Sociolinguistics

Introducing
Sociolinguistics

Dr. Emma Moore

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 Contents

 What is sociolinguistics?
 Why study sociolinguistics?
 What is the scope of sociolinguistics?

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 What is Sociolinguistics?

 What the academics say…

“We can define Hudson

sociolinguistics as the (1996: 1)
study of language in
relation to society.”

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 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…”
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 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

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 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

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 What is Sociolinguistics?

Language Society

Attitudes

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 What is Sociolinguistics?

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

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 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

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 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).
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 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?

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 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

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 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)

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 Exercise

 You want someone to pass you a copy of the

bus timetable. How would you ask:
a friend?
 someone at the bus stop?

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 The structure of language variation

 Variation based on social factors is not FREE

VARIATION
She were
a good
Free Variation: laugh
Whether or not one
form or another
form is used is
linguistically
insignificant She was a
good laugh

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 Sociolinguists believe in structured
heterogeneity

 Social constraints
 Linguistic constraints She were a
good laugh

Social: Linguistic:
Social class Type of pronoun?

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 Social constraints on language

 We learn to speak in  Language is indexical:

different ways because It reflects our social
of our place in society memberships
 Social class  It also helps to
 Gender construct and define
 Ethnicity our social memberships
 Age
 Region of origin

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 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

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 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

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 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)

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