Introduction

Sociolinguistics examines the relationship between language use and the social world, particularly how language operates within and creates social structures. Studies in sociolinguistics explore the commonplace observations that everyone does not speak a language in the same way, that we alter our speech to accommodate our audience, and that we recognise members and non-members of our communities via speech. Sociolinguistic studies have looked at speech communities based on social categories such as age, class, ethnicity, gender, geography, profession and sexual identity. To be sure, such categories are fluid: they exist only in context, and rather than standing independent of speech are generally produced through it. In short, these categories exist largely as a matter of social perception.

Background

Sustained interest in sociolinguistics emerged in the 1960s, in part as a reaction to ‘autonomous’ Chomskian linguistics. In place of the latter's idealised speaker/hearer, for whom social influences are idiosyncratic or irrelevant, the ‘hyphenated’ field of sociolinguistics sought to explore and theorise the language use of social beings. Capturing the interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise, a distinction is often made between micro-sociolinguistics and macro-sociolinguistics (Coulmas 1997; Spolsky 1998). Micro-sociolinguistics refers to research with a linguistic slant, often focusing on dialect and stylistic/register variation. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods have been employed to explore such linguistic phenomena as phonological differences between dialects or discourse variation between male and female speakers. Coulmas (1997: v) refers to micro-sociolinguistics as ‘social dimensions of language’.