Sociophonetics

Sociophonetics is a branch of linguistics that broadly combines the methods of sociolinguistics and phonetics. It addresses the questions of how socially constructed variation in the sound system is used and learned. The term was first used by Denise Deshaies-Lafontaine in their 1974 dissertation on Quebecois French, with early work in the field focusing on answering questions, chiefly sociolinguistic, using phonetic methods and data. The field began to expand rapidly in the 1990s: interest in the field increased and the boundaries of the field expanded to include a wider diversity of topics. Currently, sociophonetic studies often employ methods and insight from a wide range of fields including psycholinguistics, clinical linguistics, and computational linguistics.^[1]