ABSTRACT

There is nothing new in the goal of understanding language as a part of social life. What is new, as we near the end of the century, is the proliferation of activity toward that goal. Forty-odd years ago a paper on the meanings of kinship terms could count as a bridge between formal linguistics and social life and have a special designation, ‘ethnolinguistic’, in its title (Garvin and Riesenberg, 1952). Today the scholarly world abounds with bridges and designations-‘sociolinguistic’, ‘ethnography of speaking’ ‘ethnography of communication’, ‘pragmatics’, ‘conversational analysis’, ‘sociology of language’, ‘social psychology of language’, together with ‘communication’, ‘intercultural’ and ‘cross-cultural communication’, ‘semiotics)’ ethnomethodology’, ‘discourse’. Yet work that has useful bearing on the situation of particular communities and groups is not as commonplace as one might hope, nor is work that builds a truly social study of language that is concrete, yet comparative, cumulative, yet critical, as normal as one might expect. More such work is appearing, yet, with regard to knowledge of itself in terms of language the United States remains a largely underdeveloped country. There is more authority about language in linguistics and among savants of the media, than knowledge to explain, and even transform, the role that language has in our lives.