sun) dwell on solidarity and positive politeness. In other words, linguistic choices reflect social stratification of society, as well as its values and beliefs.

Advertisers use a multilingual approach to present the quality of their products. For example, stereotypically, French has been associated with elegance and refinement. Therefore, numerous cosmetics and fashion-goods commercials employ French and/or French-accented messages. Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schroder (1985) found that in many commercials, the advertisers avoid using the word "buy" in the imperative clause to avoid direct imposition; instead, they call on the audience to act with the words "try," "ask," "get," "take," "use," "call," "make," and so on. Advertisers rely on more indirect ways of attracting the attention of prospective buyers because telling the audience what to do is considered to be a face-threatening strategy.

In media, every linguistic element, from the headline and structure of the lead paragraph to the choice of words in indirect speech, is important in creating information that is aimed at the target audience. Thus, research on media language uncovers the techniques of creating the information for the target audience. It provides insights on language, media, and society in general.

Conclusion

From a new subdiscipline within linguistics, sociolinguistics has developed into an elaborated area of interdisciplinary research on the dynamic relationship that exists between language and society. As the study of language in relation to society, sociolinguistics is closely connected with other areas of human research, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, and media studies. Sociolinguistics not only incorporates the insights from these disciplines into its research but also feeds back to these other disciplines, thereby promoting knowledge and awareness of certain linguistic varieties that are spoken by different groups in relation to the value systems and social structures of society.

See also:Culture and Communication; Culture Industries, Media As; Gender and the Media; Globalization of Culture Through the Media; Intercultural Communication, Adaptation and; Interpersonal Communication; Language Acquisition; Language and Communication; Language Structure; Society and the Media.

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Alla V. Yelyseieva