What is sociolinguistics?

I. What is sociolinguistics?

Concerned with things that vary (most ling classes you'll take are concerned with the things that don't vary about language)

All levels of the language can show variation - sounds, words, meanings, grammar

Variation can be seen at the level of the individual or the group 

so an individual's use of language varies from place to place, audience to audience and one group of speakers shows language differences when compared to another group of speakers.

Everyone speaks a dialect - your age, gender, race, ethnicity, social class, geographic background, etc. all contribute to make up your dialect

Some examples of variation to test with the class: 

sound: often, coupon, data 

lexicon: sneaker/gym shoe/tennis shoe; firefly/lightening bug 

meaning: barbecue 

grammar: positive anymore "the weather's so hot anymore"

II. Background on sociolinguistics (sometimes known as social dialectology) 

Stems from the study of regional dialects. 

response to concerns of theoretical linguistics:

Saussure's langue (grammatical system - homogeneous) vs. parole (social 

uses of language - heterogeneous); (Chomsky's competence vs. performance)

Linguistic theory concerned with ideal speaker-listener, in a completely 

homogeneous speech community : an idealization to allow analysis to take 

place.

But then what to do with this variation?  Is it just random - free variation? 

Where does this variation really come from and what purpose does it serve?

III. Reasons for variation in language

SOCIOHISTORICAL factors 

LINGUISTIC factors 

  

Language constantly changing for many reasons. No language ever stagnant, whether we're talking about vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation.

So we've got all these dialects. Now how do we categorize them?

dialectology concerned with finding regional variation - old farmer, quaint 

connotations

But in late 1960's urban popluation growing, and there was 

an increasing need to describe & analyze speech of urban populations fully 

and accurately. lack of HOMOGENEITY in urban environments, unlike areas 

typically of interest to dialectology. this lack of homogeneity led many 

to clain it's FREE VARIATION - random, not patterned.

But some (starting with William Labov) argued that this variation displayed ordered heterogeneity instead of random chaos.  Labov set out to study this variation systematically - what is behind the variation?

IV. Some important concepts 

Notion of SPEECH COMMUNITY: community of people in which the rules for the 

conduct & interpretation of at least one linguistic variety (language/dialect) are shared: 

i.e., shared norms for language use (can be a city, neighborhood, region, nation)

Shared communicative competence - what a speaker needs to know to communicate effectively in cultural settings

Can a speech community still be said to exist if it shows the kind of heterogeneity that 

a city like NYC shows?

Concept of a linguistic variable: a linguistic item with identifiable 

variants (in/ing; ae); the dependent variable

sociolinguistic variable: a linguistic feature which correlates with some 

non-linguistic independent variable of social context: of the speaker, 

addressee, audience, setting, etc. so social variables like age, gender, 

race, style. (social characteristics are the independent variables)

So the goal of urban/social dialectology (sociolinguistics) becomes the correlation of social and linguistic traits, and the explanation of why things correlate in this way. (Sociolinguistics seeks to demonstrate patterned covariation vs. free variation) 

V.  Branches of sociolinguistics 

Can be defined broadly or narrowly - 

Broad: branch of linguistics studying those properties of language which require reference to social, including contextual, factors in their explanation 

Narrow: seeks to explain patterend covariation of language and society; seeks rules to account for that variation.

Some traditions of sociolinguistic investigation:

• linguistic variation (sociolinguistics proper): focuses on the linguistic variable that correlates with social differences. Unit of study is language itself.  Considered a part of linguistics.  Biggest proponent - Labov.

• ethnography of speaking: emphasis on various aspects of context that are involved in differing interpretations of language use. Unit of analysis is not language itself but rather the users of language: the speech community.  Generally considered part of sociology or anthropology.  Proponent - Dell Hymes.

•  language planning (also applied sociolinguistics, sociology of language): emphasis on practical aspects of this study. Much about language contact issues and language use in education.

For all these branches of sociolinguistics, awareness that variation exists on the group level as well as on the individual level.

For the individual, a whole set of  linguistic resources - 

Linguistic repertoire: a person's (or community's) linguistic resources. For an individual, depends on social history & social networks.

Parts of this repertoire include: 

Vernacular: the most basic, earliest learned variety of language. It is the least subject to self-monitoring and the least likely to change over one's lifetime. 

Superposed varieties: later-learned varieties of speech. Used in more formal settings.

The vernacular comes out in certain circumstances - when someone is tired, upset, around other speakers of the vernacular, very informal settings...

A goal of sociolinguistics is to understand this vernacular. But to do this we must examine speech in natural settings, not artificial ones. But how do we get at this kind of speech? 

Observer's paradox: the speech we most want to observe is unobserved speech.  We have to come up with techniques for overcoming this.