Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Introducing
Sociolinguistics
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Contents
What is sociolinguistics?
Why study sociolinguistics?
What is the scope of sociolinguistics?
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What is Sociolinguistics?
3
What is Sociolinguistics?
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What is Sociolinguistics?
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What is Sociolinguistics?
Language Society
Attitudes
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What is Sociolinguistics?
Language Politics:
capitalist,
communist,
sexist,
Setting: democratic,
formal, fascist…
casual…
Power:
rights,
norms,
Attitudes: judgements
religious,
gender,
education… History: war,
change,events
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Why did sociolinguistics emerge?
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Isolating language structure
Chomsky’s competence/performance
distinction
Competence = underlying knowledge of language
structure
Performance = language output which is affected
by language-external conditions
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Something that makes sociolinguists
cross…
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What do we use language to do?
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How do we know what to say?
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Exercise
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So, what do sociolinguists want to do?
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Example of a socially-realistic
linguistics
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Anything else?
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Examples of policy implications…
Sexism/racism in language
Does our language render women invisible
Dialect and education research and inequality
Is it harder for nonstandard children to achieve academic
success?
Language policy and planning affects social policy
Multilingualism; Standardisation; Education; Globalisation
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The structure of language variation
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Sociolinguists believe in structured
heterogeneity
Social constraints
Linguistic constraints She were a
good laugh
Social: Linguistic:
Social class Type of pronoun?
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Social constraints on language
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Are we all experts?
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Summing Up…
Sociolinguistics is interdisciplinary
It emerged from a particular stance towards
formal linguistics
We’ll focus on the branch of sociolinguistics
that aims to provide a socially-realistic
linguistics
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References and Additional Reading
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