I have a proposal for you: sociolinguistics is worth your time.
“Sociolinguistics” might sound daunting or disconnected from everyday life, but really it just means, “how languages and societies (or “groups of people”) interact”. What does that mean? A lot of things.
One way to think of a culture is as a filter on a camera: it makes the world seem a certain way when you look through it. When you look at yourself through it, it makes you seem a certain way. The language we use (or languages, as most of the world is multilingual), including the dialect (or dialects), are both results and causes of culture – and cultures help us form and understand both ourselves and others. So all of this really does have a lot to do with our everyday lives!
While the cultures and languages we’re most at home in can make us feel like their lenses are the default, they’re only one way of seeing the world; there’s no such thing as “a view from nowhere”, no perfectly unbiased viewpoint without flavor or color. Because I’m a native “Standard” American English user, I navigate the world differently from someone who speaks something else as their native language; a native Mandarin user, for example, might reach for different imagery than “flavor” or “navigate” (if you are a native Mandarin speaker, please let me know if you would pick something else, and tell me what it is if so – or if you come from any other linguistic background)! It shapes me – and you – in ways that run beneath the surface, like ocean currents. And there is so much beneath the surface!
Sociolinguistics looks at just that: what’s under the surface of the languages we use, at how they shapes values & viewpoints and how values & viewpoints shape them – in everything from conversations at home to business to school to literature to government documents to music, and how that forms people’s sense of self and of others. “Citizen” sociolinguistics, as I mentioned in my title, is simply the practice of regular people (i.e., people who are not academics) taking note of what they see in their and others’ language usage and talking about it (I’m a big fan of this!).
The sociolinguistics of English, in particular, is of interest because it’s such a widespread global language and there are so many varieties of it. It’s seen by many as THE “lingua franca”, or “common language”, and for good reason: it’s spoken in some form by roughly 1.5 billion people (exact numbers are hard to calculate), and is used by most of the world’s socio-political and economic powerhouses. Of course, this is changing – the global influence of the US in particular is coming into question – but it’s been the case for a long time. What effects has and does this have on people, in every area of life?
This is a blog about language and people and English and how they interact, and what that means for us as humans, in ways big and small. If you’re interested, please read on – welcome, I’m so glad you’re here!
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