By Kamil Wiśniewski Aug 2nd, 2007

Sociolinguistics is a quickly developing branch of linguistics which investigates the individual and social variation of language. Just as regional variation of language can give a lot of information about the place the speaker is from, social variation tells about the roles fulfilled by a given speaker within one community, or country. Sociolinguistics is a practical scientific discipline researching the language that is actually used either by native speakers, or foreigners, in order to formulate theories about language change.

There are numerous factors influencing the way people speak which are investigated by sociolinguistics:


An important factor influencing the way of formulating sentences is according to sociolinguists the social class of the speakers. Thus, there has been a division of social classes proposed in order to make the description accurate. Two main groups of language users, mainly those performing non-manual work and those with more years of education are the ‘middle class’, while those who perform some kind of manual work are ‘working class’. Additional terms ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ are frequently used in order to subdivide the social classes. Therefore, differences between upper middle class can be compared with lower working class.

It is notable that people are acutely aware of the differences in speech patterns that mark their social class and are often able to adjust their style to the interlocutor. It is especially true for the members of the middle class who seem eager to use forms associated with upper class, however, in such efforts the forms characteristic of upper class are often overused by the middle class members. The above mentioned process of adopting own speech to reduce social distance is called convergence. Sometimes, however, when people want to emphasize the social distance they make use of the process called divergence purposefully using idiosyncratic forms.

Sociolinguistics investigates the way in which language changes depending on the region of country it is used in. To describe a variety of language that differs in grammar, lexis and pronunciation from others a term dialect is used. Moreover, each member of community has a unique way of speaking due to the life experience, education, age and aspiration. An individual personal variation of language use is called an idiolect.

There are numerous factors influencing idiolect some of which have been presented above, yet two more need to be elucidated, namely jargon and slang. Jargon is specific technical vocabulary associated with a particular field of interest, or topic. For example words such as convergence, dialect and social class are sociolinguistic jargon. Whereas slang is

a type of language used most frequently by people from outside of high-status groups characterized by the use of unusual words and phrases instead of conventional forms.

Finch G. 1998. How to study linguistics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Yule G. 1996. The study of language. Cambridge: CUP.

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