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Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural
norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. It also studies how lects differ between
groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, economic status, level of education,
etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social class or
socio-economic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage
varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies. For example, a
sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that Black English Vernacular would not
be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting; he or she might also study the
grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect much as a dialectologist would study
the same for a regional dialect. The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints
determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of
different varieties of language in different social situations. William Labov is often regarded as the
founder of the study of sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the
focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the
language's effect on the society.

-Sociolinguistics is the branch of linguistics that is concerned with language in social contexts -
how people use language, how it varies according to context and over time, how it contributes to users'
sense of identity, and so on.

Sociolinguistics covers a wide variety of subdisciplines. It can involve the study of linguistic variation,
language attitudes, pragmatics, discourse analysis, multilingualism, creolistics, applied linguistics,
language planning, literacy studies and language and gender. It also overlaps with other fields such as
communication studies, sociology, social anthropology and media studies.

Sociolinguists will typically be familiar with more theoretical study of language, and may well discuss
language using theoretical definitions - for example, they may study how the syntax and phonology of
languages vary according to different social factors. A famous sociolinguistic study conducted by
William Labov, for example, focused on how New Yorkers varied in their use of the r segment in
phrases such as fourth floor, finding that the presence or absence of r correlated with social context -
in this case, the prestige of department

stores where different speakers worked.[1] This use of the apparatus of theoretical linguistics and the
concern with language itself both distinguish sociolinguists from sociologists, who may study
language to understand how societies themselves work

-Sociolinguistic Variable

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and interview them, assessing
the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables. Labov specifies the ideal sociolinguistic variable to

• be high in frequency,
• have a certain immunity from conscious suppression,
• be an integral part of larger structures, and
• be easily quantified on a linear scale.

Phonetic variables tend to meet these criteria and are often used, as are grammatical variables and, more
rarely, lexical variables. Examples for phonetic variables are: the frequency of the Glottal stop, the height
or backness of a Vowel or the realisation of word-endings. An example for grammatical variables is the
frequency of Double negative.
-Linguistic variation
refers to the range of differences between the languages of the world. The study of this variation is
a major branch of linguistics. The nature of variation is very important to an understanding of human
linguistic ability in general: if human linguistic ability is very narrowly constrained by biological
properties of the species, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained,
then languages might vary greatly. But there are different ways to interpret similarities among languages.
For example, the Latin language spoken by the Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in
Italy. Similarities between Spanish and Italian are in many cases due to both being descended from Latin.
So in principle, if two languages share some property, this property might either be due to common
inheritance or due to some property of the human language faculty. Often, the possibility of common
inheritance can be essentially ruled out. Given the fact that learning language comes quite easily to
humans, it can be assumed that languages have been spoken at least as long as there have been
biologically modern humans, probably at least fifty thousand years. Independent measures of language
change (for example, comparing the language of ancient texts to the daughter languages spoken today)
suggest that change is rapid enough to make it impossible to reconstruct a language that was spoken so
long ago; as a consequence of this, common features of languages spoken in different parts of the world
are not normally taken as evidence for common ancestry. Even more striking, there are documented cases
of sign languages being developed in communities of congenitally deaf people who could not have been
exposed to spoken language. The properties of these sign languages have been shown to conform
generally to many of the properties of spoken languages, strengthening the hypothesis that those properties
are not due to common ancestry but to more general characteristics of the way languages are learned.
Loosely speaking, the collection of properties which all languages share can be referred to as "universal
grammar" (or UG). However, there is much debate around this topic and the term is used in several
different ways. Universal properties of language may be partly due to universal aspects of human
experience; for example all humans experience water, and the fact that all human languages have a word
for water is probably not unrelated to this fact. The challenging questions regarding universal grammar
generally require one to control this factor. Clearly, experience is part of the process by which individuals
learn languages. But experience by itself is not enough, since animals raised around people learn
extremely little human language, if any at all. A more interesting example is this: suppose that all human
languages distinguish nouns from verbs (this is generally believed to be true). This would require a more
sophisticated explanation, since nouns and verbs do not exist in the world, apart from languages that make
use of them.In general, a property of UG could be due to general properties of human cognition, or due to
some property of human cognition that is specific to language. Too little is understood about human
cognition in general to allow a meaningful distinction to be made. As a result, generalizations are often
stated in theoretical linguistics without a stand being taken on whether the generalization could have some
bearing on other aspects of cognition.

-Multilingualism refers to the state of knowing two or more languages, as opposed to one
(monolingualism). People or speech communities - groups of people sharing a way of speaking - can be
multilingual (societal multilingualism). Where two languages are used, the term bilingualism is often
preferred, and occasionally trilingualism is also used, for three languages.

A multilingual individual need not be completely fluent or a native speaker of either language, nor do they
need to regularly use both languages. Multilingualism is the norm in most societies, and frequently
speakers may command upwards of three or four different languages. In some cases, the languages may be
highly similar, such that speakers of one can readily understand the other, but if culturally they are
considered separate tongues, then speakers may still be regarded as multilingual.

Creolistics is the study of both creoles and the pidgin languages from which creoles develop. Although
the study of these contact languages is most often associated with linguistics, particularly language
acquisition and sociolinguistics, it has expanded into related fields such as anthropology, sociology,
history and literary studies, because the creation of a creole invariably involves cross-cultural contact.[1]
Researchers who study creole phenomena may be known as creolists.

Creolistics has provided some revealing and controversial insights into language evolution, acquisition
and use, though disagreements exist over what languages or varieties can be labelled a 'creole' or a
'pidgin', and debate continues over the nature of creolisation: the role of 'simplification' or 'simplicity'; the
'life cycle' of pidgins and creoles (e.g. 'Is a pidgin a necessary prerequisite for a creole to form?' 'Does
creole genesis usually lead to a post-creole continuum, in which varieties differ relative to the broadest
forms of the creole and the language(s) from which most vocabulary is derived?'); and the origin of
grammatical structures in creoles which are absent in any preceding pidgin.[2]

The third of the above controversies is particularly contentious. For example, the language bioprogram
hypothesis (LBH)[3] of Derek Bickerton claims that creole genesis supports ideas about the nature of
language associated with Noam Chomsky; as creole grammars are remarkably similar across the world,[4]
this reflects the existence of an innate faculty for language. Bickerton does, however, go further than most
creolists in explaining creole genesis as being largely biologically-based, and the LBH has been strongly
critiqued.[5] Other controversial theories, such as relexification,[6] form part of current enquiry but as yet
there is no widely-accepted account of creole genesis that satisfactorily explains most of the data.

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