ABOUT THE COURSE:Language is a social tool, and has been studied as such for many decades. It is an integral part of who we are as humans. Language at a social level, as opposed to individual level, tells us how an entire society or culture understands itself and others, its shared values, judgements, worldview and so on. In a sense, language and society shape each other, and are in a constant state of negotiation. This makes this relationship a dynamic one, that demands attention not only from the perspective of linguistics, in terms of form and function, but also from psychological and cognitive perspective, for example, in terms of the frame of social cognition. Of late, neuroscience has also started to show interest towards social phenomena and incorporates this angle in their state-of-the-art research paradigm. Thus, starting from Linguistics, this course will try to touch upon a number of disciplines that try to understand the intertwined nature of language and society.INTENDED AUDIENCE: UG/PG/PhD students from any discipline and early career researchers dealing with language related courses or teaching. Social and affective psychology, linguistics and social cognition are some of the relevant areas outside of linguistics who will find some resonance with this courseINDUSTRY SUPPORT: Companies related to Artificial Intelligence (may help in creating more nuanced representation) as well as the world of advertising may benefit from understanding the subtle nuances of language as played out in a society

Syllabus

Week 1: Language as a social reality
Lecture 1: Introduction to the course; language as seen from sociological and linguistic perspective; Historical account of the social-origin theory of language.
Lecture 2: the role of society on language use and its speakers: Mark Pagel and Thomas Hobbes
Lecture 3: John Locke, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
Lecture 4: Giambattista Vico, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Von Herder; Modern day formal and social linguistics
Lecture 5: sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, ethnolinguistics and pragmatics: similarities and differences in their scopes; social cognition and social neuroscience.
Week 2:Language and its variations: speaker-based
Lecture 1: What is language? How do languages and dialects get their labels?
Lecture 2: Regional and social variation: case studies from various Indian languages.
Lecture 3: Gender and age: key variables in language use and structure; role of underlying cultural construal.
Lecture 4: Ethnicity and social network
Lecture 5: Language change.
Week 3:Language and its variations: usage-based
Lecture 1: Style and register
Lecture 2: politeness strategies
Lecture 3: cross cultural communication; ethnographic accounts from different cultures;
Lecture 4: performance of language: narratives and genres.
Lecture 5: language and perception; social class and language, elaborate code Vs restricted code.
Week 4:Speech communities
Lecture 1: language and Identities
Lecture 2: language attitude in multilingual communities
Lecture 3: Language ideology
Lecture 4: language socialization
Lecture 5: case studies
Week 5:Language contact: reasons and effects
Lecture 1: Different types of contact: social, political, economic.
Lecture 2: Pidgins and creoles, post creole continuum
Lecture 3: Mixed languages: reasons, grammar and cultural significance.
Lecture 4: Bi/multilingualism: reasons and types; social VS individual bilingualism, impact of bilingualism.
Lecture 5: Code switch, code mix
Week 6:
Lecture 6: diglossia
Lecture 7: Language maintenance, shift: different forces of assimilation leading to shift in language loyalty.
Lecture 8: death and revitalization: repercussions of language death, language and cultural cognition; case studies of language revitalization and their impact.
Discourse analysis:
Lecture 9: conversation analysis
Lecture 10: Critical discourse analysis
Week 7:Applied domains:
Lecture 1: policy issues: Language policy and language planning; status and corpus planning; recent cases from India;
Lecture 2 & 3: Application in social issues: language issues in politics, newsroom; emergent issues: immigration, multilingual societies.
Lecture 4 & 5: Application in educational issues: multilingual education, lesson planning for second language teaching, literacy, reading research.
Week 8:Foray into cognition:
Lecture 1: What is collective cognition? How is language related to collective cognition? Case studies and examples from different cultures.
Lecture 2: supracultural models: crosslinguistic variations.
Lecture 3: social cognition in discourse
Lecture 4: cognitive sociolinguistics
Lecture 5: social neuroscience and language: new findings on the neural signatures of language and social practices.