Introduction

Sociolinguistics A description We can define sociolinguistics as the study of language in relation to society , and this is how we shall be taking the term in this book. Sociolinguistics has become a recognised part of most courses at university level on ‘linguistics’ or ‘language’, and is indeed one of the main growth points in the study of language, from the point of view of both teaching and research. There are now major English-language journals devoted to research publications ( Language in Society, Language Variation and Change and International Journal of the Sociology of Language ) and a number of introductory textbooks, apart from the present one. Most of the growth in sociolinguistics has taken place since the late 1960s. This is not meant to imply that the study of language in relation to society is an invention of the 1960s – on the contrary, there is a long tradition in the study of dialects and in the general study of the relations between word-meaning and culture, both of which count as sociolinguistics by our definition. What is new is the widespread interest in sociolinguistics and the realisation that it can throw much light both on the nature of language and on the nature of society. Like other subjects, sociolinguistics is partly empirical and partly theoretical – partly a matter of going out and amassing bodies of fact and partly of sitting back and thinking.