Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics studies the relationship between language and society — how language varies and changes across social groups and situations.

Scope

It covers linguistic variation and change, dialect and register, language and social class, gender, and ethnicity, and language attitudes and policy.

Core questions

• How does language vary across social groups?
• How do sound changes spread through society?
• How do speakers signal identity through language?
• How do social factors drive language change?

Key concepts

• Linguistic variable
• Variation and change
• Dialect and register
• Prestige
• Social class and language
• Language attitudes

Key theories

Variationist sociolinguistics

Labov made the systematic, quantitative study of socially conditioned variation and change empirical.

Social differentiation of speech

Trudgill demonstrated correlations between linguistic variables and social class.

History

Founded by Labov's variationist studies in the 1960s, sociolinguistics established the quantitative analysis of language variation and change, expanding to interactional, ethnographic, and language-policy approaches.

Debates

Internal versus social explanation of change

How far language change is driven by social factors versus internal linguistic structure.

Key figures

• William Labov
• Peter Trudgill

Seminal works

• labov-1963
• labov-1972
• trudgill-1974

Frequently asked questions

What is a linguistic variable?

A feature of language (e.g., dropping 'r') that varies systematically with social and stylistic factors, the unit of variationist analysis.