Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology^[1] can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) and/or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies.

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically collect data through conversational interviews with members of a population of interest; researchers then assess the realization of linguistic variables in the resulting speech corpus. Other research methods in sociolinguistics include matched-guise tests (in which listeners share their evaluations of linguistic features they hear), dialect surveys, and analysis of preexisting corpora.