Sociolinguistics

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Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

Scientific discipline developed from the cooperation of linguistics and sociology that investigates the social meaning of the language system and of language use, and the common set of conditions of linguistic and social structure. Several areas of sociolinguistic investigation are differentiated. (a) A primarily sociologically oriented approach concerned predominantly with the norms of language use. (When and for what purpose does somebody speak what kind of language or what variety with whom?) Here language use and language attitudes as well as larger and smaller social networks are in the foreground. These facets are studied mainly by using quantitative methods; connections between socioeconomics, history, culture, ethnic differentiation, social class structure, and language varieties are included in the investigation ( diglossia, code theory). (b) A primarily linguistically oriented approach that presumes linguistic systems to be in principle heterogeneous, though structured, when viewed within sociological parameters. For an appropriate description of linguistic variation, a new type of rule—differentiated from rules found in generative grammar—is proposed, the so-called ‘variable rule,’ which expresses and establishes the probability that a particular linguistic form will result from the influence of different linguistic and extralinguistic variables, e.g. social class, age, etc. ( variational linguistics). The results of this sociolinguistic approach have particularly important implications for the theory of language change: in a series of empirical investigations the relevance of social conditions to the processes of language change was demonstrated and proved, such that synchronically present variational structures can be seen as a ‘snap shot’ of diachronic changes. (c) An ethnomethodologically oriented approach with linguistic interaction as the focal point, which studies the ways in which members of a society create social reality and rule-ordered behaviour. Here a formal distinction must be drawn between conversation analysis, which deals with the structure of conversations, and ethnographic conversation analysis ( ethnography of speaking), which investigates interactive processes in the production of meaning and understanding ( contextualization).

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