Differences in Sociolinguistic Rules and the Misunderstandings
Differences in Sociolinguistic Rules and the Misunderstandings
Language learners are used to taking advantages of knowledge of their mother tongue language when they are studying foreign languages, they may have some misinterpretations that caused by the differences in sociolinguistic rules. For a better understanding of sociolinguistics, Wardhaugh (2006, p.13) stated that sociolinguistics how people’s talking are influenced by the society and how people’s class, gender, and age contribute to the language varieties. In other words, sociolinguistic rules emphasize the language in social contexts and more importantly that some of the sociolinguistic rules are relevant to the contextual sense. In the following, the paper will focus on the comparison between Mandarin and English based on the relevance of languages and cultures, languages and genders, and languages and varieties.
First of all, the differences in sociolinguistic rules shows that language users have different cultural backgrounds; moreover, the relationship between language and culture can be proved by the grammar and vocabulary usage in expressions. Due to the strong influence of Latin literary culture, English translation is the counterpart of each Latin verbs (Collins, 2009, p.257). For instance, Taylor (2007) suggests that the verb tenses includes twelve categories and Dawson (2010) states that the complex sentence structures contains four kinds of subordinate clauses. Whereas, we do not have these kinds of grammatical structures in Chinese; therefore it leads to a confusion for Chinese students when they are learning English. Besides, there are some misunderstandings that result from using inappropriate vocabularies because of the cultural differences. For example, some Chinese may offer the seat to elders on the buses and they may say: “come here and be safe, old woman.” However, we cannot call somebody which is starting with the word “old” in English. It is an impoliteness and a taboo in
Language learners are used to taking advantages of knowledge of their mother tongue language when they are studying foreign languages, they may have some misinterpretations that caused by the differences in sociolinguistic rules. For a better understanding of sociolinguistics, Wardhaugh (2006, p.13) stated that sociolinguistics how people’s talking are influenced by the society and how people’s class, gender, and age contribute to the language varieties. In other words, sociolinguistic rules emphasize the language in social contexts and more importantly that some of the sociolinguistic rules are relevant to the contextual sense. In the following, the paper will focus on the comparison between Mandarin and English based on the relevance of languages and cultures, languages and genders, and languages and varieties.
First of all, the differences in sociolinguistic rules shows that language users have different cultural backgrounds; moreover, the relationship between language and culture can be proved by the grammar and vocabulary usage in expressions. Due to the strong influence of Latin literary culture, English translation is the counterpart of each Latin verbs (Collins, 2009, p.257). For instance, Taylor (2007) suggests that the verb tenses includes twelve categories and Dawson (2010) states that the complex sentence structures contains four kinds of subordinate clauses. Whereas, we do not have these kinds of grammatical structures in Chinese; therefore it leads to a confusion for Chinese students when they are learning English. Besides, there are some misunderstandings that result from using inappropriate vocabularies because of the cultural differences. For example, some Chinese may offer the seat to elders on the buses and they may say: “come here and be safe, old woman.” However, we cannot call somebody which is starting with the word “old” in English. It is an impoliteness and a taboo in