Research in Sociolinguistics

Language is very important and basic tool that we used to communicate. The importance of language is essential to every aspects and interaction in our everyday lives. We use language to inform the people around us. We communicate effectively with our words, gestures and tones of voice in a multitude of situation. Being able to communicate with each other form bonds teamwork and it’s what separates humans from other animal species. Communication derives our lives and betters us.

What is Sociolinguistics?

                

Sociolinguistics basically made up of two different words.

                

          Society + Linguistics = Sociolinguistics.

                

Basically society is made up of people and they used language for communication. So sociolinguistics does the study of the relationship between language and society. Importantly it examines how language operates within and creates social structures. It is also the descriptive study of the all aspects of society, cultural norms, expectations and context, on the way language is used and the effects of language use on society. Every person has their own way of speaking language. Studies in sociolinguistics explore the things like we can easily differentiate the person by his or her speech. It is also helpful to find out whether person is from our community or not.

                Sociolinguistics mainly does studies on speech communities based on social categories like age, class, ethnicity, gender, geography profession and sexual identity.

It is also help us to understand why we speak differently in various social contexts and help uncover the social relationship in a community.

Example: The way of interaction with your friend, family, teachers, and strangers will be different from each other.

                Thus, sociolinguistics exists everywhere because our tone always used to get changed person to person.

                The study of sociolinguistics made between two, like:

1. Micro Sociolinguistics

2. Macro Sociolinguistics

Micro Sociolinguistics:

                

Micro sociolinguistics is a kind of a study which mainly focuses on the dialect and stylistic variation. Every person has different dialect and has his or her own style for language. It’s also do study of speaking style of people. Micro sociolinguistics refers to research with a linguistic slant often focusing on dialect and stylistic variation. Both quantitive and qualitative research methods have been employed to explore such linguistic phenomena as phonological differences between dialects or discourse variation between male and female speaker.

Macro sociolinguistics:

                Macro sociolinguistics works on higher level. It studies on not only dialects and styles but it works on behaviours of entire speech community or society. There are so many languages which are speaking by only particular community people, but the same language is not understood by other community people. It also studies the issues like why immigrant communities retain their native language in some society, social context but not in others or how social identity can affect language choice.

Research on Sociolinguistics:

                Sociolinguistics is the study which can explored in many way. There are so many things which are still having discussed in sociolinguistics. If we explores some of those aspects of sociolinguistics research that have been particularly productive when viewed through the lens of L2 teaching and learning. These works will be discussed within three categories:

• Language Variation

• Linguistics relativity

• Language in Contact

Language variations in Sociolinguistics

                

In sociolinguistics, language variation includes languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistics variation also called as “Lect”. By using language variation we can avoid misinterpretation “variety” avoids the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language and dialect which is associate with non- standard varieties thought of as less prestigious or “correct” than the standard linguistics speaks of standard and non- standard varieties.

                Freeman and McElhinny, legendry sociolinguistics had done survey on the interaction of culture and gender with respect to politeness. They found that according to society, “In societies where politeness is normative valued or seen as a skill or where acquisition of politeness is not an automatic part of language learning but requires additional training, men tend to be understood as more polite, and women are understood as impolite or too polite. In societies where directness is valued and politeness is seen as a form of deference rather than a skill women tend to be more polite or at least are perceived as a more polite……..

                Thus, they found that it is a kind of ideology rather than use of language. Thus language variation has its own impact on societies which can be found through different researches.

Linguistic Relativity:

                Linguistic relativity can be viewed in many ways. When people from different communities or class misunderstood the common linguistic behaviour that creates problem with the speaker and they trapped into miscommunication. Research had study on cross-cultural miscommunication and they found that the same language speaker also faced the problem of miscommunication and their language can interpret in different way. This miscommunication of language can be called as Pragmalinguistics and Socio-pragmatics failure.

Communicative Competence:

                “Communicative competence”, term coined by Dell Hymes in 1966. Communicative Competence actually means that a language which speaker used is grammatically correct like the user have the knowledge of some basic things like syntax; morphology, phonology and a speaker have also knowledge of when to use proper utterance appropriately.

                Cross linguistic communication also says that speaker with the only knowledge of grammar may be failed in communication but a speaker should also have the knowledge of current communicative aspects. Speaker must be aware of all these things. Thus, social relativity somehow focused on grammar and also on social aspects of language use.

Languages in Contact:

                A speaker or a learner from L1 lives in a variety of environment can get many alternatives to monolinguals. In dialogic situation, varieties of two languages are exists side by side. The first language is used in formal situation like corporate education. Another language is used in informal situation. The first and the other is the local, native language, which considered as a low language.

 

Code-switching is another contact in which a bilingual speakers switch from one language to another at a time and with the same utterance. It is quite easy for bilingual speakers.

                Thus, sociolinguistic is a study of language used in social world. It is very necessary for a speaker to know all the aspects of sociolinguistics.