Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T10:24:49.905Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Sociolinguistic issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Roland Sussex
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Get access

Summary

The sociolinguistics of the Slavic languages

With the exception of language standardization and regional variants (chapter 10), the sociolinguistics of the Slavic languages has been under-researched. Much remains to be done in the area of sociolects, for instance, except in so far as they overlap with questions of the national language, language planning, language in education, corpus planning and what the Russians call kul′túra réči – the ‘culture of (good) speech’. Raskin (1978) regarded this deficiency under Communism as mainly ideological: a classless society is difficult to reconcile with sociolectal variation, and attempts to work out a genuinely Marxist–Leninist philosophy of language have so far failed to solve this question – though investigations like the Soviet Russian Russkij jazyk i sovetskoe obščestvo (Panov, 1968; Krysin, 1974; 11.3.1) provided a strong empirical platform for socially correlated studies of language variation. The after-effects of these problems of ideology and scholarship help to explain the uneven state of sociolinguistics in the modern Slavic languages (Brang, Züllig and Brang, 1981). Since the decline of Communism this field has become a major growth area of research (Cooper, 1989) in fields like colloquial language (Patton, 1988), political correctness (Short, 1996), culture-marginal slangs (Skachinsky, 1972), graffiti (Bushnell, 1990) and gay language (Kozlovskij, 1986), which were areas of scholarship not encouraged at the official level under Communism.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Slavic Languages , pp. 544 - 585
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×