언어 변화의 사회적 요인 연구

Abstract

This paper mainly deals with the social analysis on factors of language change in terms of indicators of social prestige and covert prestige and self identity. In this context, language should not be isolated from its society where the speakers of the language live in. The Language change should be observed and analysed with reference to its usages and social meaning in speech community which had long been ignored and discarded by neogrammarian tradition and transformational grammarians. The seemingly irregular and confusing data have their regularity and consistency to show the structures of speech community if analysed by refences of the socio-economic index from the working class to upper middle class, the contextual index from word list reading to casual speech, sex index of man and woman, and age index from young generation to the old generation on the quantitative analyses. The subgroup of each speech community have their own social factors to show themselves private or social level when a certain linguistic variable is chosen co use. And the strong marker of the speech community rakes a lead to the linguistic innovation where language change takes place. The prestige by New York lower middle class young women is a leading innovation factor for the standard form since that is the prestige form at which they are aiming. The covert prestige by the Norwich young male upper working class and middle working class is another language innovation factor to lead the non-standard dorm because it implies masculinity. And the self identity as native status as a Vineyarder and as country man and city woman of Whasung, Kongki, Korea helps choose the different linguistic variable to show different identity.