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Introducing Sociolinguistics
Introducing Sociolinguistics
Introducing
Sociolinguistics
1
Contents
What is sociolinguistics?
Why study sociolinguistics?
What is the scope of sociolinguistics?
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What is Sociolinguistics?
3
What is Sociolinguistics?
5
What is Sociolinguistics?
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What is Sociolinguistics?
Language Society
Attitudes
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What is Sociolinguistics?
Language Politics:
capitalist,
communist,
sexist,
Setting: democratic,
formal, fascist…
casual…
Power:
rights,
norms,
Attitudes: judgements
religious,
gender,
education… History: war,
change,events
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Why did sociolinguistics emerge?
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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…
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What do we use language to do?
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How do we know what to say?
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Exercise
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So, what do sociolinguists want to do?
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Example of a socially-realistic
linguistics
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Anything else?
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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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The structure of language variation
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Sociolinguists believe in structured
heterogeneity
Social constraints
Linguistic constraints She were a
good laugh
Social: Linguistic:
Social class Type of pronoun?
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Social constraints on language
We learn to speak in Language is indexical:
different ways because It reflects our social
of our place in society memberships
– Social class It also helps to
– Gender construct and define
– Ethnicity our social memberships
– Age
– Region of origin
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Are we all experts?
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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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References and Additional Reading
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