1. SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND THE ESL CLASSROOM
PhD Course
Assoc.Prof.Dr.Azamat Akbarov

2. An exploration into the relationship between language and culture
Sociolinguistics
An exploration into the relationship between language and culture

3. Fundamental Question
What is the relationship between language and culture?
b. Humans are the only creature to have culture.
c. Humans are the only creature to have language.
d. How do the two connect?
e. What is language? “what members of a particular society speak”

4. What is sociolinguistics?
It studies why people speak differently according to:
- Whom they are talking to?
- What they are talking about?
- In what kind of context they are talking?

5. More specifically… 1. Social motivation for language variation:
- socio-economic status
- gender
- ethnicity
- region
etc.
2. Language contact
- Pidgin language
- Creole language

6. Basic concepts you should know:
Dialect vs. language:
Mutual intelligibility:
Situation in which speakers of different language varieties are able to understand and communicate with the other.
- Chinese dialect, a special case

7. Basic concepts you should know:
Dialect continuum: (bütün)
Situation in which a large number of contiguous dialects exist, each mutually intelligible with the next, but with the dialects at either end of the continuum not being mutually intelligible.

8. A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the continuum are no longer mutually intelligible.

9. In sociolinguistics, a language continuum is said to exist when two or more different language or dialects merge one into the other(s) without a definable boundary

10. Three Views of Language
Language as Grammar:
Language as communication:
Language as thing: