Functional characteristics of the German language and the role of the language situation

Language as a means of communication arises and develops only in society. Consequently, language is a social phenomenon. Therefore, from the very beginning of the emergence of the science of language, linguists were interested in the problem of the connection between language and society. In any society, language acts as a means of accumulating, storing and transmitting the knowledge acquired by this society. Therefore, society and the social, economic and cultural changes taking place in it cannot but influence the various levels of the language. Equally, language has a significant impact on society.

Of particular importance among the tasks of social linguistics is the study of the functional capabilities of the language and the role of the language situation. The functional side of the language includes its role in the life of a particular society, the fulfillment of its purpose in various spheres of the social life of the people at different stages of its development. Under the linguistic situation, the interaction of various linguistic forms and languages is considered in the process of serving all spheres of the people's life at a certain stage of its socio-economic development.

If the functional characteristic of linguistic formations determines the place that various forms of language or languages occupy in a given linguistic situation, then the linguistic situation itself is the essence of linguistic forms and education coexisting in the practice of communication of a given nation [2].

As V.A. Avrorin rightly notes, the linguistic situation is a component of the most complex structure of social relations within the framework of a particular community of people. The most important of these elements and conditions that determine everything else are socio-historical conditions. Changes in these conditions under the influence of factors of the social order change the set and nature of spheres of activity. The latter are reflected in the nature of the forms of existence of the language, and all this, taken together, leads to changes in the linguistic situation [1].

Thus, the linguistic situation is a complex formation that finds its origins and its explanation in the facts of socio-historical development, the reflection of these facts in the structure of the language, the forms of its existence. Along with the social differentiation of society, the social stratification of language is a multidimensional formation that exists and functions in different dimensions. This structure is characterized, as already noted, by the opposition of two planes of socially conditioned language variability - stratification and situational [3].

When studying the social differentiation of language and speech, the interaction of the stratification and situational parameters is especially important, because it allows you to study speech in various not only social situations of communication, as was done earlier, but also to differentiate the features of linguistic and speech behavior of representatives of various social groups in similar communication situations. Ignoring situational variability led, for example, B. Bernstein to the conclusion that the “lower classes” of society use more limited and stereotyped speech forms, in contrast to the “middle class” [2]. One of the reasons for this erroneous conclusion, according to A.D. Schweitzer, was that the author did not take into account the fact that the volume of speech resources used and their stereotypes are not constant and may vary depending on a number of factors, including number and from the social situation [4]. In the analysis of the variability of oral speech, it is impossible to abandon the stratification aspect, since the study of the speech behavior of representatives of different social and age groups in various communication situations is able to give the most complete picture of the functioning of a given language, a wide range of its variability. Otherwise, it is only possible, as before, to draw conclusions regarding the pronunciation features of the speech of an abstract native speaker, a member of a homogeneous group of speakers. Some changes are the result of conscious regulation or creative influence on the part of society and its members, while others occur spontaneously, under the pressure of the system of the language itself. So, for example, many phonetic changes, sometimes quite significant, which have not been explained on the basis of social history for a long time, are now interpreted as a result of the development and improvement of the forms of language existence.

Literary German is referred to as Hochdeutsch ("high" German). The term Hochdeutsch itself is used in two senses. On the one hand, linguists use this term to designate dialects of the more southern, elevated part of Germany, i.e.

"High German" - in contrast to the dialects of the North German lowlands, united by the name "Low German" (Niederdeutsch). On the other hand, Hochdeutsch acts as a designation for the general German literary form of the national language, which developed in the New German period on the basis of High German (Southeastern and Middle German) dialects, as opposed to territorially fragmented dialects and Upper and (i.e., as "high" style as opposed to "low"; it is in this sense that the term Hochdeutsch is fixed in everyday consciousness). There is a variety of functional styles in literary German. The functional style is a historically developed, socially conscious subsystem within the system of the common language, assigned to certain situations of communication and characterized by a set of means of expression and the principle of selection of these means from a common language hidden behind them [3]. The scientific, official-business, artistic, journalistic and colloquial functional styles are distinguished.

In modern German society, there are differentiated relations between certain social strata, age groups and certain forms of language existence, but the links between the social and linguistic development of the country have a fundamentally different character.

Innovations that penetrate many languages of the world, including German, come from the United States, covering such spheres of life as advertising, politics, press and television, sports, music, entertainment, telecommunications, etc., for example, sociology, psychology, economics.

In this article, the internationalisms of the English and German languages were examined. The objectives of this work have been achieved. It can be concluded that a partial discrepancy between meanings may turn out to be more dangerous in practice than one might think: false semantic proximity leads to a non-normative interchange of these words when translating from one language to another. It should be noted that incomplete lexical parallels sometimes present difficulties not only for students of a foreign language, but also for persons who speak a foreign language to a sufficiently high degree. Even they often underestimate the influence of interlingua interference and transfer logical-subject connections from one language to another.

The study of the social conditioning of language, which sociolinguistics is engaged in broadly, helps to penetrate even deeper into the nature of language, to find out the conditions for its functioning in society. Indeed, there are deep and direct connections between the social functions of language and the language system.

Analysis of works in this area helps to determine the differences in connotations in the compared languages. The continuation of scientific research could be comparative studies on the material of the Russian, German and English languages in order to identify how strong the differences in lexical parallels in writing are. After all, the fact that English has become the international language of science is a fact, but a huge amount of Anglo-American borrowings (which is now observed in the German language) can erase the linguistic and cultural identity of Germany.