SOCIOLINGUISTICS DEFINITION SERIES

There have been general symposia symposia on major topics notable major research efforts the launching of series of working papers books of readings, increasingly specific to the field textbooks even a series of collected papers of middle-aged men who find themselves senior scholars and journals. The subsequent decade has seen a great deal of activity. Kiesling, Linguistic Variation and Change.The term “sociolinguistics” began to gain currency about ten years ago. southerners, Coke (when used to refer to a beverage and not the steel-making fuel or the illicit narcotic) has the same referent as soda, whereas in other parts of the U.S., Coke refers to a single brand/flavour of the beverage. Thus, in the case of soda and pop, we need to take into account that for many U.S. ' Lexical variables are fairly straightforward, as long as we can show that the two variants-such as the choice between soda and pop for a carbonated beverage in American English-refer to the same entity. Trask, Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. 'Furthermore, it has been discovered that variation is typically the vehicle of language change.'

A variable is some point of usage for which two or more competing forms are available in a community, with speakers showing interesting and significant differences in the frequency with which they use one or another of these competing forms. The concept of a sociolinguistic variable has become central to the description of speech. 'he introduction of the quantitative approach to language description has revealed important patterns of linguistic behaviour which were previously invisible. Millward and Mary Hayes, A Biography of the English Language, 3rd ed. egional dialects are only one of many types of linguistic variation.' There are dialects of age (teenagers have their own slang, and even the phonology of older speakers is likely to differ from that of young speakers in the same geographical region) and dialects of social context (we do not talk the same way to our intimate friends as we do to new acquaintances, to the paperboy, or to our employer). For example, there are occupational dialects (the word bugs means something quite different to a computer programmer and an exterminator), sexual dialects (women are far more likely than men to call a new house adorable), and educational dialects (the more education people have, the less likely they are to use double negatives). 'egional variation is only one of many possible types of differences among speakers of the same language. Some dialects are extremely different and others less so.' The extent of dialect differences is a continuum. But if one person says something like 'You should not do that' and another says 'Ya hadn't oughta do that,' then this is a dialect difference because the variation is greater. For example, if one person utters the sentence 'John is a farmer' and another says the same thing except pronounces the word farmer as 'fahmuh,' then the difference is one of accent. 'A dialect is variation in grammar and vocabulary in addition to sound variations. (Raymond Mougeon et al., The Sociolinguistic Competence of Immersion Students. Furthermore, the probability of one form being chosen over another is also affected in a probabilistic way by a range of extra-linguistic factors ' With sociolinguistic variation, speakers can choose between elements in the same linguistic context and, hence the alternation is probabilistic. With linguistic variation, the alternation between elements is categorically constrained by the linguistic context in which they occur. 'There are two types of language variation: linguistic and sociolinguistic. Linguistic Variation and Sociolinguistic Variation.(Randi Reppen et al., Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. These factors include the speaker's purpose in communication, the relationship between speaker and hearer, the production circumstances, and various demographic affiliations that a speaker can have.'

Most of this variation is highly systematic: speakers of a language make choices in pronunciation, morphology, word choice, and grammar depending on a number of non-linguistic factors. Variability is inherent in human language: a single speaker will use different linguistic forms on different occasions, and different speakers of a language will express the same meanings using different forms. In fact it is impossible to study the language forms used in natural texts without being confronted with the issue of linguistic variability. ' Linguistic variation is central to the study of language use.

Sociolinguistics definition