Sociolinguistics: Language, Identities, and Interaction (English) (5cr)

Objectives

Students will have a clear understanding of the basic concepts and technical terminology associated with the field of sociolinguistics. Students will be able to recognize and evaluate patterns of linguistic behavior associated with social categories such as gender, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, age, and peer culture categories. Students will be able to understand the ways in which social variation in language contributes to linguistic change. Students will be able to analyze the ways linguistic interaction is structured in spoken and text-based discourse.

Content

Sociolinguistics is the study of the linguistic choices that people make, consciously and unconsciously, as members or aspiring members of groups. These groups are based on categories that are regarded as socially and culturally meaningful to speakers. They include ethnicity, neighborhood and regional identities, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, religion, urban versus rural identity, and other categories as well. We will see how several of these categories are reflected in phonetics and phonology (vowel quality, the articulation of other types of sound segments, and prosody) as well as other aspects of linguistic behavior. We will look at the linguistic behavior of English-speaking bilinguals in English-speaking countries, and how unconscious patterns linked to group identities can affect the course of linguistic change. Topics will include how bilingual New Yorkers display Hispanic identity in their native English phonology, whether and why there might be a gay dialect, and why apparently lower status dialects persist, even though people of all generations have access to one or more high status variety. We will place equal weight on approaches to linguistic variation (i.e. in form) and to linguistic interaction, with a focus on how to observe and model real-life spoken and text-mediated discourse.