Language and Interpersonal Relationships

We saw in the preceding chapter that the choice of language can be used by speakers to convey something about their relationship with their interlocutors. In this chapter we extend this consideration beyond multilingual situationssituation to look more generally at how we indicate in our speech the types of relationship that we have with others. We’re now moving into the approach to the study of language in its social context that we called ‘ethnographic’, which is concerned with understanding social and cultural systems from an insider’s perspective.