Sociolinguistic is the study of the relationship between
language and society, of language
variation, and of attitudes about
language. Any discussion of the relationship between language and society, or of the various
functions of language in society, should begin with some attempt to define
each of these terms. Let us say that a society is any group of people who are
drawn together for a certain purpose or purposes. By such a definition ‘society’
becomes a very comprehensive concept, but we will soon see how useful such
a comprehensive view is because of the very different kinds of societies we must
consider in the course of the various discussions that follow. We may attempt
an equally comprehensive definition of language: a language is what the members
of a particular society speak. However, as we will see, speech in almost
any society can take many very different forms, and just what forms we should
choose to discuss when we attempt to describe the language of a society may
prove to be a contentious matter. Sometimes too a society may be plurilingual;
that is, many speakers may use more than one language, however we define
language. We should also note that our definitions of language and society are
not independent: the definition of language includes in it a reference to society.
Language is both a system of communication between individuals and a social
phenomenon. When two or more people communicate with each other in speech, we can call
the system of communication that they employ a code. In most cases that code
will be something we may also want to call a language.
b. Variation
A variety is a set of linguistic forms used under specific social circumstances,
with a distinctive social distribution. When we look closely at any language, we will discover time and time again that there is considerable
internal variation and that speakers make constant use of the many different
possibilities offered to them. No one speaks the same way all the time and
people constantly exploit the nuances of the languages they speak for a wide
variety of purposes.
No two speakers of a language speak exactly the same way, ex: Between group variation = inter-group variation. No individual speaker speaks the same way all the time, ex: Within-speaker variation = intraspeaker variation.
c. Society
The area of language and society – sociolinguistics – is intended
to show how our use of language is governed by such factors as class, gender,
race, etc. A subsection of this area is anthropological linguistics which is
concerned with form and use of language in different cultures and to what extent
the development of language has been influenced by cultural environment.
Human language, that unique characteristic of our species, has been of
interest throughout history. The scientific study of human language is
called linguistics. A linguist, then, is not someone who speaks many languages
(although many linguists do); such individuals are polyglots. A
linguist is a scientist who investigates human language in all its facets, its
structure, its use, its history, its place in society.
The form and structure of the kinds of linguistic knowledge speakers
possess is the concern of theoretical linguistics. This theory of grammar
– the mental representation of linguistic knowledge – is what this textbook
is about. But the field of linguistics is not limited to grammatical theory;
it includes a large number of subfields, which is true of most sciences
concerned with phenomena as complex as human language.
references link:
http://home.lu.lv/~pva/Sociolingvistika/1006648_82038_wardhaugh_r_an_introduction_to_sociolinguistics.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/wassink/LING200/lect19_socio1.pdf
https://abudira.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/full_summary_an_introduction_to_sociolinguistics.pdf
https://www.uni-due.de/ELE/LanguageAndSociety.pdf
http://www.phil.uu.nl/~mariekes/it08/Fromkin.pdf
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