When language met society: sociolinguistics in the twenty-first century

Extract

Languages, like their speakers, are socially situated. They exist in specific contexts, which they help shape and which, in turn, are shaped by them. Looking at the ways in which these interactions occur can tell us a lot about language users as well as languages (and language) themselves. Broadly speaking, it is this social aspect of language that is the object of study of sociolinguistics. I may be biased (after all, it was after being exposed to Cheshire's (2009) study of language use by a group of adolescents in Reading, England, that I decided to choose it as a field of study), but it is indeed a fascinating branch of linguistics, for it has the potential to appeal to those with an interest in language – either as an entity per se or as an instrument – but also to those who are more attracted by the sociological implications of it.