Variationist Sociolinguistics

Abstract

This is a book about the fascinating, intricate and remarkable relationship between language and society, a field that is typically called sociolinguistics. However, this is not a book about everything in sociolinguistics because sociolinguistics is a very diverse and wide-ranging discipline. Taken broadly, sociolinguistics involves studying the interaction of language, culture, and society. This book cannot do all that. Instead, I focus on the type of sociolinguistics that has come to be known as Variationist Sociolinguistics, or “Language Variation and Change” (LVC). This is the type of sociolinguistics I have been practicing in my own research since 1981. This branch of the sociolinguistics tree is known for its focus on language change as well as its quantitative methods and its concern for accountable methodology. It is the study of linguistic variation and change through observation and interpretation. Variationist Sociolinguistics deals with systematic and inherent variation in language, both in the present (synchrony) and in the past (diachrony). The goal of LVC studies is to understand the mechanisms which link extra linguistic phenomena (the social and cultural) with patterned linguistic heterogeneity (the internal, variable, system of language) (Sankoff 1988a: 157). Here is the definition from the leading journal, aptly entitled Language Variation and Change: Language Variation and Change is the only journal dedicated exclusively to the study of linguistic variation and the capacity to deal with systematic and inherent variation in synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Sociolinguistics involves analysing the interaction of language, culture and society; the more specific study of variation is concerned with the impact of this interaction on the structures and processes of traditional linguistics. Language Variation and Change concentrates on the details of linguistic structure in actual speech production and processing (or writing), including contemporary or historical sources.