Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the interaction between society , including cultural norms , expectations, and context and 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 influences, and is influenced by 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.
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 some sociolinguists study these sociolects.
Some sociolinguists assess the realization of social and 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.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the s, and also by Louis Gauchat in Switzerland in the early s, but none received much attention in the West until much later.
The study of the social motivation of language change , on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his article "Sociolinguistics in India" published in Man in India.
