CHAPTER 1
WHAT DO SOCIOLINGUISTS STUDY?
What is sociolinguist?
- Sociolinguists are the people who study the relationship between language and society. They are interested in explaining why we speak differently in different social contexts, and they are concerned with identifying the social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning.
- Sociolinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and the context in which it is used.
Why do we say the same thing in different ways?
- Language provides a variety of ways of saying the same thing – addressing and greeting others, describing things, paying compliments.
- The choice of one linguistic form rather than another is useful clue to non-linguistic information. Linguistic variation can provide social information.
- Ex. Addressing mother at home alone: mum, mummy, mom, ma, Tess
What are the different ways we say things?
- Vocabulary or word choice is one area of linguistic variation, but linguistic variation occurs at other levels of linguistic analysis too: sounds, word-structure (morphology), and grammar (or syntax) as well as vocabulary.
Social factors, dimensions and explanations
- Social factors:
1. The participants: who is speaking and who are they speaking to?
2. The setting or social context of the interaction: where are they speaking?
3. The topic: what is being talked about?
4. The function: why are they speaking?
- Social dimensions:
1. A social distance scale concerned with participant relationships
2. A status scale concerned with participant relationships
3. A formality scale relating to the setting or type of interaction
4. Two functional scales relating to the purposes or topic of interaction.
- Explanations:
1. To identify clearly the linguistic variation involved (e.g. vocabulary, sounds, grammatical constructions, dialects, languages)
2. To identify clearly the different social or non-linguistic factors which lead speakers to use one form rather than another (e.g. features relating to participants, setting or function of the interaction)
