Sociolinguistics Basics

This article is talks about Sociolinguistics which is the study of how language serves and is shaped by the social nature of human beings. Sociolinguistics examines the interplay of language and society, with language as the starting point. Sociolinguists also study dialect any regional, social or ethnic variety of a language. By that definition, the English taught in school as correct and used in non-personal writing is only one dialect of contemporary American English.

Scholars are currently using a sociolinguistics perspective to answer some intriguing questions about language in the United States, here are some are as follows: Which speakers in urban areas of the North are changing the pronunciation of vowels in a systematic way? Which features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) grammar are used by middle-class white teen-agers who admire contemporary African-American music, entertainment and clothing?

Considerations other than grammatical correctness often govern speaker choices. Some social factors are attributes of the speaker for example, age, gender, socio-economic class, ethnicity and educational level. Constraints on subject matter vary from culture to culture.

Contact is an important concept in sociolinguistics social contact and language contact. Language change spreads through networks of people who talk with one another. Contact between languages brings about variation and change. Bilingualism is another response to language contact. Speakers may also develop a dialect of one language that is heavily influenced by features of the other language, such as the contemporary American dialect Chicano English.