Branches of Sociolinguistics

Branches of Sociolinguistics

• Synchronic sociolinguistics – the relations that exist between language and society, and the processes characterizing the socially determined functioning of language at a given point in time.
• Diachronic sociolinguistics – the history of a language in connection with the history of its people.
• Theoretical sociolinguistics – the fundamental, most general problems and questions concerning the relationship between "man and society" (the development of language; the processes of verbal communication; the social conditioning of language functioning; the interaction and mutual influence of languages).
• Experimental sociolinguistics – the collection of factual material and evidence for the propositions formulated by theoretical sociolinguistics.
• Applied sociolinguistics – the solution of problems necessary for everyday life (for example, teaching a native or foreign language).
• Macrosociolinguistics – global phenomena and processes, the development of language and society as a whole. * Including linguistic conflictology – the linguistic manifestation of conflicts whose causes are social in nature.
• Microsociolinguistics – the use of language in small social groups.

A distinction is made between synchronic sociolinguistics, which studies primarily the relations between language and social institutions, and diachronic sociolinguistics, which studies primarily the processes characterizing the development of language in connection with the development of society. Depending on the scale of the objects that sociolinguistics is concerned with, a distinction is made between macrosociolinguistics and microsociolinguistics. The former studies linguistic relations and processes occurring in large social formations – states, regions, large social groups, often delimited conventionally according to one or another social feature (for example, age, level of education, etc.). Microsociolinguistics analyzes linguistic processes and relations occurring in real and, at the same time, numerically small groups of language speakers – in the family, a work team, teenage play groups, and so on.

Depending on what sociolinguistic research is aimed at – the development of general problems related to the "language – society" relationship, or the experimental testing of theoretical hypotheses – a distinction is made between theoretical and experimental sociolinguistics. Theoretical sociolinguistics studies the most general, fundamental problems – such as, for example:

• – identifying the most essential regularities of language development and demonstrating their social nature (alongside those regularities that are due to the self-development of language);
• – studying the social conditioning of language functioning, the dependence of its use in different spheres of communication on social and situational variables;
• – analyzing the processes of verbal communication, in which the decisive role is played by such factors as the set of social roles performed by the participants in communication, the social-psychological conditions for the realization of particular speech acts, their illocutionary force, speakers' ability to switch from one code to another, and so on;
• – studying the interaction and mutual influence of languages coexisting within a single society; problems of interference and the borrowing of elements from a contact language; the theoretical grounding of the processes by which intermediate linguistic formations are formed – interdialects, koines, pidgins – as well as a number of other problems.

Sociolinguistic theorists rather early recognized the need to support general propositions about the dependence of language on social factors with mass empirical material (the fact that this material had to be massive is quite natural, since what needs to be demonstrated are social, group ties between language speakers and the way they use linguistic means, rather than individual ones). M.V. Panov in Russia and W. Labov in the USA were apparently the first sociolinguists who, in the early 1960s, independently of one another, turned to experimentation as a necessary stage in sociolinguistic research and a means of proving certain theoretical constructs.

This is how impetus was given to the development of experimental sociolinguistics.

A modern sociolinguistic experiment is a very labor-intensive undertaking, requiring considerable organizational effort and no small financial expense. After all, the experimenter sets out to obtain sufficiently representative and, as far as possible, objective data on the verbal behavior of people or on other aspects of the life of a language community, and such data must characterize the various social groups that make up the language community. Consequently, reliable tools for experimental research are needed, a proven methodology for conducting it, trained interviewers capable of strictly following the planned program of the experiment, and, finally, a correctly selected set of informants to be surveyed, from whom the sought-after data are to be obtained.

True, the history of science also knows instances of sociolinguistic experiments organized in a less cumbersome way. As R. Bell relates, half in jest and half in earnest, in his book Sociolinguistics, one of the first sociolinguist-experimenters may be considered the ancient military commander Jephthah, who belonged to the tribe of Gilead. To prevent the enemy's "fifth column" – members of the tribe of Ephraim – from infiltrating his armed forces, Jephthah ordered every warrior who came to the crossing of the river Jordan: "Say shibboleth". Shibboleth means 'a stream' in Hebrew. Such an order was quite fitting on the riverbank. The point, however, was that members of the tribe of Gilead easily pronounced the sound [š], while the Ephraimites could not do so. The result of the experiment was bloody: "everyone who could not pronounce shibboleth in the Gileadite manner was seized and slain... and forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell at that time" (Book of Judges).

Many sciences, in addition to the theoretical elaboration of the problems facing them, also address problems connected with practice; the branches concerned with this are usually called applied. Applied sociolinguistics exists as well. What kind of problems does it solve?

These are, for example, problems of teaching a native or foreign language. Traditional language teaching methodology is based on dictionaries and grammars, which record mainly the intra-structural properties of a language and the rules for using words and syntactic constructions determined by its own system. Meanwhile, the actual use of language is governed by at least two further classes of variables – the social characteristics of the speakers and the circumstances in which verbal communication takes place. Consequently, language teaching is most effective when its methodology and teaching materials take into account not only purely linguistic rules and recommendations, but also various kinds of "external" factors.

Sociolinguistic information is important in developing the problems and practical measures that make up a state's language policy. Language policy requires particular flexibility and consideration of numerous factors in multiethnic and multilingual countries, where questions of the relationship between languages in terms of their communicative functions and their use in various spheres of social life are closely linked to the mechanisms of political governance, national accord, and social stability. One of the instruments of language policy is language legislation. Although its drafting is, on the whole, the competence of jurists – who must clearly and consistently formulate provisions concerning, for example, the status of the state language, its functions, the protection of the exclusive use of the state language in the most important social spheres, the regulation of the use of "local" languages, and so on – it is obvious that the creation of linguistically sound language legislation is possible only on the basis of a comprehensive knowledge of the functional properties of the language, the degree of elaboration within it of particular systems (for example, systems of special terminology, scientific language, the language of diplomatic documents, the style of official-business communication, etc.), and a more or less detailed understanding of "what" a given language "can" and "cannot" do under the various social and situational conditions of its use.

The areas of application of sociolinguistic theory and the results of sociolinguistic research to the solution of practical social problems often depend on the nature of the language situation in a given country. In multilingual countries there are one set of problems, in monolingual countries quite another. Under conditions of multilingualism, urgent questions arise concerning the choice of a single macro-mediator language that would serve as a means of communication for all the peoples inhabiting the country, and would possibly hold the status of state language; under conditions of linguistic homogeneity, the pressing problems are those of the standardization and codification of the standard language and its relations with other subsystems of the national language. Hence the differing emphases in the development of sociolinguistic problems and in the orientation of the applied branches of sociolinguistics.

See Also

• sociolinguistics