Linguistics

Simply defined, sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society. Sociolinguistic studies attempt to describe how speakers from varying social groups (taking into account age, sex, ethnicity, occupation, religion, and class, if applicable) use the rules of speech appropriately in different situations. For example, one study might focus on how one knows when it is proper to address a person as Ms, Mrs, Mary, Doctor, or simply as “you”, while another may look at the speech patterns of Swahili/Lingala/French multilinguals in different contexts.

Sociolinguists believe that the mechanism of language change can be understood by studying the social forces that motivate using different forms in different circumstances. For example, in certain dialects of American English, the pronunciation of the r-sound after vowels (postvocalic r) has been linked to social class. In expressions such as “fourth floor”, some people pronounce the r and others do not, and the usage of the r-sound is claimed to be consistent within a given socio-economic niche. According to a pioneering variationist study by William Labov of English as used in New York, people aspiring to move from the lower middle class to the upper middle class attach prestige to pronouncing the r after vowels. Sometimes they even overcorrect their speech to pronounce r where those they emulate may not.

The studies of ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics overlap to a certain extent. Ethnolinguistics is the study of language and culture and of the relationship of language with ethnicity (it therefore draws on linguistics, anthropology, and sociolinguistics). However, the study of culture implies a link with that of society, which is where the differences between the two disciplines become blurred. Sociolinguistics can also be said to be similar to psycholinguistics in that both are interested to some extent in language variation and change and in language universals.

See also Grammar; Language.