Linguistic Competencies of School Boys Living in Railway Colony, Dera Ghazi Khan: A Case Study in Sociolinguistics

Abstract

Sociolinguistic competence is an essential part of communicative competence due of course to its inclusion in learning a new language. It also tells while living in a society, how we understand and learn a language correctly and properly.  It is maintained that most of the learners are unable to develop socio-linguistic as well as grammatical knowledge of the language which they learn in daily life. The current study was set to explore and find the development of sociolinguistic competencies. It is also an admitted fact that the teenagers learn language faster as compared with those in advanced age.   In this study, the targeted language is Sindhi and the area selected is Railway Colony D. G. Khan where a variety of inhabitants living in this colony come from diverse places of Pakistan. The research tried to explore how a language works if it exists all around in a mixed cultural society, even if it is not obligatory.  Enquiring into the fact that ‘a few languages are mutually unintelligible when commonly spoken, and a dialect may be standardized if it is used by the upper class, political leaders and in literature, especially during the informal chatting, the study explored how a dominant language influences the lexical choices of a speech community. The Sindhi language being spoken by a dominating number of population in a city of the Punjab has been viewed in the given perspective.  This study aimed at gauging the influences and inter-textual connections of the Sindhi language on non native speakers of the Sindhi language since they have been growing up together and learning this language effortlessly due to great exposure to this language. So, the situation with reference to multilingualism creates a special case of study, a situation where a regional language is playing a vital role in daily communication without state patronage. Employing ethnographic research approach, the study concludes that a language having vaster socio-economic influence becomes the choice of people where a language of power is spoken.