Sociological Aspects of Language

Description

Communication is successful if the speaker is taken to mean what he wants to be taken to mean. What is needed is not a set of shared rules but that speaker and listener be able to correlate the speaker's responses with the occurrence of a shared stimulus in their common world. The sociology of language is the study of the relationship between language and society. It focuses upon the entire gamut of topics related to the social organization of language behavior, including not only language usage per se but also language attitudes and overt behaviors towards language. The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that language is variable and ever-changing. As a result, language is not uniform or constant. Rather, it is varied and inconsistent for both the individual user and within and among groups of speakers who use the same language. This textbook “Sociological Aspects of Language” deals with the relationship between language and identity-whether of an individual or a group. The aim of this book to provide an overview of the theoretical and methodological models in this field and to indicate how it has advanced in the field of language education.