1. TRENDS IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
ALI H. RADDAOUI

2. STATUS-QUO SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Critical Sociolinguistics
Program for today:
Quick review of lecture ‘Two Types of Sociolinguistics
Presenting lecture 2: Issues in Sociolinguistics
Work on Assignment 1: Tunisia’s linguistic Atlas
Work on Assignment 2: article review
Presenting Lecture 3: Chomsky versus Hymes

3. Status-Quo Sociolinguistics
Classical correlational sociolinguistics does no more than link frequency values for isolated linguistic variables to frequency values for isolated social variables, without interpreting either the linguistic variables or the social variables as part of a theoretical whole on the basis of social and linguistic theory’’. Muysken, 1998.
Establishmentarian sociolinguistics

4. Status quo sociolinguistics
Status quo sociolinguistics: 'non-critical, 'culturalist', 'scientistic', 'one-sided structuralist', 'subject-demeaning', 'subject-pacifying', 'vulgar correlatism’, 'influential' and 'dominant'.

5. THE OBJECT OF CRITICAL SCIENCE
Beyond description or superficial application, critical science in each domain asks further questions, such as those of responsibility, interests, and ideology. Instead of focusing purely on academic or theoretical problems, it starts from prevailing social problems, and thereby chooses the perspective of those who suffer most, and critically analyzes those in power, those who are responsible, and those who have the means and opportunity to solve such problems. (van Dijk, 1986, 4)
Social responsiblity

6. CRTICAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Critical sociolinguistics: 'knowledgeable', 'responsible', 'critical', 'reflexive'.
Their main criticism is that most of this work tends to understress the essential power asymmetry in communication between members of dominant communities and ethnic immigrant communities, clouding the issue by looking at differences in communicative strategies. Muysken, 1998

7. Critical sociolinguistics
In my view, a method that includes political, social, and cultural analyses of the context that surrounds and creates the discourse will stand a better chance of being useful to the ‘participants themselves’, by creating a better understanding of “what the parties in the interaction understand themselves to be doing in it” Mey, 2001.

8. Critical sociolinguistics
“Productive future developments might be possible if the aim of sociological neutrality is abandoned as unrealizable, and the uncritical assumptions are replaced by explicit critical awareness” (Billig, 1999a: 556).

9. THE PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC
Chomsky, N P. 6

10. BROAD IMPLICATIONS FOR ACADEMIC AGENDA
Chomsky, N P. 7.

11. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chomsky, N Philosophers and Public Philosophy. Ethics. Vol. 79. No. 1. Pp.1-9
Van Dijk, T.A Prejudice in Discourse: an Analysis of Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation. Amsterdam: Benjamins