sociolect adj
also social dialect
a variety of a language (a dialect) used by people belonging to a par-
ticular social class. The speakers of a sociolect usually share a similar
socio-economic and /or educational background. Sociolects may be classed
as high (in status) or low (in status).
For example:
He and I were going there. (higher sociolect)
‘Im’n me was goin’ there. (lower sociolect)
The sociolect with the highest status in a country is often the standard
variety.
The difference between one sociolect and another can be investigated by
analyzing the recorded speech of large samples of speakers from various
social backgrounds. The differences are referred to as socio-lectal variation
orsocial dialectal variation.
see also accent^3 , dialect, speech variety
sociolectal variation n
also social dialectal variation
see sociolect
sociolinguistic marker n
a linguistic feature that marks a speaker as a member of a social group
and to which social attitudes are attached, e.g. absence of postvocalic “r” in
the speech of some New Yorkers (stigmatized) and some British speakers
(rp).
sociolinguistics nsociolinguistic adj
the study of language in relation to social factors, that is social class,
educational level and type of education, age, sex, ethnic origin, etc.
Linguists differ as to what they include under sociolinguistics. Many would
include the detailed study of interpersonal communication, sometimes
called micro-sociolinguisties, e.g. speech acts, conversation analysis,
speech events, sequencing^1 of utterances, and also those investiga-
tions which relate variation in the language used by a group of people to
social factors (see sociolect). Such areas as the study of language choice
in bilingual or multilingual communities, language planning,
language attitudes, etc., may be included under sociolinguistics and
are sometimes referred to as macro-sociolinguistics, or they are considered
as being part of the sociology of language or thesocial psychology
of language.
see also ethnography of communication
sociolinguistics