Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the interaction between society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context and language and the ways it is used.
Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology[1] can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.)
Studies in the field of sociolinguistics use a variety of research methods including ethnography/participant observation, analysis of audio or video recordings of real life encounters or interviews with members of a population of interest.
Other research methods in sociolinguistics include matched-guise tests (in which listeners share their evaluations of linguistic features they hear), dialect surveys, and analysis of preexisting corpora.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Louis Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West until much later.
The study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century.
[2][3] Dialectology is an old field, and in the early 20th century, dialectologists such as Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid Jr. initiated large scale surveys of dialect regions in the U.S.
The study of sociolinguistics in the West was pioneered by linguists such as Charles A. Ferguson or William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.
His focus on ethnography and communicative competence contributed to his development of the SPEAKING method: an acronym for setting, participants, ends, act sequence, keys, instrumentalities, norms, and genres that is widely recognized as a tool to analyze speech events in their cultural context.
Conversation analysts such as Harvey Sacks and interactional sociolinguists such as John J. Gumperz record audio or video of natural encounters, and then analyze the tapes in detail.
[10] To reveal social practices and cultural norms beyond lexical and syntactic levels, the framework includes empirical testing of the translation using methods such as cognitive interviewing with a sample population.
Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a distinct group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves.
The learning of a language is greatly influenced by family, but it is supported by the larger local surroundings, such as school, sports teams, or religion.
[12] Crucial to sociolinguistic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech habits are assigned a positive or a negative value, which is then applied to the speaker.
An important implication of the sociolinguistic theory is that speakers 'choose' a variety when making a speech act, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Historically, humans tend to favor those who look and sound like them, and the use of nonstandard varieties (even exaggeratedly so) expresses neighborhood pride and group and class solidarity.
For instance, Sylvie Dubois and Barbara Horvath found that speakers in one Cajun Louisiana community were more likely to pronounce English "th" [θ] as [t] (or [ð] as [d]) if they participated in a relatively dense social network (i.e. had strong local ties and interacted with many other speakers in the community), and less likely if their networks were looser (i.e. fewer local ties).
[21] According to Basil Bernstein, the restricted code exemplified the predominance of extraverbal communication, with an emphasis on interpersonal connection over individual expression.
Such environments may include military, religious, and legal atmospheres; criminal and prison subcultures; long-term married relationships; and friendships between children.
However, simplification is not a sign of a lack of intelligence or complexity within the code; rather, communication is performed more through extraverbal means (facial expression, touch, etc.)
Bernstein notes the example of a young man asking a stranger to dance since there is an established manner of asking, yet communication is performed through physical graces and the exchange of glances.
The lack of predetermined structure and solidarity requires explicit verbal communication of discrete intent by the individual to achieve educational and career success.
He warns, however, that studies associating the codes with separate social classes used small samples and were subject to significant variation.
[22] Additionally, studies by Bernstein,[23][24] Venables,[25] and Ravenette,[26] as well as a 1958 Education Council report,[27] show a relative lack of success on verbal tasks in comparison to extraverbal in children from lower working classes (having been exposed solely to restricted code).
This theory has been criticized by several scholars of linguistic backgrounds because of the lack of proven evolutionary feasibility and the fact that different languages do not have universal characteristics.
The variations will determine some of the aspects of language like the sound, grammar, and tone in which people speak, and even non-verbal cues.