Sociology and ideas about language
Early accounts of language and society
In the work of the classical social theorists, and particularly that of its pre-eminent trio Durkheim, Marx and Weber, there is little in the way of a systematic treatment of language. This is unsurprising perhaps, given amongst other things the rudimentary development of a discipline of linguistics. Yet it is clear that the social theories advanced by the social scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often made claims about language (or rested on implicit assumptions about it) that, without an adequate theory of language, were merely hopeful or naIve. Durkheim, for example, recognized the centrality of the symbolic to his notion of the conscience collective, that is, the normative order external to, and constraining of, individuals (Dur kheim 1965, 1982). Ritual and ceremonial practices were important symbolic practices whereby the individual experienced both the transcendental nature of the social (it is a bigger force than the individual) and its immanence (by becoming part of something bigger than oneself, one commits oneself to the social). However, there is little account in Durkheim of how, and in which ways, symbolic meanings are linguistically mediated.
This tendency- to emphasize the symbolic without elaborating on language- is more marked in the work of Weber, partly because of his emphasis on the role of meanings in the explanation of social action (Gerth and Mills 1948; Weber 1964, 1974, 1978). In particular, his insistence that people act on the basis of reasons whose content can be identified in terms of their beliefs and motives introduced an interpretive dimension to social analysis. Weber sought to reconcile this focus on meanings and their fundamental role in the interpretation of social action with a commitment to the discovery of causal connections and to a notion of a social science. There is some question still about how far Weber succeeded in this enterprise, but for our present purposes two points should be noted. First, Weber's stress on the meaningful nature of social action provided a powerful input into those sociologies that viewed the recovery, articulation and understanding of social meanings as the primary objective of social explanation. We shall consider these shortly. Second, Weber, like Durkheim, did not concern himself systematically with the linguistic mediation of meanings. (For a discussion of the relevance of Weber and Durkheim to sociolinguistic enquiry, see Sarangi and Candlin 2001.)
By contrast, Marx regarded language as a distinctive capacity of human beings, one that crucially allowed for conscious reflection on their activity (Marx 1959). Unlike other animals, human beings were thus freed from a fixed sequence of behavior and so could modify and improve upon earlier forms of production. As Callinicos notes, 'Marx's conception of human labor as necessarily a social activity is closely related to his view of language as "the immediate actuality of thought: [as] practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it exist for me", (Callinicos 1989: 27-8). However, linking language in this way to human practice, suggestive though it is (and we will return to this later), does not amount to a fully developed theory of language (Kitching 1988).
In short, it is difficult to discover in the founding figures of the sociological tradition more than the raw material for treating language sociologically. (This is not, of course, a matter of personal culpability or dereliction of sociological duty, but rather a case of theorists working within their own historically limited social and intellectual horizons.) Despite this, and in their different ways, Durkheim, Marx and Weber have imparted to social theory particular sets of interests in language and its relation to social life. We will outline the work of the symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists, for whom language is a key constituent of social interaction.
