sociolinguistics
- Related Topics:
- sociology
What is sociolinguistics?
Who are some key figures in sociolinguistics?
What are some key areas of sociolinguistics?
What methods are used in sociolinguistic research?
sociolinguistics, the study of the social dimensions of language use. Human language, across all of its many modalities, exhibits tremendous diversity, creativity, and innovation. As language users, people learn not only the structure of a given language but also the social and cultural norms and expectations regarding language use, including what and how to communicate within their social groups, communities, cultures, and societies.
From a sociolinguistic perspective, language, culture, and society influence each other in ways that are inseparable and manifold. Therefore, sociolinguists examine how humans use language—in its many forms, with different styles and patterns, consciously and unconsciously, across social contexts, and in various domains. Sociolinguists also examine how social, geographic, cultural, and personal factors influence how people around the world use language—individually and collectively. Analyzing language variation and change, past to present, lends insight into the ways in which people communicate, interact with each other within their communities and societies, and interpret the world around them.
History and development of the field
Sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary area of study, with many inputs. Since about the 1960s it has crystallized into its own field. Sociolinguistics is generally understood as being rooted in linguistics, but it has been influenced by many other disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and more. Because language is connected to all dimensions of human interaction and social organization, theories and concepts from other disciplines are useful in analyzing the complexities of language in society. In return, sociolinguistic research has influenced other fields by contributing insights about the relationships between people, language, culture, and society, as well as about methods for studying them.
Key figures who have influenced modern sociolinguistic thought include the Swiss linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who contributed theoretical and conceptual distinctions such as langue (language, broadly defined) versus parole (language use, on an individual scale), and the relationship between the signifier and the signified; the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who theorized about language, culture, and cognition; the Soviet psychologist L.S. (Lev Semyonovich) Vygotsky (1896–1934), who explored interrelationships among language, consciousness, learning, and cognition; the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman (1922–82), who studied the centrality of language to social interaction; the German-American anthropological linguist John J. Gumperz (1922–2013), who is credited with originating the field of interactional sociolinguistics; and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), whose theoretical frameworks identify the interconnectedness of language, power hierarchies, and social and cultural capital. Perhaps the most influential figure in contemporary sociolinguistics is William Labov (1927–2024), an American pioneer of the quantitative study of language variation and change in relation to sociological concepts and social factors.
Today sociolinguistics continues to demonstrate its strong interdisciplinary foundation in its many research trends that examine the broad patterns as well as the subtle intricacies of human language use. Key areas of sociolinguistic research include but are not limited to language variation and change; dialectology; language, gender, and sexuality; raciolinguistics; and language ideologies. Each of these areas is discussed in this article. At the core of the main research questions that sociolinguistics asks and the central phenomena that it studies across all of its subfields is the foundational principle that language and society are intertwined and inseparable.
Methods and ethics in sociolinguistic research
Reflecting the field’s multidisciplinary parentage, sociolinguistics has developed a diverse suite of methods and techniques to investigate how people use language in various domains, contexts, and modalities—including spoken, signed, written, online, and combinations thereof. Methods of data collection are numerous, including observations, interviews, and surveys; experimental approaches; discourse, conversational, and narrative approaches; corpus approaches (involving analyses of historical or contemporary collections of words or texts in large databases); and more.
Qualitative techniques in sociolinguistics include both descriptive and interpretive analyses. For example from interview data, sociolinguists can document how a person uses language; they can also analyze how a person talks about language, thus revealing the person’s language-related judgments and beliefs, known as language ideologies (see below Language attitudes, ideologies, representation, and cognition). Qualitative approaches are also used to examine conversational intricacies, such as turn taking and interruption. In quantitative analyses, statistical and interpretive approaches are typically employed to reveal correlations between individuals’ linguistic patterns and social dimensions—including, but not limited to, a person’s geographic region of origin, age, gender, racial or ethnic identities or affiliations, education level, occupation, income, and so on—in real time or over time.
Qualitative and quantitative techniques may be used separately, in combination, or in complementary fashion to answer different research questions about the same data. For example, quantitative analyses can provide a broad picture of linguistic trends, while qualitative analyses can add rich contextual and interpretive detail to linguistic patterns. These many methods and techniques are necessary to uncover and understand the multiplex relationships between linguistic and social phenomena.
Contemporary sociolinguistics has engaged deeply with questions of how to develop ethical research practices. Of particular concern is the ethics of collecting and analyzing linguistic data from historically or currently marginalized or minoritized populations and groups, including members of Indigenous communities, refugees, immigrants, users of signed languages, and members of other vulnerable communities and populations. Ethical guidelines have been put forward by numerous professional organizations related to language and linguistics. Global organizations have also established ethical guidelines, codes, and standards for international research on intangible cultural heritage, which includes language.
Today, calls to “decolonize” linguistic research emphasize the need to avoid extractive practices that directly or indirectly conceptualize language users and language communities as mere sources of data, or even as data themselves. Instead, in line with community-centered models, sociolinguists engage in equitable, collaborative partnerships that prioritize a community’s goals for linguistic research and grant the community ownership and control over their linguistic material.
Language variation and change, from local to global
One of the driving aims of sociolinguistics is to document and analyze how language varies and changes over time. By studying the patterned distributions of language use and how they differ by place, community, culture, and context, sociolinguists reveal how social differences are encoded within and by language. For example, whether a person in the United States uses soda or pop may indicate something about where they grew up, as these words vary regionally. Patterns of grammatical features, pronunciations, and other linguistic characteristics can be similarly tracked, mapped, described, and analyzed. This type of research reveals how and why language evolves for individual people, within families and neighborhoods, and along affiliations related to gender, racial, ethnic, and national identity—all of which are shaped in communities and societies around the world by social forces such as migration, globalization, and technological innovation. Language use maintains and reflects culture and community, not only on a local scale but also on a broad, global scale.
As is apparent to people who have traveled beyond the boundaries of their immediate community, the use of a given language often differs by place, in both subtle and distinctly apparent ways. Sociolinguistics has a long tradition of studying the variabilities of language use, both by people across different places and by people within one place, with variations that reflect their place identity—their orientation toward and sense of belonging to a place. The area of study known as linguistic geography, or dialect geography, has existed for centuries, with scholars exploring how different languages and language varieties are distributed geographically, often in ways that are also shaped by physical features of the landscapes. For example, the presence of a mountain range or bodies of water can separate groups of people, preventing them from coming into contact with each other. Linguistic separation and isolation can both preserve older or unique ways of talking and provide fertile ground for linguistic creativity. At the same time, patterns of migration can also lead to innovation and change. For example, as people and their different languages come into contact, these interactions can sometimes give rise to new languages and varieties known as pidgins and creoles, such as Melanesian pidgins and Haitian Creole. Linguistic atlases, dialect maps, and dialect dictionaries have all been used to document and chronicle the geographic distribution of linguistic features—typically, vocabulary items and pronunciations—for languages and their locales around the world.
The United States has emerged as a particularly productive site for dialect geography research, given its vast size, its many physical divides—such as major rivers and mountain ranges—and its migratory patterns—both voluntary and forced—over many generations. In the latter half of the 20th century, Labov brought a new dimension to dialect geography by studying how people’s place identity shaped their language use. While on a vacation in the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Labov noticed that residents who had a stronger affiliation to the community exhibited a stronger local accent; in addition, he found that broader social forces, such as tourism, gentrification, and generational change, were also shaping the linguistic habits of island residents. Labov’s later research in the large U.S. urban centers of New York City and Philadelphia explored how language use—not only words and pronunciations but also grammatical features—varied by social class, ethnicity, age, and gender, among other demographic factors and sociological structures. His work was groundbreaking, both in demonstrating how social factors relate to language change and in legitimizing the patterned linguistic variation that people and communities exhibit. Through these research studies, Labov also was a trailblazer of new and innovative methodologies for studying language variation and change over time, including oral narratives and rapid anonymous surveys of people’s real-time language use.
Today, mobility and technological modernization allow people to communicate beyond their immediate communities and contexts in ways that were unimaginable in generations past. The Internet, virtual communities, and messaging apps and platforms allow people to communicate instantly and seamlessly, transcending the constraints of time zones and physical distance. Terms such as code-mixing, code-switching, code-meshing, and translanguaging describe specific sociolinguistic processes whereby linguistic features are shared, blended, integrated, and incorporated to produce hybrid and innovative forms across communities and cultures. The borrowing and diffusion of linguistic elements and cultural practices on a global scale characterizes the contemporary era.
The presence of English as a global language, seeded by colonization, has expanded in the modern era. Today the status of English as a global lingua franca is undisputed. In particular hip-hop culture has contributed to the spread and dominance of English beyond its origins and influence in the United States via global linguistic flows. At the same time, people around the world have localized and adapted English into the varieties they use in their own countries and cultural contexts—a phenomenon and area of study generally conceptualized as World Englishes.
Globalization, increased mobility, and the Internet have also affected languages other than English, enabling and encouraging attention to how language is used beyond national boundaries. For example, media-fueled international phenomena such as K-pop and anime have increased interest in non-English, non-Western languages and cultural practices. Efforts to document, preserve, and revitalize the world’s sleeping, or endangered, languages and language varieties are also aided by technology, as language users can now easily create, share, and promote digital content in their own languages. Digital infrastructure has been similarly important for increasing access to content in signed languages.
Language use, social variation, social hierarchies, and social inequality
Social, demographic, cultural, and community-level structures, concepts, categories, and norms all affect the ways in which people use language. Social variation in language use—including pronunciation, grammatical features, vocabulary, and more—can be identified, analyzed, and tracked over time as a means of theorizing, interpreting, and understanding how culture and society shape language—and, in return, how language shapes culture and society.
Language is not merely a vehicle for transmitting content; rather, it is something that humans do, in interaction, as an integral part of their lives in the communities and societies to which they belong. Key dimensions that correlate with social variation in language use include a person’s region of origin, their social class and social status, education level, racial or ethnic affiliations, and gender or sexual identity. Sociolinguistic distinctions manifest themselves differently across different cultures and societies; nevertheless, they tend to reflect social categorizations, aligning with social boundaries and even perpetuating social inequalities. Therefore, understanding how people use language can be a means of understanding social stratification, or how societies and communities are divided hierarchically, in ways that are influenced by power and prestige. Crucially, language is not merely passively reflective of social differentiation and social categorization: language can also be actively used to challenge social boundaries, hierarchies, and inequalities.
Gender is a social category with rich variation, and its intersections with language have been studied widely in sociolinguistics. Language is one mechanism among many that people use to express their gender identities, in interaction with many other social identities. The study of language, gender, and sexuality was crystallized in sociolinguistics in the mid-1970s and quickly burgeoned into a robust area. Extensive sociolinguistic research has uncovered how gender differences are encoded in languages and language varieties in different cultural contexts around the world. As this body of work has evolved, scholars in this area have also critiqued and retheorized binary views of how language, gender, and sexuality operate. Gender identity often correlates with language variation, but it does not have universal, simplistic, or unilateral effects on linguistic behavior.
Gender interacts with other social identities, and how people talk in everyday settings can mirror, reinforce, or challenge gender-related norms, expectations, and ideologies. In many societies, language about men is used in ways that reflect and reinforce a more powerful status, whereas language about women may reflect and reinforce a subordinate status and even express derogatory or misogynistic views. Language used about and by different gender-based groups can also indicate societal categories and hierarchies related to gender. For example, in English, Mr. refers to men irrespective of their marital status, whereas the terms Miss and Mrs. refer to women in ways that overtly indicate theirs. When the term Ms. was introduced and began to garner attention in U.S. society, it was widely critiqued by language pundits as unacceptable. Yet feminist activists advocated for the term, eventually gaining the endorsement of Gloria Steinem, the creator of Ms. magazine.
Today the increased use of gender-neutral pronouns and neopronouns (i.e., neologistic pronouns that do not express gender), and gender-neutral honorific terms such as Mx. reflect the ongoing evolution of language in capturing a broader spectrum of identities. Language is both an object and a practice of critique and reform, and it is a platform and opportunity for linguistic activism and social change.
Studies of language use carried out in numerous social and cultural contexts have identified women and girls as frequent leaders in language change, meaning that they often innovate and adopt new linguistic forms. At the same time, sociolinguists find that women—especially those who hold a higher social status—may avoid linguistic forms that are viewed in their communities as being stigmatized or less prestigious. Indeed, in general, sociolinguists have found that social groups that are marginalized or hold a lower social status are typically more heavily stigmatized when they use nonstandard forms. Furthermore, women and girls are often criticized for their language use in general. For example, in English, the use of the quotative like—as in, “she’s like, ‘let’s go early’ ”—is just one linguistic feature originated by young women that has spread rapidly around the world but has also been much maligned. These complexities reflect the foundational principle that gender, language, power, and prestige are interrelated, multifaceted, complicated, and socially situated.
Language in relation to race, ethnicity, and culture is a similarly complex topic that has also dominated research in sociolinguistics. The contemporary area of study known as “raciolinguistics” examines how language is used to conceptualize, represent, and express race, racial and ethnic identities, and racism. Language and racialization are intertwined: they affect and are affected by each other. The use of language reflects how a given community conceptualizes race, how it talks about race, and how it establishes racial boundaries and hierarchies that reinforce racial inequalities. Everyday language can be used—directly and indirectly, consciously and subconsciously—in ways that reproduce racism, racial inequality, bias, and discrimination in different cultural contexts.
By the same token, how a given community or society is structured along the lines of race and ethnicity has implications for language use. Racial and ethnic categories and terms change over time. People who are classified together into certain racialized groups in a particular community or society tend to affiliate with each other, interact with each other, and use language in ways that are similar to each other, which lends insight into cultural dynamics and social organization. Analyzing how racialized groups use language can also lend important insight into their histories, cultures, and lived experiences.
For example much sociolinguistic research has investigated the development, structure, and use of language varieties in Black and African American communities around the world. Numerous and changing scholarly terms have been used to refer to Black and African American language varieties, which themselves are a linguistic reflection of sociocultural and sociopolitical changes over time. Today most scholars use the terms African American English, African American Language, Black English, or Black Language. Scholars have traced the history and heritage of Black and African American languages to inputs from West African and Caribbean languages and culture, documenting their linguistic systematicity, evolution, and innovation. Scholars have also documented the history, structure, and development of Black American Sign Language (BASL).
Language is a key mechanism that intersects with social structures and social categories—from gender to race and ethnicity, among many others—to influence a person’s access to the rights, privileges, and opportunities that are afforded by social institutions. Around the world, many of the most pervasive societal challenges, systemic biases, and social inequalities have linguistic dimensions—such as illiteracy and restricted education for women and girls, migrants and refugees, Indigenous peoples, and those from other marginalized and minoritized groups. Linguistic bias and miscommunication can also impede access to health care, affect workplace interactions, limit job opportunities, and inhibit fair treatment by legal systems.
Indigenous and minority education initiatives, national and global policies, and advocacy for linguistic human rights have sought to mitigate and remedy linguistically inflected social inequalities. Sociolinguists—and linguists across many subfields—are increasingly engaged in efforts to promote linguistic diversity and social justice and to advance greater linguistic equity, inclusion, and belonging.
Language attitudes, ideologies, representation, and cognition
Language is a double edged sword: it is a key mechanism for identity and belonging, but it can also be a powerful mechanism for boundary setting, gatekeeping, and exclusion.
From a linguistic perspective, all languages and language varieties are equal in form and function. In society, however, some languages and language varieties (and, by extension, the people who use them) are considered standard, well regarded, or otherwise esteemed, while others are considered nonstandard or even substandard and deficient. These ideas are known as language ideologies: value-based judgments and beliefs about language that typically have more to do with social power and prestige than linguistic reality.
In particular, the standard language ideology is a bias toward an idealized or normative form of language that is used by powerful gatekeepers and institutions and serves as a basis for societal determinations about what constitutes good, proper, or correct language. Language ideologies can be expressed informally. For example, teachers and other linguistic decision makers and arbiters make decisions about and set expectations for how to use language, which directly or indirectly support linguistic power dynamics, which in turn sustain educational and social inequalities. Language ideologies can also be codified through more formal means, such as language policy and planning, language-based educational policies, and political decrees. The intersection of extremist language ideologies and extremist politics can also result in linguistic imperialism, or the dominance of one language over others, and even linguistic genocide, or the intentional destruction and eradication of one or more languages.
Sociolinguists also study people’s language-related attitudes and perceptions, including what people think about their own and others’ language use, as well as the biases that may be embedded in those ideas and beliefs. Positive linguistic attitudes include linguistic pride, which may emerge as celebration, activism, and revitalization. In contrast, negative linguistic attitudes may emerge as linguistic bias, prejudice, and discrimination. The beliefs of one social group regarding another group’s language or language use can be conscious or unconscious and expressed explicitly or implicitly—for example, in hate speech or language-related microaggressions. They can thus be deployed in ways that powerfully affect how people are treated in society.
Bias against Black and African American languages and language varieties is part of racial discrimination, bias, and systemic racism against Black and African American people. Negative, damaging, and often inaccurate representations, stereotypes, and parodies of Black and African American languages and language varieties have been documented over the course of many generations. Today they continue to abound, especially on the Internet and in mass media. Racialized language ideologies also perpetuate bias and discrimination—both implicit, subtle, and covert as well as explicit, blatant, and overt. Such effects can be seen in biased classroom interactions and educational assessments; job and housing discrimination; disparate treatment by legal systems; and racial bias and stereotyping in AI-based technologies, among other areas.
The study of language ideologies and attitudes is related to and intersects with the study of linguistic production, linguistic perception, and the relationship between language, culture, and thought. Research at the intersection of sociolinguistics and cognitive science is growing. A key area of interest is how social differences are encoded in language, including how people form and express stereotypes and social categorizations. Another key area is investigating the social processes behind language variation, including how people’s linguistic expectations and prior linguistic knowledge can affect how they perceive language variation itself. Mental representations of linguistic and social information are also linked, as people simultaneously construct their linguistic and social identities and thus manifest their individual linguistic styles.
How a person uses language is ultimately related to questions of the self. Language use can be conceptualized as an act of identity and as an interactional, contextual, and symbolic process of meaning making. Language is not a neutral, objective, or autonomous mechanism that simply transmits content. Rather, language is something that we do as humans: it is a social practice, activity, and resource that shapes who we are, how we express ourselves, how we interact in the world, and how others interact with us.
Christine Mallinson