The document discusses sociolinguistics and language variation. It defines sociolinguistics as the systematic study of language in society, focusing on how individuals and groups use language in social contexts. There are three main perspectives in sociolinguistics: geographic, examining regional dialects; anthropological, studying the relationship between language, culture and thought; and sociological, analyzing the link between social relations and language varieties. Speech communities are groups that share the same or similar language varieties. Varieties include dialects, sociolects, and idiolects, which differ by region, social class, gender, age, and ethnicity at the lexical, phonological and syntactic levels. Pidgins are simplified mixed languages for basic communication between

1. Language in
society
Farjana Ela

2. Objectives
 Perspectives of sociolinguistics
 Speech community
 Varieties of sociolinguistics
 Pidgin and Creole

3. What is sociolinguistics?
• Systematic study of various aspects of language in
society
•William Labov is the founder of sociolinguistics

4. The study of the relationship between language and society
is sociolinguistics;
it focuses on how language is used by the individual speaker
and groups of speakers in its social context

5. perspectives of sociolinguistics
There are three perspectives of sociolinguistics;
1.Geographic perspective - regional dialects
2.Anthropological perspective - the relationship
between Language, culture and thought.

6. perspectives of sociolinguistics
3. Sociological perspective- the relationship between
social relations and the use of different language
varieties.

7. Speech Community
and
Language Variety

8. Speech Community
• The way people speak often serves to define them as
a group (family, village, town, region)
• Share the same language or a particular variety of a
language

9. Language variety
• The main tool in sociolinguistic - the concept of the
linguistic variable
• In the word form, for example, some people
pronounce the /r/ and some don’t.

10. Language variety
• linguistics features of the speech variety can be
found at the lexical, the phonological and in the
syntactical level

11. Language variety
Two types of varieties—
• Dialectal Varieties
• Register

12. Dialect and Accent
A regional, temporal or social variety within a single
language is dialect
Accent is the way that words are pronounced when
spoken by individuals in a region or a country.

13. Dialectal Varieties
• Regional Dialect
• Sociolect
• Language And Age
• Language And Gender
• Idiolect
• Ethnic Dialect

14. Regional Dialect
• People living in the same geographical region.

15. Sociolect
• Sociolect, or social-class dialect,
• characteristic of a particular class

16. Language and Gender
The language used by men and women having some
special features of their own.

17. Language and age
Difference between old generation and the younger
generation language

18. Idiolect
• Personal dialect of an individual speaker
• Regional, Social, Gender, And Age Variations

19. Ethnic Dialect
An ethnic dialect is a social dialect of a language
spoken by a less privileged population

20. Register
•stylistic-functional varieties of a dialect or language.
• Type of language which is selected as appropriate to
the type of situation.

21. Pidgin
A special language variety that mixes or blends two
or more languages for trading or business purpose.

22. Creole
pidgin becoming the primary of a speech community
The vocabulary enriched with new syntactic
-semantic concepts

23. Review
1. While language principally communicate meaning,
also establish and maintain social relationships
2. Users of the same language in a sense all speak
differently.

24. 3.The kind of language each of them chooses to use
determined by his social background
4. Women using more standard language than men

25. Finally….
Language and society affect each other
Social structure may influence or determine linguistic
structure and/or behavior

26. Thank You