Sociolinguistics

Market Researcher: What is sociolinguistics all about?

Linguist: Just what it says it is. Linguistic behavior examined in a sociological context.

Market Researcher: People talking in social spaces?

Linguist: Yes. Bit abstract, isn’t it. I think one of the most succinct descriptions of what sociolinguistics is all about went something like, “Who says what to whom, when.” Or something like that. Think it was Joshua Fishman.

Market Researcher: Didn’t Harold Lasswell say something like that?

Linguist: Harold?

Market Researcher: Lasswell. Political scientist with an interest in communication theory as well. Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect.

Linguist: Ah, I remember. Slightly biased towards media, but yes, it’s another way of putting it.

Market Researcher: And Lasswell had a neat description of what politics was all about in the same vein. Politics is who gets what, when, where, and how.

Linguist: Now that’s a pretty little concatenation that could be applied to sociolinguistics. Who says what, to whom, when, where and how. Pretty much what Fishman meant.

Market Researcher: But what are some of the key research areas of sociolinguistics?

Linguist: Sociolinguistics is a big baggy area. It’s a lot of things to a lot of people. Sociologists, linguists, psychologists, educators, language planners.

Market Researcher: Can language be planned? I thought it was just something that happened.

Linguist: Difficult to build new human languages from scratch. Esperanto where it survives remains a hobbyist contraption. But languages can be managed, for example, by giving them status as an official language, as in Singapore, or rescuing them from the brink of extinction, like Maori in New Zealand.

Market Researcher: And other areas?

Linguist: Studies of dialects, language change, or code switching. Also, language use by ethnic groups, genders, people of different ages. And uses of, education in, and attitudes to language.

Market Researcher: Sounds a like a contents list for some book on sociology and language. I like the Lasskey-Fishman approach. Plainly spoken. More easily grasped than a string of –ists, -istics and –isms.

Linguist: Sooner or later, though, you have to come to grips with abstractions.

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