Sociolinguistics

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 What is Sociolinguistics?

1.“We can define sociolinguistics as the study of language in relation to

society.
Hudson (1996: 1)
2. Sociolinguistics… is that part of linguistics which is concerned with
language as a social and cultural phenomenon. It investigates the field of
language and society and has close connections with the social
sciences…”
Trudgill (2004: 21)

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What is Sociolinguistics?

3. The sociolinguist’s aim is to move towards a

theory which provides a motivated account of the
way language is used in a community, and of the
choices people make when they use language
Holmes (1992: 16)

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What is Sociolinguistics?

 No set definition or single approach, but a set

of reoccurring themes
 Combining linguistic AND social theory
 Drawing upon our knowledge of the social world to
better understand language

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Why did sociolinguistics
emerge?

 The legacy of formal linguistics

 Constructs models of the linguistic
system
 Phonetics and phonology, syntax,
semantics
 Interested in humans’ underlying
knowledge of language structure

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Isolating language structure

 Chomsky’s competence/performance
distinction
 Competence = underlying knowledge of language
structure
 Performance = language output which is affected by
language-external conditions

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Something that makes
sociolinguists cross…

“Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an

ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous
speech-community, who knows its language
perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically
irrelevant conditions as memory limitations,
distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and
errors (random or characteristic) in applying his
knowledge of the language in actual performance.
This seems to me to have been the positions of the
founders of modern general linguistics, and no
cogent reason for modifying it has been offered”
(Chomsky 1965).

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How do we know what to say?

 Not just important to know the linguistic rules,

but the social rules too
 When is it appropriate to speak?
 Who is able to speak?
 Which speech forms are affective in getting what
you want done?
 Our sociolinguistic knowledge is structured…
 Communicative competence (Hymes 1971)

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So, what do sociolinguists want
to do?

 Provide “a socially realistic linguistics”

 To do this we must:
 Represent all speakers
 Not rely upon speaker intuition
 Be descriptive not prescriptive
 This allows us to learn more about language

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Example of a socially-realistic
linguistics

 Developing the work of dialectologists

 To represent all sorts of social identities, social
groups and individuals
 Region…
+ social class
+ age
+ gender
+ social group
 How do linguistic features pattern according social
groupings?
 Also known as: Variationist sociolinguistics or
quantitative sociolinguistics
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 Solve social problems involving
language
 To do this, we must:
 Think about the role of power in language
 Look to language for evidence of social
inequality
 Examine social policy with respect to language

 This allows us to learn more about

society

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Examples of policy
implications…
 Sexism/racism in language
 Does our language render women invisible

 Dialect and education research and inequality

 Is it harder for nonstandard children to achieve
academic success?
 Language policy and planning affects social
policy
 Multilingualism; Standardisation; Education;
Globalisation

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Social constraints on
language
 We learn to speak in  Language is
different ways indexical: It reflects
because of our place our social
in society memberships
 Social class  It also helps to
 Gender construct and define
 Ethnicity our social
 Age
memberships
 Region of origin
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Are we all experts?

 We all have stories about our experience of

language and its interaction with society
 Sociolinguistics: a target for disparagement?
 Sociolinguistics: as scientific and rigorous as
any other academic field

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Summing Up…

 Sociolinguistics is interdisciplinary
 It emerged from a particular stance towards formal linguistics
 We’ll focus on the branch of sociolinguistics that aims to
provide a socially-realistic linguistics

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