Introduction of sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is a very broad field, and it can be used to describe many different ways of
studying language. A lot of linguists might describe themselves as sociolinguists, but the people
who call themselves sociolinguists may have rather different interests from each other and they
may use very different methods for collecting and analyzing data.
Language is central to social interaction in every society, regardless of location and time
period. Language and social interaction have a reciprocal relationship: language shapes
social interactions and social interactions shape language.
Sociolinguistics is the study of the connection between language and society and the
way people use language in different social situations.
For example
It asks the question, "How does language affect the social nature of human beings, and
how does social interaction shape language?
Then answer is this
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.
Basic concept of sociolinguistics
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 not
only on the occasion and relationship between the participants, but also on the
participants’ region, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, and gender.
Change in language
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.
Language change is the phenomenon by which permanent alterations are made in the
features and the use of a language over time.
All natural languages change, and language change affects all areas of language use.
Types of language change include sound changes, lexical changes, semantic changes,
and syntactic changes.
Why sociolinguistic is important?
Sociolinguists are generally concerned with the social implications of the use and
reception of language. They carry out basic research on language variation, sensitivity,
and acquisition among social groups of all types including those based on social status,
age, race, sex, family, friendship units, and others. Some of the topics of sociolinguistics
include dialect geography, bilingualism, linguistic interference, social dialectology
(including studies of social stratification and minority group speech), language situations
(language rivalries, standardization, language as a means of group identification and
functional styles), and attitudes toward language. In order to accommodate these
topics, sociolinguists have borrowed research techniques from other disciplines and
have developed some new analytical modes of their own. It has been necessary, for
example, to conceptualize linguistic data as part of a continuum rather than as isolated
phenomena. The occurrence of a grammatical feature, for example, can no longer be
interpreted on a purely qualitative basis, as it once was. Realizing that speakers of a
language, standard or nonstandard, exist in a continuum, sociolinguists find it necessary
to use quantitative as well as qualitative analyses in order to determine the frequency
with which any given form occurs in the speech of an individual. This notion of the
linguistic continuum enables us to conceive of groups of individuals with similar or
identical continua as linguistically homogeneous.
Linguistics features
Sociolinguists are also deeply involved in identifying and analyzing the linguistic features which
set off one social group from another. Although there are currently available several "grocery"
lists of features said to be characteristic of nonstandard English, they generally tend to
oversimplify and frequently are misleading (Non-Standard Dialects, 1968, is a case in point).
the "grocery lists" may be useful, for earlier research by Ann E. Hughes has clearly revealed the
general inability of teachers even to identify the features which they consider problems in their
students' speech (Hughes, 1967). Only 10% of the teachers in Hughes' study of Detroid Head
Start Teachers showed clear evidence of understanding that the so-called nonverbal child has a
language which may be perfectly appropriate for certain, but not all, circumstances in life. One
third of the teachers characterized the disadvantaged child's greatest problem as his failure to -
speak in sentences and/or complete thoughts. Other common observations about the language
of the disadvantaged child included statements about their limited vocabulary, their slurring
words together, and their dropping ends of words. Even though 40% of the teachers recognized
that their students have some sort of unusual phonological activity at the ends of words, not
one could describe these features in terms satisfactory enough to be diagnostically useful. What
is even more distressing is that 13% of these teachers observe that disadvantaged children do
not talk at all and 10% observe that these students do not talk at home.
This inability of teachers to describe nonstandard language with any degree of diagnostic
usefulness has suggested that we try to discover the vocabulary of socially meaningful terms
with which people can evaluate speech.
Labov observed this phenomenon in his study of the subjective reactions to language of New
Yorkers (1966: 405). Recent research in Detroit used the semantic differential scale using polar
adjectives as a device for laymen to express their evaluations of tape recorded speech segments
(Shuy, Baratz, and Wolfram, 1969).
For each segment, listener judges were asked to use the following scale:
Awkward:::: : graceful
Relaxed: tense
Formal: informal
Thin: thick
Correct:: : :: : incorrect
