تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

Applied linguistics and social contexts Sociolinguistics

المؤلف:  Alison Sealey & Bob Carter

المصدر:  Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education

الجزء والصفحة:  P29-C1

2026-09-22

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Applied linguistics and social contexts

Sociolinguistics

The contributions of researchers such as Hymes and Gumperz span approaches which appeal to both applied linguistics and socio-linguistics. The latter sub-discipline is quite broad in scope, but it is basically concerned with exploring how people use language differently in different social contexts. Practitioners whose interest is predominantly in language description, particularly language change, often use a quantitative approach in the measurement of linguistic variables, and 'correlating linguistic variation as the dependent variable with the independent variables such as linguistic environment, style or social categories is the primary empirical task of socio-linguistics' (Chambers 1995: 17). For others, the legitimate concerns of sociolinguistics are deemed to extend to issues which are elsewhere delineated as 'the sociology of language', while there is also a great deal of potential common ground between this broader interpretation of 'sociolinguistics' and the broader interpretations of 'applied linguistics'. The most inclusive definitions of either discipline may make the distinction between the two effectively redundant, some of the issues we discuss might equally well be considered 'sociolinguistic' as 'applied linguistic'. To give just one example here, a widely publicized controversy was sparked in the late 1990s by the decision of the Oakland School Board in California to recognize 'Ebonies' as 'the primary language of African American children'. Sociolinguists who have studied the detail of phonological, lexical and grammatical variations between varieties of English spoken by black and white Americans suddenly found themselves in the media spotlight (Rickford 1999a). The extremely heated debate concerned both the status and characteristics of a language variety and the political and pedagogic issues of what language and literacy teaching practice should be.