3/18/2014

Overview: What is Sociolinguistics?


Assalamualaikum! :)

Now, lets talk about interesting information about Sociolinguistics subject, shall we?

Below is the overview of what Sociolinguistics is all about.
Hope you find this, informative and useful.

Sociolinguistics: An academic field of study in Linguistics which has only developed within the last fifty years, in the latter part of the last century.
Scope: Social aspects of language, in the intersection of language and society.
First coined: The word sociolinguistics was apparently coined in 1939 in the title of an article by Thomas C. Hodson, “Sociolinguistics in India” in Man in India.
First used: In linguistics by Eugene Nida in the second edition of his Morphology (1949: 152), but the term always been attributed to Haver Currie (1952), who himself claimed to have invented it.

William Labov has called Sociolinguistics secular linguistics, "in reaction to the contention among many linguists working in a broadly Chomskyan framework that language can be dissociated from its social functions" (Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, 2005).

In the late 1960s, Sociolinguistics became popularized as a field of study and there were two labels – sociolinguistics and sociology of language – for the same phenomenon. The terms; the study of the intersection and interaction of language and society were also used interchangeably.

Eventually, wider description of language is made in relation to social factors, including differences of regional, class, and occupational dialect, gender differences, and bilingualism.

Sociolinguists attempt to isolate the linguistic features used in particular situations that mark the various social relationships among the participants and the significant elements of the situation. Factors influencing the choice of sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary may include age, gender, education, ethnic identity, occupation, and peer-group identification.

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