Sociolinguistics
Course Aims and Objectives
This course introduces you to fundamental concepts and approaches involved in the study of the links between language and society. We will look at a number of important approaches to sociolinguistic research, and cover the topics most central to the discipline and its development. These include language variation and change, which usually refers to social, geographical and stylistic differences within a single language; language contact, including pidginisation and creolisation and societal multilingualism, including language shift, language death and language revival.
Course Content
The course will cover a selection of the following topics:
- language, dialect and standard;
- variation within one speech community - the work of the variationist sociolinguists;
- language variation and social networks;
- sociolinguistics of speech communities - diglossia, code switching and language shift;
- language contact, pidginisation and creolisation;
- language death and revitalisation;
- language globalisation and localisation;
- sociolinguistics of orthography.
Assessment
A 5,000 word written assignment.
Recommended Reading
Chambers, J. K. (1995/2002). Sociolinguistic theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coupland, N., & Jaworski, A. (1997). Sociolinguistics. A reader and coursebook. London: Macmillan.
Fasold, R. (1984). The sociolinguistics of society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fasold, R. (1990). The sociolinguistics of language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hudson, R. (1996). Sociolinguistics (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wodak, R., Johnstone, B., & Kerswill, P. E. (Eds.). (2010). The Sage handbook of sociolinguistics. London: Sage.
Kiesling, S. F. (2011). Sociolinguistic variation and change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change Vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mesthrie, R., Swann, J., Deumert, A., & Leap, W. (2000). Introducing sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Meyerhoff, M. (2011). Introducing sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.
Milroy, L., & Gordon, M. (2003). Sociolinguistics: Method and interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P., & Cheshire, J. (1998). The sociolinguistics reader: Vol. 1: Multilingualism and variation. London: Arnold.
Wardhaugh, R. (2010). An introduction to sociolinguistics. (6th ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.