Sociolinguistics

Issues in sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is a field work-based discipline.Researchers collect examples of language usage

in their naturally occurring environment and study them in relation to the findings of other sociolinguists research work. There is not intuitive conclusion .

Categorizing the ways people speak

• Idiolect: an idiolect is a language spoken by one person with their own private meanings hence the term idiosyncrasy it may seem odd to others.

• Sociolect:on the other hand is a dialect spoken within a group of people that others may not fully understand.

• Standard: standardization is a process that is apparent in almost all modern nations, in which one variety of particular language is taken up(by government, the education system, newspapers and media)

• Dialect: in linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation of language. Accent can be confused with dialects which are varieties of language differing in vocabulary and syntax as well as pronunciation.

• accent: accent is the way that words are pronounced when spoken by individuals in a region or a country.

• Prestige: other non-standard form of the language can be treated as poor or incorrect varieties. They are stigmatized. Standard forms receive prestige. Simply, by asking some questions you can measure the prestige of the variety:

• Has the variety been standardized and codified institutionally?• Is the variety spoken by a living community of speakers?• Do the speakers have a sense of the long history of their variety?• Do the speakers consider their variety to be independent of other

forms and autonomous?• Do the speakers consider their variety pure or a mixture of other

forms?

Descriptive tools of language variation

The linguistic variable: the main tool in sociolinguistic has been the concept of the linguistic variable.

In the word farm for example, some people do not pronounce the/r/and some do.

• phonological variation: in order to be able to describe accents systematically and precisely, sociolinguistic use the IPA.

• Grammatical variation: linguistic variable operating at grammatical level have also been studied in sociolinguistics. For example, variations in morphology of subject-verb agreement have been observed among the speech of British schoolchildren.

• Discoursal variation: under this title,discoursal variation we have studies that investigate for example conversation structure or examining of pice of discourse from the aspect of politness or social solidarit

Social factors the correlate with language variation

• Geographical and social mobility:Dialect within a language are often localized

geographically. We can speak of dialect chain, where the shift from one dialect to the next is not sudden between one town or country or state and the next.

The counterpart of hypercorrection is the phenomenon observed when some people use stigmatized forms of language, this is known as covert prestige's hypercorrection.

• Gender and power: gendelect has been used to show some of differences in the ways men and women use language.

• Age: older people and younger people use language differently.• Audience: most conversations have “recipient design”, that is

speakers plan their conversations with their audience in mind.• Identity: not only linguistic patterns signal social and individual

identity but people’s personal, ethnic, political identities is a factor in their language use

• Social network relation: whether individuals have strong or weak relations to the group can be used as a measure of their sociolinguistic influence.