What is sociolinguistic

Sociolinguistics is concerned with language in social and cultural context, especially how people with different social identities speak and how their speech changes in different situations. Some of the issues addressed are how features of dialects (ways of pronouncing words, choice of words, patterns of words) cluster together to form personal styles of speech. why people from different communities or cultures can misunderstand what is meant, said and done based on the different ways they use language.

Sociolinguistic Methods
Sociolinguistics encompasses a range of methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative "The standard way in which sociolinguists investigate [language] use is by random sampling of the population. In classic cases, like those undertaken in New York by [William] Labov, or in Norwich by [Peter] Trudgill, a number of linguistic variables are selected, such as 'r' (variably pronounced according to where it occurs in a word) or 'ng' (variably pronounced /n/ or //). Sections of the population, known as informants, are then tested to see the frequency with which they produce particular variants. The results are then set against social indices which group informants into classes, based on factors such as education, money, occupation, and so forth. On the basis of such data it is possible to chart the spread of innovations in accent and dialect regionally." (Geoffrey Finch, Linguistic Terms and Concepts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)

Subfields and Branches of Sociolinguistics

"Sociolinguistics includes anthropological linguistics, dialectology, discourse analysis, ethnography of speaking, geolinguistics, language contact studies, secular linguistics, the social psychology of language and the sociology of language." (Peter Trudgill, A Glossary of Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press, 2003)

Sociolinguistic Competence
Sociolinguistic Competence "Sociolinguistic competence enables speakers to distinguish among possibilities such as the following. To get someone's attention in English, each of the utterances 'Hey!', 'Excuse me!', and 'Sir!' or 'Ma'am! is grammatical and a fully meaningful contribution to the discourse of the moment, but only one of them may satisfy societal expectations and the speaker's preferred presentation of self. 'Hey!' addressed to one's mother or father, for example, often expresses either a bad attitude or surprising misunderstanding of the usually recognized social proprieties, and saying 'Sir!' to a 12year-old probably expresses inappropriate deference. "Every language accommodates such differences as a non-discrete scale or continuum of recognizably different linguistic 'levels' or styles, termed registers, and every socially mature speaker, as part of learning the language, has learned to distinguish and choose among places on the scale of register." (G. Hudson, Essential Introductory Linguistics. Blackwell, 2000)

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