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Language and Society: What Your Speech Says About You cover art

Language and Society: What Your Speech Says About You

Written by: Valerie Fridland, The Great Courses
Narrated by: Valerie Fridland
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Publisher's Summary

Language is not a passive means of communication. In fact, it's the active process through which we construct societies, and, within them, our own social lives and realities. Language - as we use it in our day-to-day interactions - fundamentally shapes our experience, our thinking, our perceptions, and the very social systems within which our lives unfold.

Nowhere is the social role of language revealed more clearly than in the fascinating field of sociolinguistics. Among many eye-opening perspectives, the work of sociolinguistics points out that:

  • Language is strong social capital, and our linguistic choices carry both costs and benefits we rarely consider.
  • Our identity is strongly tied to the speech we use and our perceptions of the speech we hear.
  • Our children are raised, our relationships are made, and our careers succeed, in large part, through how we use language.
  • Language embodies a worldview: Your linguistic system reflects and affects the way you organize and understand the world around you.

In these 24 thought-provoking lectures, you'll investigate how social differences based on factors such as region, class, ethnicity, occupation, gender, and age are inseparable from language differences. Further, you'll explore how these linguistic differences arise, and how they both reflect and generate our social systems. You'll look at the remarkable ways in which our society is a reflection of our language, how differences in the way people use language create differences in society, how people construct and define social contexts by their language use, and ultimately why our speech reveals so much about us. Join a brilliantly insightful sociolinguist and teacher in a compelling inquiry that sheds light on how our linguistic choices play a determining role in every aspect of our lives.

©2014 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2014 The Great Courses

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Awful narration. Difficult to follow up.

I really wanted to like this one. The title was so promising and I had already listened to some great courses about language from John McWhorter so I didn't stop a second to think about buying this one.

The narrations is horrible! First, there is a bad joke every two sentences. I mean, I get that humor is a tool to keep the listener engaged, but bad humor too often can be off-putting.

Second, the lecturer makes tons of mistakes while speaking. It seems that her brain is going faster than her tongue so she says something wrong and had to correct it and often makes a mistake again. these mistakes are way too frequent. I would understand if this is a live lecture, but couldn't they edit a recording before publishing it? So the rithm gets interrupted every sentence either by a mistake or a bad joke. It truly made it very difficult to follow up and I had to go back several times to try and absorb the contents.

Lastly, the title is misleading. It should be called "Southern American English compared against New York English with a sprinkle of UK English for flavor". The lecture is too focused on American English, specifically southern vs New Yorker, it barely touches other varieties of English and maybe mentions one other language almost by accident. there are very few points that can be expanded into a greater understanding of how language makes us humans and the role of society and etc that was my main interest in this audiobook. I'll definitely avoid any other lecture by Valerie Fridland.

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