122049 PS Proseminar Linguistics 2 (2013S)

The author of our course book, Miriam Meyerhoff (2011: 1), quips that "[i]f I had a penny for every time I have tried to answer the question, 'So what is sociolinguistics?', I would be writing this book in the comfort of an early retirement". These definitional difficulties notwithstanding, at its core, sociolinguistics is about variation in language, viewed from both a linguistic and a social perspective. This includes, among other things, the study of regional dialects, language attitudes, multilingualism and language choice, language policy, or the role of gender in language use. As diverse as these issues might seem, they interrelate inasmuch as they deal with the influence of social structures on linguistic structures, and vice versa. The aim of sociolinguistic research is to shed light on these interrelationships in order to gain a better understanding of both language and society.