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Contents
What is sociolinguistics?
Why study sociolinguistics?
What is the scope of sociolinguistics?

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What is Sociolinguistics?
We can define sociolinguistics as the study of
language in relation to society
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…”

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What is Sociolinguistics?
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

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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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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?
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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Let’s think about that…
Do ALL speakers share the same underlying
knowledge of language?
How do we know?
Is language solely a cognitive process?

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What do we use language to do?
Communication AND achievement of social goals
Language without social knowledge = “a social
monster”
 Attitudes
 Stances

 Judgements

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

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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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