Sources of sociolinguistics according to Koerner (1991)

Dialectology	Hislorica1 linguistics	Bi- and multilingual studies
Wrede(1902) Gauchat (1905) Jaberg(1908) Hermann(1929) McDavid (1946-, 1948)	Meillet (1905) Yendryes (1921) Sommerfelt (1932) Martinet (1946 {1939}) Weinreich (1953) Labov (1963)	M. Weinreich(1931) U Weinreich(1951) Haugen (1953) Ferguson (1959) Friedrich (1961)

Sociolinguistics is the field that studies the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live.

One of the principal uses of language is to communicate meaning, but it is also used to establish and to maintain social relationships.

In the thirty years or so that it has been recognized as a branch of the scientific study of language, sociolinguistics has grown into one of the most important fields of linguistics.

3. The terms and methods of sociolinguistic enquiry

Every branch of linguistics has its own aim. For example, the formal linguist pursues an autonomous universal system, significant elements of which are to be explained by the very design and structure of the human brain. The psycholinguist asks how such a system works and how it can be learned or lost. The sociolinguist asks how it is used in a living and complex speech community. The answers to each of these questions is important to the applied linguist, concerned, among other matters, with how to help people learn language and how to use it effectively to deal with the problems of practical everyday life. The sociolinguist looks at the complex connection between the variations within a language and the matching variations in the social groups that use it. Why do I say ‘Good morning’ to some people, and ‘Hi!’ to others? How did Professor Higgins know which parts of Eliza Doolittle’s speech needed to be changed to make her pass for a member of the upper class? Sociolinguistics is all about variation, and seeks socially relevant explanations for regular patterns of variation in language use.

In the micro-sociolinguistics the sociolinguist’s goal might be to show how specific differences in pronunciation or grammar lead members of a speech community to make judgments about the education or economic status of a speaker. In New York City, for instance, pronouncing the word ‘this’as /dis/ or pronouncing ‘bird’ as /bɔid/, marks the social class of the speaker. In the same way, the choice of lexical items (saying ‘doctor’s surgery’ instead of ‘doctor’s office’) makes clear on which side of the Atlantic a speaker of English has been living. As much as speech itself communicates content, so the form of speech, the selection among available socially marked variants, communicates important social information about the speaker and the listener and about their relationship to each other. In other words, the medium (the variety chosen) becomes the message itself.

In macro-sociolinguistics (which is also called by some scholars as sociology of language) the scholar’s primary attention turns from the specific linguistic phenomena to the whole of a language or variety. In macro-sociolinguistics, we treat language (and a specific language) alongside other human cultural phenomena. We might ask, for instance, about the significance of a group of immigrants shifting completely to a new language or maintaining their old one for some purposes. Why did most immigrants to the USA from Northern Europe drop their home language so fast, while Asian immigrants to Britain seem to be keeping theirs alive? We might investigate the close bonds between language choice and social identity, asking why their language remained so important to Maoris, Basques, or Frisians that they have been willing to undertake political action to preserve it. These questions concern the use of a language or a language variety as a whole rather than individual variations, and asking them makes the study of language a means to understanding a society.

In spite of some scholars would like to prioritize one sphere for another one, there is the more common concern for the connection between language and society rather than a need to give priority to one or the other.

In sociolinguistics methods of enquiry are closely connected to the questions what to study and how to study which are closely related. The reason for this concern is because we need to observe a dynamic phenomenon in its natural setting. There is a riddle which Labov labeled as the observer’s paradox, namely: how can we observe the way people speak when they are not being observed? There has been no definitive answer. Sociolinguists have countered the paradox in different way, as we will find out while study this course.

The next very important question is ‘What are the sociolinguistic data?’ which is a key one in any discipline. There is a tension between the observers and quantifiers. The classical example is the two famous sociolinguists Joshua Fishman and John Gumpertz who were working together on a study of bilingualism among Puerto Ricans in the Jersey City. Joshua Fishman had his background in sociology and psychology and used mostly statistical calculation, while Gumperz, trained as an ethnographer, would discovered his data through observation of the use of language in a natural setting.

Whatever method they choose, what sociolinguists are looking for is evidence of socially accepted rules accounting for variations in speech. Some of these data can be collected by observation, some by elicitation. Whether to trust the observation is of course a problem: the speaker might be pretending or lying. All of these methodological problems are inevitable in the study of a living phenomenon like language in its social use. Many studies make use of multiple data collected in a number of different ways.

In practice a number of workable solutions have been found to the ‘observer’s paradox’ of collecting natural speech samples. To analyze variation in pronunciation, sociolinguists studying microlinguistic variation regularly count the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic feature under defined social conditions. For finer differences, they may make precise instrumental measurements of significant speech sounds. In order to obtain the samples for this analysis, natural speech must be recorded on tape. This produces the methodological problem. Won't speakers become self-conscious, and try to make their speech clearer or more standard in the presence of a tape-recorder? Are the data collected in this way natural?      Clandestine recording has been tried and largely abandoned. There are practical reasons, for the tapes are usually noisy and require very expensive processing. There are also ethical ones. Fifty years ago, a study of spoken English could be based on surreptitiously recorded telephone conversations passing through a university switchboard. In a climate of greater respect for the privacy of their sources, sociolinguists now ask their subjects for permission to use the tapes that they have made. Tape-recorders are now in the open, and researchers are generally satisfied that any initial anxiety effecting the level of formality will disappear as an interview continues.      The sociolinguistic interview, modelled on the format developed by William Labov for his now classic doctoral study of New York City English, is one of the most common techniques for gathering samples of language. In the interview, the sociolinguist talks to the subject, attempting to elicit examples of various kinds of speech. The normal stylistic level for an interview like this is fairly formal, for the two people speaking are strangers. There are ways to modify the level of formality. The easiest alteration is in the direction of more careful attention to speech, by giving the person being interviewed a passage or a list of words to read. It is more difficult to relax the formality. Occasional bursts of informal speech occur when a speaker switches to a topic outside the interview, such as when a mother being interviewed by a sociolinguist speaks to her child who has come into the room. Another circumstance is when the speaker is emotionally involved in an event he or she is narrating. Taking advantage of this, an interviewer might ask a question about an occasion when the speaker's life was in danger and so obtain less self-conscious speech. The sociolinguistic interview, modeled on the format developed by William Labov, is one of the most common techniques for gathering samples of language.

That was a major shift in research techniques occurred with the publication of Labov’s work on English in New York City (1966). His description of urban speech was based on a study of 88 individuals from a socially stratified random sample, consisting of male and female speakers from three age groups and four social classes (identified on the basis of education, occupation, and income). Labov showed that variation in the speech of the individual was a reflection of variation in the social group by illustrating how the most extreme case of stylistic variation in the use of /r/ by a single speaker was in conformity with the overall pattern exemplified in group scores of the different social classes (summarized in Chambers, 1995, pp. 18-21).

Labov’s work on language use in New York City provided a blueprint for current methods of