Authority and Language: An Analysis of Language Privilege

BACKGROUND

Different status of various kinds of people is a common phenomenon in the world. Sex, power, economy, ethnicity, and age are important factors that influence the dominance on range of groups. A strong group tends to have powerful authority among vulnerable group which the situation does not only become a chit-chat but a custom. It is inevitable that grouping people according to their social level has occurred and establish a system of social class. The effect of different qualification or status also spread in almost every element of human life, including a manner of speaking, style or linguistic features. For instance, a renowned professor is not expected to speak like a person who works in a private factory. A businessman can never use the beggars’ accent when talking to his friends and the driver’s government has no authority to speak to the president without restraint or viceversa. It is a clear distinction that the existence of semantics, syntax, phonology, phonetics, vocabulary or style also has a role to distinguish particular person and their position in the society. Therefore it can be easily to identify who belongs to which level.

Based on the latter case, certain groups organized by people who have powerful levels and in this research will deeply focus on language authority occur among individual or intellectuals who have the power to speak and respected by many people. Differences in rank or position in essence is often influence and determine the person's speaking style. Someone who has a higher position tend authoritative in conveying style of speech, when he said something, although only a single word, a subordinate will follow him without hesitant and this was seen as something natural. On the other hand, language as tool to communicate becoming much more complex phenomenon as it can be learned in order to become more authoritative in its practical (Milroy & Milroy, 1999). This becomes interesting discussion because not infrequently there are people who did not have a high position in the government or any agency but the use of language is often more listened to than people who have a high position in formal organization, in a concrete example illustrated when an individual tends to believe special individual (dignitaries honored in a community) rather than the Member of Parliament (have a power of the legislative function in a country). Speech codes in that situation became a permanent variety hereditary and thus the linguistic feature has gradually strong influences as a result of language Authority.

In educational context, it is nature that students want to study the language especially EFL (English as foreign language) at a major university, but the unique thing that arises when they learn to be more authoritative, it presents a system of authoritarian, namely habit differences in the language used by a fraction of a professor or influential lecturer in academic environment against his interlocutor that his colleague or his students as a low speaker status. Although the matter use of English in communicating in Indonesia country was minimal, but the linguistic features owned by professors certainly not least, considering they have been spending almost half of their life to learn the language and followed by the increase of students who want to learn English (EFL) with varying motives.

As a result of the development of sociolinguistic research in recent years, it has become possible that language phenomenon has grown and at the same time attracted more linguists to continue exploring the existence of the applied linguistic especially in education and not some cases that cultures may be especially affected by sociolinguistic demonstrations of authority. It has been also long recognized that students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds express concern about their uncertainty and lack of control in social situations involving people in socially powerful positions. The students from different ethnic often being isolated because of discrimination they felt. “Are their faces so different? Do people think they can’t speak English? Moreover the students feel the sense of power distance between themselves and the school environment that do not create a bridge of understanding and competence for successful interaction.

However there only a few expert discussed the authority of language as their primary research, by that reason the researcher interested in investigating something which is largely unknown by using ethnography design where Mackay & Gass in Heigham & Sakui (2009) add that ‘Ethnographic approaches are particularly valuable when not enough is known about a context or situation’. Departing from the issue the researchers took the initiative to examine more deeply about the authority of language that occurs in daily life and all the parts that involved in educational context. The researcher also tried to find out their feelings, expectancies and presumptions to this diverse situation of language usage in the environment . Based on the explanation above, the researcher will conduct an ethnography research entitling Authority and Language: An Analysis of Language Privilege