What does Sociolinguistics study?

Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society.

Sociolinguistics is concerned with how language use interacts with, or is affected by, social
factors such as gender, ethnicity, age or social class, for instance. As Coulmas defines, it is
the study of choice and “the principal task of Sociolinguistics is to uncover, describe and
interpret the socially motivated” choices an individual makes.[1]

Sociolinguists are interested in how we speak differently in varying social contexts, and how
we may also use specific functions of language to convey social meaning or aspects of our
identity. Sociolinguistics teaches us about real-life attitudes and social situations. Below is a
video featuring Paul Cooper, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, in which he
outlines some of the reasons studying Sociolinguistics is important in consolidating our
understanding of society.

Sociolinguistics
WRITTEN BY: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Sociolinguistics, the study of the sociological aspects of language. The discipline concerns
itself with the part language plays in maintaining the social roles in a community.
Sociolinguists attempt to isolate those linguistic features that are used in particular situations
and that mark the various social relationships among the participants and the significant
elements of the situation. Influences on the choice of sounds, grammatical elements, and
vocabulary items may include such factors as age, sex, education, occupation, race, and peer-
group identification, among others. For example, an American English speaker may use such
forms as “He don’t know nothing” or “He doesn’t know anything,” depending on such
considerations as his level of education, race, social class or consciousness, or the effect he
wishes to produce on the person he is addressing. In some languages, such as Japanese, there
is an intricate system of linguistic forms that indicate the social relationship of the speaker to
the hearer.

What is Sociolinguistics?
Sociolinguistics is the study of the connection between language and society and the way
people use language in different social situations. It asks the question, "How does language
affect the social nature of human beings, and how does social interaction shape language?"
It ranges greatly in depth and detail, from the study of dialects across a given region to the
analysis of the way men and women speak to each other in certain situations.
The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that language is variable and ever-changing. As a
result, language is not uniform or constant. Rather, it is varied and inconsistent for both the
individual user and within and among groups of speakers who use the same language.

People adjust the way they talk to their social situation. An individual, for instance, will
speak differently to a child than he or she will to their college professor. This socio-situational
variation is sometimes called register and depends no only on the occasion and relationship
between the participants, but also on the participants’ region, ethnicity, socioeconomic
status, age, and gender.

One way that sociolinguists study language is through dated written records. They examine
both hand-written and printed documents to identify how language and society have
interacted in the past. This is often referred to as historical sociolinguistics: the study of the
relationship between changes in society and changes in language over time. For example,
historical sociolinguists have studied the use and frequency of the pronoun thou in dated
documents and found that its replacement with the word you is correlated with changes in
class structure in 16th and 17th century England.

Sociolinguists also commonly study dialect, which is the regional, social, or ethnic variation
of a language. For example, the primary language in the United States is English. People
who live in the South, however, often vary in the way they speak and the words they use
compared to people who live in the Northwest, even though it is all the same language. There
are different dialects of English, depending on what region of the country you are in.

What Sociolinguists Study

Researchers and scholars are currently using sociolinguistics to examine some interesting
questions about language in the United States:

There is vowel shift occurring in the North, in which pattered alterations to vowels is
occurring in certain words. For example, many people in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and
Chicago are now pronouncing bat like bet and bet like but. Who is changing the
pronunciation of these vowels, why are they changing it, and why/how is it spreading?
What parts of African American Vernacular English grammar are being used by white
middle-class teenagers? For example, white adolescents might compliment a peer’s clothes
by saying, "she money," a phrase associated with African Americans.
What will be the impact on language in Louisiana due to the loss of monolingual French
speakers in the Cajun region of Southern Louisiana? Will the French features of language be
sustained even when these French speakers are gone?
What slang terms do younger generations use to show their affiliation with certain subgroups
and to distinguish themselves from their parents’ generation? For example, in the early 2000s,
teenagers described things that they enjoyed as cool, money, tight, or sweet, but definitely
not swell, which is what their parents would have said when they were teenagers.
Which words are pronounced differently according to age, gender, socioeconomic status, or
race/ethnicity? For instance, African Americans often pronounce certain words differently
than whites. Likewise, some words are pronounced differently depending on whether the
person speaking was born after World War II or before.
Which vocabulary words vary by region and time, and what are the different meanings
associated with certain words? For example, in Southern Louisiana, a certain breakfast dish
is often called lost bread while in other parts of the country, it is called French toast.
Similarly, which words have changed over time? Frock, for instance, used to refer to a
woman’s dress, while today frock is rarely used.
Sociolinguists study many other issues as well. For instance, they often examine the values
that hearers place on variations in language, the regulation of linguistic behavior, language
standardization, and educational and governmental policies concerning language.

What is the sociology of a language?

Sociology is the study of human social relationships and institutions. Its subject matter
includes every social creation, such as the family, science, classes, religion, social changes,
and so forth. The sociology of language looks at how language functions in its social context,
to facilitate communication but also how it changes and affects other social relationships,
such as how language (including accents, dialects and slangs) affect and is affected by class,
education, gender, nationality, etc.

What is Sociolinguistics?
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in relation to social factors, including differences in
region, class, occupational dialect and gender, and bilingualism. In other words, it studies
how various social factors such as gender, ethnicity, age or social class affect language.

Language is variable and changing; thus, language is not homogeneous, neither for
individual users nor among groups of speakers who use the same language. Sociolinguistics
is based on the premise that language use symbolically represents fundamental aspects of
social behavior and human interaction. Thus, sociolinguists study how people speak
differently in various social contexts, and how people use specific functions of language to
convey aspects of our identity and social meaning.

Difference Between Sociolinguistics and Sociology of Language

Sociolinguistics has various subfields and branches such as dialectology, discourse analysis,
ethnography of speaking, geolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, language contact
studies, secular linguistics, etc.

What is Sociology of Language?

Sociology of language is basically the study of the relationship between language and society.
In other words, it studies society in relation to language; thus, society is the object of study
in this field. This field studies the language of a particular community in order to discover
and understand the use of the social structures and the way the people of that community
use them to communicate properly. The idea that language can reflect (automatically or
deliberately) attitudes of the speakers are at the base of the sociology of language. Sociologists
are interested in the attitudes of these speakers.
Key Difference Between Sociolinguistics and Sociology of Language
Figure 01: Relationship between Society, Language, Sociolinguistics, and Sociology of
Language

It is also important to notice that there is a lot of overlap between both sociolinguistics. In
fact, sociology of language is also known by the term ‘macro-sociolinguistics’

What are the Similarities Between Sociolinguistics and Sociology of

Language?
Both fields deal with the interaction between society and language.
The boundaries between these two fields are sometimes not clear.
What is the Difference Between Sociolinguistics and Sociology of Language?
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in relation to social factors, including differences in
region, class, occupational dialect and gender, and bilingualism. Sociology of language, in
contrast, is the study of the relations between language and society. Although both these
fields study the interaction between language and society, sociolinguistics focuses on
language while sociology of language focuses on society. In general, sociolinguistics looks at
how social factors affect language whereas the sociology of language looks at the relationship
between society and language.

Difference Between Sociolinguistics and Sociology of Language in

Tabular Form

Summary – Sociolinguistics vs Sociology of Language

Both sociolinguistics and sociology of language are closely-related fields that study the
interaction between language and society. The basic difference between sociolinguistics and
sociology of language is that sociolinguistics focuses on language while sociology of language
focuses on society.