Sociolinguistics

SOCIOLINGUISTICS
By Kamil Wiśniewski Aug 2nd, 2007

Sociolinguistics is a quickly developing branch of linguistics which investigates the individual and social variation of language. Just asregional variation of language can give a lot of information about the place the speaker is from, social variation tells about the roles fulfilled by a given speaker within one community, or country.Sociolinguistics is a practical scientific discipline researching the language that is actually used either by native speakers, or foreigners, in order to formulate theories about language change.
Thereare numerous factors influencing the way people speak which are investigated by sociolinguistics:

• Social class: the position of the speaker in the society, measured by the level of education,parental background, profession and their effect on syntax and lexis used by the speaker;
• Social context: the register of the language used depending on changing situations, formal language in formalmeetings and informal during meetings with friends for example;
• Geographical origins: slight differences in pronunciation between speakers that point at the geographical region which the speakercome from;
• Ethnicity: differences between the use of a given language by its native speakers and other ethnic groups;
• Nationality: clearly visible in the case of the English language: BritishEnglish differs from American English, or Canadian English;
• Gender: differences in patterns of language use between men and women, such as quantity of speech, intonation patterns.
• Age: theinfluence of age of the speaker on the use of vocabulary and grammar complexity

An important factor influencing the way of formulating sentences is according to sociolinguists the social class of thespeakers. Thus, there has been a division of social classes proposed in order to make the description accurate. Two main groups of language users, mainly those performing non-manual work and those...