Sociolinguistics

The study of how social factors influence variation in language
 

Social Factors:

1. age

2. gender

3. education

4. occupation

5. religion

6. social class

7. ethnicity

8. regional origin

9. social situation

Types of Variation:

1. phonetic

2. lexical

3. syntactic

4. morphological

Linguistic Factors

1. phonetic / semantic / syntactic context

2. frequency

3. particular word or collocates

Methodology

1. Selecting participants

   1. A priori

   2. Random selection

   3. Social networking
       

2. Eliciting data

   1. Observation

   2. Observation of a small group over a period of time

   3. Interview

   4. Surveys and questionnaires

   5. Accent Judgment Test

   6. Discourse Completion Test

You accidentally knock your teacher down as you are running down the hall. What would you say to him?

Bob: I just found a great apartment, but the only problem is I need a $500 deposit today
Ren: Don't you have enough?
Bob: No, I don't get paid until Friday. ____________?
Ren: Sorry, I don't have that much either.
 

Examples of sociolinguistic research

Influence of phonetic context

• Detroit; AAVE; consonant deletion

Influence of social class

• Detroit; AAVE; deletion of /r/

• Detroit; AAVE, plural

• NYC; deletion of /r/

MORE

• Utah English (thanks to Wendy Baker for this)

• T-dropping in Utah English

• Labov on NYC dialect

• "Slayer slang"

Utah English Experiment

Who do you know that has an accent?

What are the characteristics of Utah English?

Dialect maps

1 characteristics

2 characteristic