Network

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Term developed by Radcliffe-Brown (1940) which, in contrast to the structural-functionalistic terms ‘class,’ ‘social group,’ etc., places social interaction in the center. Every person has a set of relational partners with whom he/she participates in interactional exchanges; if one considers all persons to be ‘points’ and the social relations that are realized between them to be ‘lines,’ an individual ‘network’ develops. All persons involved in such a network are in turn likewise embedded in social networks, which may in part mutually overlap. The whole set of all social transactions within a speech community can be construed to be a complex network of individual social relations, in which individual social groups are characterized each by specific network structures. The more members of an individual network are involved in relations outside the larger network, the more ‘tightly woven’ the networks become. Furthermore, networks become all the more ‘multiplex’ as more and more diverse relations are based within the individual networks (e.g. when co-workers, who also happen to be friends. meet regularly for outside activities or live in the same neighborhood).

In such networks social cohesion develops and culture- and group-specific systems of values, shared knowledge, shared attitudes, as well as patterns of behavior are established, which in turn manifest themselves linguistically. This concept is therefore of central importance for empirical studies of linguistic behavior and for studies of the processes of linguistic change: precisely those interactional relations that are responsible for (groupspecific) conformity in behavior (though which do not necessarily correlate with a particular special class or ethnic group) are used as a starting point to determine group divisions. ( also sociolinguistics)

Boissevain, J.

1974. Friends of friends: networks, manipulators, and coalitions. London.

——1987. Social network. In U.Ammon et al. (eds), Soziolinguistik/Sociolinguistics: an international handbook of the science of language and society. Berlin. 164–9.

Milroy, L. 1980. Language and social networks. Oxford.

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1940. On social structure. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 70. 1–12.

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