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The social study of language

The scope of enquiry

Sociolinguistics studies the relationship between language and society, which means the use of

language and the social structures in which the users of the language live. It focus its attention in

the aspect of language that allows to establish and maintain social relationships

Sociolinguistics assumes that the human society is made up of many related patterns and

behaviors, some of which are linguistics.

Sociolinguistic is one of the most important hyphenated fields of linguistic. An interdisciplinary

field between sociology and linguistic.

Practitioners apply a plethora of methods to a multitude of subjects that all have in common one

single thread: languages and their use in social context.

Noam Chomsky chose to study language autonomously, as a self-sufficient system. He aimed to

find a basic universal grammatical structure without needing to appeal to the social context.

Sociolinguists believe that language is full of systematic variations that are to be explain by

appealing to social forces and facts

The primary task of sociolinguist is to map variations on to social conditions. This mapping helps to

understand synchronic and diachronic variation.

Styles, which are small variation that everyone acquires in a normal upbringing, can be used to

identify us, the person we are talking to, or the thing we are talking about.

The existence of patterned variation in language makes it possible to identify ourselves as

belonging to certain groups. The social prestige or stigma associated with these variations makes

language a source of political and social power.

Complementary Approaches

Formal Linguist: pursues to develop an autonomously universal system, significant elements of

which existence are to be explained by the structure and design of human brain.

Psycholinguist: asks how the system functions, is acquired and how it can be lost.

Sociolinguist: asks how is used in a living and complex speech community.

The formal linguist and psycholinguist focus their attention on the system. But the sociolinguist

looks at the complex connections between variations and the matching of these variations in the

social groups that used it.

A sociolinguist is interested in how members of a speech community can, and do, identify and

response to fine differences in language use that are associated with social divisions.

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Micro end of sociolinguistic: shows how specific differences in pronunciation and grammar lead

members of the speech community to make judgments about the economical situation or

education of the speaker. Speech communicates content as the form of the speech, the selection

among available socially marked variants, communicates important social information about the

speaker and the listener and about their relation to each other.

The macro end (sociology of language) looks at the language as a whole, and treats language as a

cultural phenomenon. It investigates the bond between language choice and social identity and

why speakers of a variety are influential and prestigious and others discriminated against.

The difference between the micro and macro is that the micro focused its attention in the

influence of society in language and the second in the role of language in society.

The method of enquiry

Sociolinguist want to know how to account for the variations existing in every language. Because

they have to observe to a dynamic phenomenon in its natural setting.

How can we observe what people talk about when they are not being observed? This is called the

observer paradox. Language use is sensitive to social relations among the participants in a speech

event. Our speech patterns regularly change when somebody enters the conversation.

What are the data? (what constitutes interpretable data)

In sociolinguistics, there is a tension between observers and quantifiers. Sociolinguist believe, in

the statistically determinable tendencies that can be extracted by analyzing large quantities of

data. Ethnographers are trained to compare the behavior observed of individuals in one culture

with the patterns of behavior observed in many other cultures. This two approaches arecomplementary