SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND SOCIOCULTURAL FEATURES OF LANGUAGE USE: FORMS OF ADDRESS IN BRITISH ENGLISH AND SPANISH

Forms of address are important means of expressing both identity and relationship with the interlocutor. The choice is governed by various aspects of social and cultural context (age, distance, status, physical setting, the level of intimacy, emotional involvement, etc). Speakers of the same cultural community may construct different systems of sociolinguistic rules in reference to addressing others depending on their identity in a linguistic subcommunity. Nevertheless, there are some rules which are shared by the majority of the cultural community and form a communicative ethnostyle [1] distinguishing one communicative culture from another. These aspects should be given specific attention in the FLT classroom so as to enable students to communicate in accordance with norms and traditions of the target culture. This paper investigates the sociocultural features that govern contemporary use of English (British English) and Spanish forms of address in different social settings focusing both on their similarities and differences. We draw on G. Hofstede's cultural dimensions [2-3], politeness theory [4 - 7 and others], Intercultural pragmatics [8, 9] and address forms theory [10 - 14]. The data has been obtained through observations, questionnaires and interviews. The study focuses on the main tendencies which illustrate the impact of culture on communicative behaviour and argues that the success of effective communication, intercultural in particular, depends to a large extent on the proper choice of an address form and requires not only linguistic but sociolinguistic and sociocultural competences as well. It is important to develop these competences by using interdisciplinary approach to SL teaching and learning. The paper demonstrates this, both in the English and Spanish languages.