Socialinguistic

Subject: English
Name: Neha Noor
Roll No :22
Sociolinguistics
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 society's effect on language. It
differs from sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics
overlaps considerably with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to linguistic anthropology, and the
distinction between the two fields has been questioned.
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.
 Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between language and society—a branch of both
linguistics and sociology.
American linguist William Labov has called sociolinguistics secular linguistics, "in reaction to the
contention among many linguists working in a broadly Chomskyan framework that language can be
dissociated from its social functions"
"[T]he difference between sociolinguistics and the sociology of language is very much one of emphasis,"
says R.A. Hudson. "There is a very large area of overlap between the two" (Sociolinguistics, 2001). In An
Introduction to Sociolinguistics (2013), Rubén Chacón-Beltrán observes that in sociolinguistics "the
stress is placed on language and its role within communication. Sociology of language, however, centers
on the study of society and how we can understand it through the study of language."
Examples and Observations

"There are several possible relationships between language and society. One is that social structure may
either influence or determine linguistic structure and/or behavior. . . .
"A second possible relationship is directly opposed to the first: linguistic structure and/or behavior may
either influence or determine social structure. . . . A third possible relationship is that the influence is bi-
directional: language and society may influence each other.
"Whatever sociolinguistics is, . . . any conclusions we come to must be solidly based on evidence."
Sociolinguistic Methods
"The standard way in which sociolinguists investigate [language] use is by random sampling of the
population.
In classic cases, like those undertaken in New York by [William] Labov, or in Norwich by [Peter] Trudgill,
a number of linguistic variables are selected, such as 'r' (variably pronounced according to where it
occurs in a word) or 'ng' (variably pronounced /n/ or /ŋ/). Sections of the population, known as
informants, are then tested to see the frequency with which they produce particular variants. The
results are then set against social indices which group informants into classes, based on factors such as
education, money, occupation, and so forth. On the basis of such data it is possible to chart the spread
of innovations in accent and dialect regionally."
Subfields and Branches of Sociolinguistics

"Sociolinguistics includes anthropological linguistics, dialectology, discourse analysis, ethnography of
speaking, geolinguistics, language contact studies, secular linguistics, the social psychology of language
and the sociology of language." (Peter Trudgill, A Glossary of Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press,
2003)
Sociolinguistic Competence
"Sociolinguistic competence enables speakers to distinguish among possibilities such as the following.
To get someone's attention in English, each of the utterances
'Hey!',
'Excuse me!', and
'Sir!' or 'Ma'am!'
is grammatical and a fully meaningful contribution to the discourse of the moment, but only one of
them may satisfy societal expectations and the speaker's preferred presentation of self. 'Hey!' addressed
to one's mother or father, for example, often expresses either a bad attitude or surprising
misunderstanding of the usually recognized social proprieties, and saying 'Sir!' to a 12-year-old probably
expresses inappropriate deference.
"Every language accommodates such differences as a non-discrete scale or continuum of recognizably

different linguistic 'levels' or styles, termed registers, and every socially mature speaker, as part of
learning the language, has learned to distinguish and choose among places on the scale of register."
Sociolinguistic variation
Sociolinguistic variation is the study of the way language varies (see also the article on Dialectology) and
changes (see Historical linguistics) in communities of speakers and concentrates in particular on the
interaction of social factors (such as a speaker's gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their
community, etc) and linguistic structures (such as sounds, grammatical forms, intonation features,
words, etc).
The study of sociolinguistic variation has its roots in dialectology, emerging in the 1960s partly as a result
of inadequate methods in earlier approaches to the study of dialect, and partly as a reaction to
Chomsky's generative programme . Unlike earlier forms of dialectology, it uses recordings of informal
conversations as its data (and occasionally reading exercises to examine the role of formality in dialect
use); argues for the role of quantitative analysis in highlighting dialect differences; and is interested in
how social groups variably select different dialect forms. This article outlines some of these important
issues and suggests the salient topics that should be taught in a course on this subject.
Socialinguistic Variables:

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Subject: English

Name: Neha Noor

Examples and Observations

Subfields and Branches of Sociolinguistics

To get someone's attention in English, each of the utterances

'Excuse me!', and

"Every language accommodates such differences as a non-discrete scale or continuum of recognizably

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