Social and societal

[Awaken]

Originally Posted by irmamar

"Goes"

Thanks for your corrections.

For instance:

Sociolinguistics examines the societal and linguistic patterns that govern our behaviour as members of human society.
An English speaker from Edinburgh speaks the same language as someone from London; they live in the same country with the same cultural background. They can consider themselves native speakers of English, in spite of clear societal or dialectical variation.
For sociolinguistics, the issue is a bit more complex than that given the fact that societal and extra linguistic factors are taken into account.

However, I have the following sentence with "social" (for instance), which is very similar to the former:

This view of the native speaker has nothing to do with the conception of the native speaker in sociolinguistics, where social and non-linguistic factors are considered of key importance for communication.

So, sometimes I think they are synonyms.

They can be synonyms in certain cases. As poli pointed out, social can be used for many different uses while societal has one definition.


For your last sentence, what do you mean when you say "social?" In that sentence social and societal could mean 2 different things if there is no other context. "Societal" guarantees that you are referring to factors associated with living in large interacting groups of people. Customs, activities, etc...

If you say social, it could mean exactly the same thing. Or it could mean factors involved with being social (friendly, interacting with others, living in companionship with others) vs. isolation.

We are getting into complex wording choices on complex topics that even push my brain as an educated native English speaker. If you use social in place of societal, you will be okay. However, societal can NOT be used in place of social always (in fact rarely).

My brain = Good questions though irmamar.

[irmamar]

Thanks everybody.

Awaken, the question is that Chomsky was concerned with an ideal native speaker/listener in a homogeneous speech community and that ideal native speaker has nothing to do with what sociolinguistics studies, that is, the social class, sex or education, among other factors, related with that native speaker.

I think I'll use 'social' and so I won't be wrong.

Thanks again.