What is Sociolinguistics?
Sociolinguistics is the study of the
relationship between language and society.
Sociolinguistics can help us understand why we speak differently in various social contexts, and help uncover the social relationships in a community.
For example, you probably wouldn't speak the same to your boss at work as you would your friends, or speak to strangers as you would to your family.
Sociolinguistics may also wonder whether women and men speak the same as each other.
Or why do people the same age or from the same social class or same ethnicity use similar language?
Sociolinguistics attempts to explain all these questions and more.
Ultimately, sociolinguistics is everywhere!
Sociolinguistics can help us understand why we speak differently in various social contexts, and help uncover the social relationships in a community.
For example, you probably wouldn't speak the same to your boss at work as you would your friends, or speak to strangers as you would to your family.
Sociolinguistics may also wonder whether women and men speak the same as each other.
Or why do people the same age or from the same social class or same ethnicity use similar language?
Sociolinguistics attempts to explain all these questions and more.
Ultimately, sociolinguistics is everywhere!
- Interactional Sociolinguistics
- Variationist Sociolinguistics
- Historical sociolinguistics
- Dialectology - this is equally similar to the study of different Varieties of English
- Discourse Analysis
- Conversation Analysis
- Language planning and policy
Sociolinguistics is a move towards studying language performance, and there are two arguments on why this should be studied within language:
- Language is an interactive and cultural phenomenon which should be studied.
- Actual language use is highly structured and not at a random.
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the sociology of language focuses on language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned recently.[1]
It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Louis Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article "Sociolingistics in India" published in Man in India..[2][3] Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK. In the 1960s, William Stewart[4] and Heinz Kloss introduced the basic concepts for the sociolinguistic theory of pluricentric languages, which describes how standard language varieties differ between nations.
For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for a regional dialect.
The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations.
William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change,[8] making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline
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