Sociolinguistics and Language Education
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SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Sociolinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language use and social variables. One of the major debates in the field of sociolinguistics is whether to take social or linguistic factors as primary in investigating this relationship. As evidence of this debate, Wardhaugh (1992) and others make a distinction between sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Whereas sociolinguistics takes linguistic factors as primary in its investigations of language and society, the sociology of language investigates the manner in which social and political forces influence language use. Trauth and Kazzazi (1996) in the Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics make a similar distinction, noting that sociolinguistics can have either a sociological or linguistic orientation. The dictionary, however, adds a third possibility, namely, an ethnomethodological orientation. Hence, three areas of sociolinguistic investigation are delineated: (a) A primarily sociologically oriented approach concerned predominately with the norms of language use (When and for what purpose does somebody speak what kind of language or what variety with whom?). . . . (b) A primarily linguistically oriented approach that presumes linguistic systems to be in principle heterogeneous, though structured, when viewed within sociological parameters. . . . (c) An ethnomethodologically oriented approach with linguistic interaction as the focal point, which studies the ways in which members of a society create social reality and rule-ordered behaviour. (p. 439) In this chapter, sociolinguistics is viewed as composed of all three areas listed earlier. The chapter shows how all three strands have contributed to a field of inquiry that has significant implications for language education. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Many contend that early work in sociolinguistics was sociologically uninformed, concentrating primarily on an analysis of language structure (Fishman, 1968; LePage, 1997). A major exception to this N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 17–27. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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S A N D R A L E E M C K AY
characterization occurred in 1968 with the publication of Fishman’s (1968) seminal book, Readings in the Sociology of Language. In this collection of studies on the relationship between language and society, Fishman (1968), argued for the benefit of a greater emphasis on the social aspects of language use. He maintained that it was only natural that since society was broader than language, social structures should provide the primary focus of sociolinguistic studies. Ultimately, Fishman argued that sociologists and linguists would both gain from developing a robust interdisciplinary field. Sociologists could arrive at some reliable linguistic indicators of social class and demonstrate how the diversity inherent in language use is patterned. Linguists, on the
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