Sociolinguistics is the science which deals with the relationship between language

and society. It is therefore a very broad topic, encompassing the study of social dialects,
language attitudes, stylistic variation, conversational interaction, multilingualism, language
change etc.
It studies “language in its social context” The attention of sociolinguists is drawn
not to the language itself, not to its internal structure, but to how people who make up a
particular society use the language. This takes into account all the factors that can influence
the use of the language - from the various characteristics of the speakers themselves (their
age, gender, level of education and culture, type of profession, etc.) to the characteristics of
a particular speech act. Sociolinguistic findings also have immediate and significant applied
value.
Researchers distinguish three vectors in modern sociolinguistics: the first focuses
on sociology (explores the norms of language use, the purpose of language options,
bilingualism, code theory depending on various social determinants), the second focuses on
linguistics and studies the heterogeneity of the system, as well as the connection of
language changes with social conditions; the third has an ethnographic and methodological
orientation. The main vectors of sociolinguistic research are the problems of language
situation, language team, social functions of language, forms of its existence in society,
social differentiation of languages depending on the diversity of social strata (stratification)
and social situations (situational), bilingualism, polylingualism, language mixing, language
policy norms, language construction, etc.
The main questions posed to modern sociolinguistics:
1. How are the forms of speech and patterns of communication distributed in
time and space?
2. How do individuals and social groups identify themselves on the basis of
language?
3. How do the ways of communication differentiate language communities?
4. What samples are isolated in multilingual use of language?
5. How is language used in cases of social conflict and tension?
6. What language settings reflect the social division of society and social
discrimination, and how to use language to address these issues?
7. What are the best methods of sociolinguistic research and ways of selecting
language data?
Sociolinguistics operates with a certain set of concepts specific to it: linguistic
community, linguistic situation, socio-communicative system, linguistic socialization,
communicative competence, linguistic code, code switching, bilingualism, diglossia, linguistic
policy and a number of others. In addition, some concepts are borrowed from other branches
of linguistics: language norm, speech communication, speech behavior, speech act,
language contact, mixing of languages, mediator language, etc., as well as from sociology,
social psychology: social structure of society, social status , social role, social factor and
some others. Let's discuss some of these concepts, the most specific to sociolinguistics and
important for understanding the essence of this scientific discipline.

Linguistic community
This is a collection of people united by common social, economic, political and
cultural ties and carrying out direct and mediated contacts with each other and with various
kinds of social institutions in everyday life using one language or different languages
common in this population.
 The boundaries of the spread of languages very often do not coincide with political
boundaries. The most obvious example is modern Africa, where residents of different states
(Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda) can speak the same language, and several languages coexist
within one state (in Nigeria, for example, there are more than 200 of them!). Therefore, when
defining the concept of "linguistic community", it is important to combine linguistic and social
characteristics: if we leave only linguistic, then we will talk only about the language,
regardless of the environment in which it is used; if we rely only on social criteria (including
both political, economic and cultural factors), then languages that function in a given social
community will remain outside the field of attention.
As a linguistic community can be considered a set of people, different in the number
of individuals included in them, from the whole country to the so-called small social groups
(for example, a family, a sports team): the criterion for the selection in each case should be a
community of social life and the presence of regular communicative contacts.
Language code
Each linguistic community uses certain means of communication - languages, their
dialects, jargons, stylistic varieties of the language. Any such communication medium can be
called code. In the most general sense, a code is a means of communication: natural
language (English, Japanese, Ukrainian), artificial language such as Esperanto or modern
machine languages, Morse code, maritime flag signaling, etc. In linguistics, it is customary to
call language formations a code: language, territorial or social dialect, and so on.
Socio-communication system
This is a set of codes used in a given linguistic community and existing with each
other in a relationship of functional complementarity. “Functional complementarity” means
that each of the codes that make up the social and communicative system has its own
functions, without intersecting with the functions of other codes (thus, they all complement
each other in terms of their functions, as it were).
For example, each style of the literary language - scientific, official-business,
publicistic, religious-preaching - has its own specific functions that are not characteristic of
other styles, and together they functionally complement each other, forming a system
capable of serving all the communicative needs of a given society (which can conventionally
called a society of native speakers of the literary language; in addition to them, there are
also, for example, speakers of dialects, vernacular) and all spheres of communication.
Language situation
The components of the socio-communicative system serving a particular linguistic
community are in certain relations with each other. At every stage of the existence of a
linguistic community, these relations are more or less stable. However, this does not mean
that they cannot change. A change in the political situation in the country, a change in the
state system, economic transformations, new guidelines in social and national policy, etc. -
all this can somehow affect the state of the socio-communicative system, its composition
and the functions of its components - codes.
The functional relations between the components of the socio-communicative system
at one stage or another of the existence of a given linguistic community form the linguistic
situation characteristic of this community.
The concept of "linguistic situation" is usually applied to large linguistic communities -
countries, regions. For this concept, the time factor is important: in essence, the linguistic
situation is the state of the socio-communicative system at a certain period of its functioning.
For example, in Ukraine, where the socio-communicative system includes the
Ukrainian and Russian languages as the main components (in addition to them there are
others: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech and some others), before the collapse of
the USSR, there was a relative dynamic balance between these languages. There were
schools with both Ukrainian and Russian languages of instruction, in the field of science and
higher education, both languages were used, to a certain extent dividing the scope (natural
and technical sciences - mainly in Russian, humanitarian - mainly in Ukrainian), in the
everyday sphere, the choice of language of communication was determined by the intentions
of the speaker, the type of addressee, the nature of the communication situation, etc. In the
1990s, the functions of the Russian language in Ukraine sharply narrowed, it was ousted by
the Ukrainian language from the spheres of secondary and higher education, science, and
culture; the areas of application of the Russian language in everyday communication are
also decreasing.
These changes are undoubted evidence of a change in the linguistic situation, while
the composition of the socio-communicative system serving the Ukrainian linguistic society
remains the same.
Sociolect
A sociolect is a set of linguistic features inherent in any social group - professional,
class, age, etc. - within a particular subsystem of the national language. Examples of
sociolects are the speech patterns of soldiers (soldier's jargon), schoolchildren (school
jargon), criminal jargon, student slang, the professional "language" of those who work on
computers, various trade argots (for example, drug dealers), etc.
The term "sociolect" is convenient to refer to various and dissimilar linguistic
formations, which, however, have a common feature that unites them: these formations
serve the communicative needs of socially limited groups of people.
Sociolects are not holistic communication systems. These are precisely the
peculiarities of speech - in the form of words, phrases, syntactic constructions, peculiarities
of stress, etc; the basis of sociolects - vocabulary. Grammar usually differs little from that
characteristic of a given national language. So, in the modern criminal argot there is a rather
large number of specific designations, but the declension and conjugation of these words,
their combination into sentences are carried out according to general linguistic models and
rules; general language is also the vocabulary that does not denote any specific realities of
the "professional" and everyday life of criminals.

Argot, jargon and slang

Argot, jargon and slang are varieties of sociolect. All three terms are often used
interchangeably. However, it is advisable to distinguish between the concepts behind these
names:
Jargon is a special type of language which we use in a specific framework. It is not
understandable outside of that particular framework. Jargons are some special kind of words
that belonged to a special kind of activity, work or profession. It is a vocabulary which can be
of science, technology, trade, art, etc.
Argot is, in contrast to jargon, a secret language to one degree or another, created
specifically in order to make the speech of a given social group incomprehensible to
outsiders. Therefore, the phrase "thieves' argot" is preferable to "thieves' jargon".
Slang is an everyday variability of the language used in highly informal situations.
People who share similar social backgrounds and age groups use the Slang. It is a kind of
local language that close friends or people of the same social circle use. The main feature of
slang is that slang words are not permanent in a language. It means they are not staying
forever in a language. These are variable and are not in the printed, inscribed form in a
document or a book. These may get mixed with some old words to make a new slang word.
Koine
In modern sociolinguistics, Koine is understood as a means of everyday
communication that connects people who speak different regional or social variants of a
given language. The role of Koine can be supra-dialectal forms of the language - a kind of
interdialects that combine the features of different territorial dialects - or one of the
languages functioning in a given area.
The concept of "koine" is especially relevant for the linguistic life of large cities, in
which masses of people with different speech skills are mixed. Intergroup communication in
a city requires the development of a means of communication that would be understandable
to everyone. This is how urban koines appear, serving the needs of everyday, mainly oral
communication of various groups of the urban population. Koine is sometimes applied to the
written forms of the language - for example, to Latin, which was used as the language of
science in medieval Europe.
Applied sociolinguistics is a section of sociolinguistics that studies the practical
use of the results of sociolinguistic empirical and theoretical research in solving various
social problems of the functioning, development and interaction of languages in individual
countries and regions.
Problems of Applied Sociolinguistics:
These are the problems of teaching native and foreign languages. The traditional
method of teaching languages is based on dictionaries and grammars, which fix mainly the
internal structural properties of the language and the rules for the use of words and syntactic
structures due to its system itself. Meanwhile, the actual use of the language is also
regulated by at least two classes of variables - the social characteristics of the speakers and
the circumstances in which verbal communication takes place. Consequently, teaching a
language is most effective when not only linguistic rules and recommendations, but also
various "external" factors are taken into account in the teaching methodology, in the
educational literature.
The most obvious role of these factors in teaching a second language. The
knowledge and skills that a child acquires in the process of mastering his native language,
an adult, comprehending a foreign language for themselves, must learn "from scratch", in a
much shorter time and to a certain extent artificially - in an educational situation, and not in
the course of a gradual socialization. Errors in a foreign language, and especially in speech
behavior, most often occur from ignorance of the situational and social conditions of the
appropriateness of certain linguistic units and structures, from failure to master the
mechanisms of code switching when changing the parameters of speech communication
(changing the topic, addressee, goal, etc.).
Sociolinguistic information is important in the development of problems and practical
measures that make up the language policy of the state. Language policy requires special
flexibility and consideration of many factors in the conditions of multi-ethnic and multilingual
countries, where the ratio of languages in terms of their communicative functions, in terms of
their use in various spheres of social life is closely related to the mechanisms of political
governance, national harmony and social stability. One of the tools of language policy is
language laws. Although their development as a whole is the competence of lawyers: it is
they who must clearly and consistently formulate provisions concerning, for example, the
status of the state language, its functions, protection of the monopoly use of the state
language in the most important social spheres, regulation of the use of "local" languages,
etc. It is quite obvious that it is possible to create linguistically literate laws about a language
only on the basis of a comprehensive knowledge of the functional properties of the
language, the degree of development of certain systems in it (for example, the system of
special terminologies, scientific language, the language of diplomatic documents, official
business communication, etc.). and a more or less detailed idea of what a given language
can and cannot do in a variety of social and situational conditions of its application.
The areas of application of sociolinguistic theory and the results of sociolinguistic
research to solving problems of social practice often depend on the nature of the linguistic
situation in a particular country. In multilingual countries some problems arise, in
monolingual countries they are completely different. In the conditions of multilingualism, the
issues of choosing one intermediary language are acute, which would serve as a means of
communication for all nations inhabiting the country, and, possibly, would have the status of
the state language. In conditions of linguistic homogeneity, the problems of standardization
and codification of the literary language, its relations with other subsystems of the national
language, are topical. Hence - different accents in the development of sociolinguistic
problems, in the orientation of the applied directions of sociolinguistics.
For example, in some polyethnic countries, the preservation of the languages of
small ethnic groups (the so-called minority languages) acquires particular political
significance, in connection with which literature in these languages is reviving, they are
involved in the sphere of public communication. Often these processes come into conflict
with the functional capabilities of minority languages, with the underdevelopment of styles in
them, underdevelopment of special terminologies, sociopolitical vocabulary, etc. Many of
these problems are the object of interest in applied sociolinguistics.
In a number of countries of modern Europe, the situation is acute with foreign
workers and immigrants from Asian and African states, with their social, cultural and
linguistic adaptation. Therefore, the attention of German and French researchers to the
speech behavior of immigrants, mixed forms of speech (in particular, to semi-lingualism, for
example, Turkish-German, Arab-French, etc.), to teaching immigrant children in European
schools, etc., is quite understandable.
For some time ago, American sociolinguistics was characterized by a surge of
interest in Black English - the language of American black people, which differs in a number
of ways from standard American English. In this regard, the problem of teaching black
children in school turned out to be very relevant, since the speech skills they acquired in the
family contradict the rules of the English language they are taught in the school class.
Methodological features of sociolinguistics are contained in its empirical research.
In collecting specific information, sociolinguistics relies heavily on the methodological
experience of sociology and social psychology, but the methods of these sciences
receive here some modifications in relation to the tasks solved by this linguistic discipline.
Thus, since many types of sociolinguistic work involve the collection and analysis of mass
material (only on the basis of a significant number of facts can we judge how language is
used by social groups, not individuals), in sociolinguistics used techniques have been long
applied by sociologists: oral questioning, questionnaires, interviews, etc., which have
undergone changes in accordance with the specifics of sociolinguistic analysis.
Currently, we can talk about a set of research methods used by sociolinguistics. In
general, methods specific to sociolinguistics as a linguistic discipline can be divided into
three groups: methods of collecting material, methods of processing and methods of
assessing the reliability of the data.
The first group is dominated by methods borrowed from sociology, social psychology
and partly from dialectology, in the second and third - a significant place is occupied by
methods of mathematical statistics. In addition, the material obtained, processed and
evaluated using statistical criteria requires sociolinguistic interpretation, which allows to
identify regular links between language and social institutions.
 An important feature of sociolinguistics is the need to clarify the methodological
details of each specific task. Because sociolinguists often have to deal with large numbers of
informants, preliminary abstract modeling of the survey situation cannot predict all the
difficulties that may arise from direct contact with informants. In order to identify all the
complicating factors and minimize their impact on the results of the study, preliminary pilot
studies are usually conducted, during which the effectiveness of known methods for a
particular situation is tested.
When collecting information, sociolinguists often resort to observation and surveys:
widely used and general scientific method of analysis of written sources. Of course, these
methods are often combined: after a preliminary analysis of written sources, the researcher
formulates a hypothesis, which he tests in the process of observation; to verify the collected
data, he may resort to a survey of a certain part of his social community. At the very
beginning of sociolinguistic research, the researcher faces the problem of choosing those
specific individuals on whose linguistic behavior it is supposed to build hypotheses and test
them.
Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction,
embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. CA originated
as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with a focus on
casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and
institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law
enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media. As a consequence, the
term 'conversation analysis' has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a
term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of sociolinguistic interactions.
In sociolinguistics, conversation analysis – also called talk-in-interaction and – is the
study of talk produced in the course of ordinary human interactions. Sociologist Harvey
Sacks (1935-1975) is generally credited with founding the discipline.
Method
Conversation analysis begins by setting up a problem connected with a preliminary
hypothesis. The data used in CA is in the form of video- or audio-recorded conversations,
collected with or without researchers' involvement, typically from a video camera or other
recording device in the space where the conversation takes place (e.g. a living room, picnic,
or doctor's office). The researchers construct detailed transcriptions from the recordings,
containing as much detail as is possible. This transcription often contains additional
information about nonverbal communication and the way in which people say things.
Jefferson transcription is a commonly used method of transcription.
After transcription, the researchers perform inductive data-driven analysis aiming to
find recurring patterns of interaction. Based on the analysis, the researchers identify
regularities, rules or models to describe these patterns, enhancing, modifying or replacing
initial hypotheses. While this kind of inductive analysis based on collections of data exhibits
is basic to fundamental work in CA, this method is often supported by statistical analysis in
applications of CA to solve problems in medicine and elsewhere.
While conversation analysis provides a method of analysing conversation this
method is informed by an underlying theory of what features of conversation are meaningful
and the meanings that are likely implied by these features. Additionally there is a body of
theory about how to interpret conversation
Conversation analysis provides a theoretical model of conversation that can be used
to understand a conversation. A conversation is viewed as a collection of turns as speaking;
errors or misunderstandings in speech are addressed with repairs, and turns may be marked
by the delay between them or other linguistic features.