Teori rangkaian sosial dalam kajian peralihan dan pengekalan bahasa

Abstract

Social anthropologists, who first developed social network analysis suggest that the structure of personal networks influences human behaviour and aspects of personality. The last few decades have witnessed a surge of interest amongst sociolinguists in the concept of social network and its relevance to the study of language behaviour. Social network approach assumes that there is a dialectic relationship between speakers' linguistic behaviours and interpersonal relations; that is, speakers language use is influenced and shaped by the types of social contact they have, and it actively contributes to the social relations which speakers maintain. Density and multiplexity pertain to the structure and content of the network respectively. Analysis of the structural aspects of social network, which, in addition to density, include anchorage, reachability and range, has generated much of the literature on social network. Various analytic techniques have been developed and applied by sociolinguists, i.e. Milroy, Mayer, Li Wei, Gal etc.