- Solidarity.

Hudson (1996:122) states that a solidarity concerns with the social distance between how much experience they have shared, how many social characteristics they share (religion, age, region of origin, race, occupation, interest, etc), how far they are prepared to share intimacies, and other factors. Speech we make in everyday usage may also reflect the social relation between the speaker and the addressee.

English speakers use personal names as the clearest linguistic markers of social relation. For example; in the case of name ‘John Smith’, we call ‘John’ if we have high solidarity with him. It will be different if John Smith is a distant superior (our headmaster or boss). In this situation, we may call him ‘Mr. Smith’ or ‘Sir’ and it means that we have low solidarity (unfamiliar) with him. So, the situation can cause the level of the solidarity between people.

The solidarity relationship is the first to be introduced here because it is probably the most important of all social relationships, at least as far as language is concerned. This is because it reflects shared experience, which is necessarily tied to linguistic similarity. People, who have spent all of their life together, sharing the same experiences of language, are bound to be very similar in their language; and conversely, similarity of language is a good (though not infallible) basis for guessing similar experiences (Hudson, 1996:232).

To signal the solidarity between people, we can use address term. In Wardhaugh (1988:258), the notion of address term is illustrated as a making selection in naming someone. People can address a person by his/her title, first name, last name, and nick name or by combination of these or by nothing at all. In English, all combinations mentioned above are possible. For example, in the case of Dr. John Smith; Dr. John Smith himself might also expect Doctor from a patient, Dad from his son, John from his brother, Dear from his wife, and Sir from police officer who stops him if he drives too fast, and he might be rather surprised if any one of these is subtitled for any other, e.g.; “Excuse me, Dear, can I see your license?” from the police officer. Here we can conclude that the address term is the way how we name or address another in the right way.

Further, Wardhaugh (1988:262) assumes that a variety of social factors usually governs our choice of address terms. In a certain society, the choice of addressing someone is sometimes quite clear but in another can be so confusing. It may happen because he or she as a society member should realize his\her social position among the society. Some of the social factors that influence the choice of address terms are age, sex, race, family relationship and occupation.

References:

Hudson, Richard A., 1996. (2nd edition). Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wardhaugh, Ronald, 1988. (3rd edition). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.