1. Introducing Sociolinguistics Dr. Emma Moore

2. Contents What is sociolinguistics? Why study sociolinguistics?
What is the scope of sociolinguistics?

3. What is Sociolinguistics?
What the academics say…
“We can define sociolinguistics as the study of language in relation to society.”
Hudson (1996: 1)

4. What is Sociolinguistics?
What the academics say…
Trudgill (2004: 21)
“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…”

5. What is Sociolinguistics?
What the academics say…
Holmes (1992: 16)
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

6. 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

7. What is Sociolinguistics?
Language
Society
Attitudes

8. What is Sociolinguistics?
Politics: capitalist, communist, sexist, democratic, fascist…
Language
Setting: formal, casual…
Power: rights, norms, judgements
Attitudes: religious, gender, education…
History: war, change,events

9. 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

10. Isolating language structure
Chomsky’s competence/performance distinction
Competence = underlying knowledge of language structure
Performance = language output which is affected by language-external conditions
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

11. Something that makes sociolinguists cross…
“Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. This seems to me to have been the positions of the founders of modern general linguistics, and no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered” (Chomsky 1965).

12. 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?

13. What do we use language to do?
Communication AND achievement of social goals
Language without social knowledge = “a social monster” (Hymes 1974: 75)
Attitudes
Stances
Judgements

14. 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)

15. Exercise
You want someone to pass you a copy of the bus timetable. How would you ask:
a friend?
someone at the bus stop?

16. 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

17. Example of a socially-realistic linguistics
Developing the work of dialectologists
To represent all sorts of social identities, social groups and individuals
Region…
+ social class
+ age
+ gender
+ social group
How do linguistic features pattern according social groupings?
Also known as: Variationist sociolinguistics or quantitative sociolinguistics

18. 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

19. 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

20. The structure of language variation
Variation based on social factors is not FREE VARIATION
She were a good laugh
Free Variation: Whether or not one form or another form is used is linguistically insignificant
She was a good laugh

21. Sociolinguists believe in structured heterogeneity
Social constraints
Linguistic constraints
She were a good laugh
Social: Social class
Linguistic: Type of pronoun?

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

23. Are we all experts?
We all have stories about our experience of language and its interaction with society
Sociolinguistics: a target for disparagement?
Sociolinguistics: as scientific and rigorous as any other academic field

24. 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

25. References and Additional Reading
Hudson, R.A. (1996) Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
Meyerhoff, Miriam (2006) Introducing Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: EUP.
Trudgill (2000) Sociolinguistics, Fourth edition. London: Penguin books.
Holmes, Janet (1992) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.
Hymes, Dell (1971) On Communicative Competence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hymes, Dell (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Required Reading: Meyerhoff (2006: Chapter 1)