Interaction between language and society

Cyprus International University (CIU) Department of Turkish and Social Sciences Education organized a talk on "Language and Society" where Prof. Dr. Kâmile İmer addressed the students.

İmer stated that the only constant rule in the universe is that everything changes, that it is inevitable for society and language not to change in this context, but there is covariance in the relationship between variables in the field of society and language.

Stating that today there are no monolingual societies other than those that are described as "primitive", İmer stated that there are groups and communities that speak two or more languages in every society, but that most of the countries have only one official language that they legally accept, however, countries like Canada, Switzerland, etc. use more than one official language.

When language development is considered from the point of view of bilingualism, there are interesting linguistic situations like codeswitching  adding a good number of  research has been done on this subject.

In the field of sociolinguistics, which examines the collocation between society and language, İmer stated that there are subjects called bivariable, accepted language, relational language, broken mother tongue and others that have been included in extensive research, and gave some examples from the Turkish language.

Noting that there are academics who also describe the Turkish used in Cyprus as a dialect or accent, İmer added that this was actually a matter of in-depth discussion and different opinions have been put forth on this matter, but that at this point it might be more appropriate to express the spoken language as a dialect.

Prof. Dr. Imer drew attention to different issues such as language development of children, first language and second language development, and at the end of the talk, a memorial plaque was presented by Prof.Dr. Halil İbrahim Yalın, the Dean of Faculty of Education.