1. What is sociolinguistics 2
Lecture 2
What is sociolinguistics 2

2. Learning outcomes By the end of the lecture, students will be able to:
Identify some of the social factors that cause linguistic variation.
Identify the areas of study in sociolinguistics and the questions SL tries to answer.
Distinguish between the linguistic variable and the linguistic variants.
Distinguish between different dialects of the language based on geographical regions.
Apply on the different dialects in the Arab World.
Examine the distribution of a sound on a regional dialect map.
Apply on the Saudi dialects as an assignment.

3. What is sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the relationship between language and society. Sociolinguists use a range of methods to analyze patterns of language in use and attitudes towards language in use.
Everyone can modify the way they speak depending on who they are with or what the situation is. When they do this, they are drawing on their sociolinguistic knowledge. And every time they change the way they speak, depending on their interlocutor or situation, they provide more sociolinguistic information that builds up the sociolinguistic knowledge in the community.

4. Areas of sociolinguistic study
Language variation according to user and different usages
Dialects: Dialectologists want to find out where one traditional local dialect begins and ends, they can often ask people directly.
Language policy and language planning: sociolinguists who are interested in investigating national language policies might need to use audio or video recordings to track the variation that happen in a specific language over time.

5. The questions the sociolinguists try to answer??
sociolinguists are not only interested in documenting the different form of language – what it looks like and how it is structured – but also want to answer questions like:
■ Who uses those different forms or language varieties?
■ Who do they use them with?
■ Are they aware of their choice?
■ Why do some forms or languages ‘win out’ over others? (And is it always the same ones?)
■ Is there any relationship between the forms in flux in a community of speakers?
■ What kind of social information do we ascribe to different forms in a language or different language varieties?
■ How much can we change or control the language we use?
This is what we mean when we say that sociolinguists are interested in both ‘social’ questions and ‘linguistic’ questions. Inevitably, some sociolinguistics research has more to say about social issues, and some sociolinguistic research has more to say about linguistic matters, but what makes someone’s work distinctively sociolinguistic will be the fact that, regardless of its emphasis, it has something to say about both linguistic structure and social structure.

6. The linguistic variable
The linguistic variable is the linguistic item under study as it changes according to one or more social factor.
For example, in Modern Standard Arabic the sound “ق” has 2 variants in the lexical item “قال”: “?al” in Cairene Egyptian Arabic & “gal” in Se3idi Egyptian Arabic.
Can you think of an example of your own?

7. Linguistic variable and its variants
Read the story and try to figure out what is the linguistic variable that is subject to variation (change) and what is its variant?
VARIABLES AND VARIANTS
Some friends were sitting outside one evening in Bequia (an island in St Vincent and the Grenadines) where they were about to watch a video and have a soft drink. One person lifted their glass and said ‘Cheers!’, to which their neighbor replied ‘Chairs and tables’. This is a play on the way cheer and chair are often pronounced the same way on Bequia. The variable (i.e. the feature that varies) is the vowel – in this case a centring diphthong – and the different variants at play in the community at large are realizations of the diphthong with a closer starting point [tʃiəz] that sounds like Standard English cheers or a more open starting point [tʃeəz] that sounds more like Standard English chairs.

8. Answer the following questions
Based on the story:
What is the linguistic variable?
What are its variants?
What is the social factor that caused the variation?
Why is [tʃiəz] the variable and [tʃeəz] the variant?
How is the data collected in this example?

9. Variable vs. variant Variable Variant 1 Variant 2 The (ear) variable
[tʃiəz]
[tʃeəz]

10. Exercise 1 Identifying variables and variants
■ How do you express the concept die or dead? How many different ways can you think of expressing the idea that someone has died? What determines your use of these different ways of phrasing the same idea?
■ Now try and think of at least one word (or set of words) that you sometimes pronounce in different ways (like the example of ‘cheers/chairs’ in Bequian given above). What determines your use of these different pronunciations? Is it the same kinds of factors that you identified in the die example?
■ Do social factors enter into your account of pronunciation more or less than they do into your account of vocabulary differences? Why do you think that might be?
■ For both the examples above, say what you would consider to be the variable and say what the variants are.

11. Regional dialectology: Mapping speakers and Places
An early and ambitious example of these was the Altas Linguistique de la France or ‘Alf’, as it is commonly called. This project was begun by Jules Gillieron and the data collection was carried out by a fieldworker, Edmond Edmont, who bicycled all around France stopping in small villages where he interviewed older speakers and asked them what the local word was for a number of vocabulary items and then carefully noted the local pronunciation of different words. Edmont was trained to use a consistent system for transcribing regional pronunciations, and at every point in his fieldwork he used the same questionnaire. This standardisation of methods was an important method of collecting data as it allowed accurate and reliable comparisons to be made between different localities.

12. Dialect Variation Maps
The results of dialect surveys are often plotted on maps, thus providing an atlas which, instead of showing topographical features like mountains and plains, shows how speakers’ pronunciation of words changes as you move across physical space. The distribution of different forms – pronunciations or sentence patterns – can be shown with different symbols shown on a map of the region which plots every point surveyed.

13. Map of dialects in the Arab World

14. More about the dialect maps in the Arab World

15. Map showing the distribution of /ق/
Look at the map and decide how many variants are there for the linguistic variable /ق/? What is the social factor causing the variation?

16. Assignment
Read about the different dialects in Saudi Arabia? Guide/Language/Languages