Sociolinguistics
Language itself content, a referent for royalties and animosities, an
indicator of social statues and personal relationships, a marker of situations
and topics as well as of the societal
goals and the large-scale value-laden arenas of interaction that typify every
speech community.
Any speech community of
even moderate complexity reveals several varieties of language, all of which
are functionally differentiated from
each other. On some occasions,
interlocutors who can speak a particular specialized variety to another
nevertheless do no do so, but instead switch to a different variety of language
which is either in wider use or
which is indicative of quite a
different set of interests and
relationships than is associated with their specialized variety.
The varieties of
language that exist within a speech community need not all represent occupational
or interest specializations. A speech community that has available to it
several varieties of language may said to possess a verbal repertoire.
Sociolinguistics seeks
to describe their linguistic and functional characteristics. Sociolinguistics
also seeks to do much more. It seeks to determine how much of the entire speech
community’s verbal repertoire is available to various smaller interaction
networks within that community, since the entire verbal repertoire of a speech
community, may be more extensive than verbal repertoire controlled by subgroups
within that community.
Sociolinguistics also
seeks to determine the symbolic value of language varieties for their speakers.
That language variety come to have symbolic or symptomatic value, in and of
them-selves, is inevitable consequences of their functional differentiation.
The limitations and the opportunities with which these interests, backgrounds
and origins, in turn, are associated.
Other
varieties come to represent educated status or national identification as a
result of the attainments associated with their use and their users and as a
result of their utilization in situations and relationships that pertain to
formal learning or to particular ideologies.
Sociolinguistics is the study of the characteristics
of their functions, and the characteristics of their speakers as these three
constantly interact, change and change on another within a speech community.
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