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Sociolinguistics

Of the many fields of language study, sociolinguistics is one that provides understanding regarding the choices that people make to communicate with one another, to form communities, and to establish their personal identities in society. Sociolinguistics is a field in which communication, especially oral communication, is observed and documented in order to discover not only the nature and kinds of information that humans attempt to share but the manner in which they share it. Unlike the work of formal linguistics that strives to classify and describe the component forms of language, sociolinguistics attempts to characterize the ways that people use language in specific situations in a social context.

The Science of Linguistics and the Birth of Sociolinguistics

In the 19th century, the study of human language was an area of interest for philosophers and classical philologists. Much of the theorizing about language was done by researchers from Western Europe, and they took interest in comparative studies of language history relying upon the writings of the ancient philosophers, especially Socrates and Plato. As societies developed, and more and more nations enabled the education of their peoples in literacy, there was a renewed respect for the classical languages and the works of the philosophers who addressed language issues. Thus, the philologists continued to be driven to compare and contrast language as history, using their gleanings from ancient philosophy and literature. Their study was one in which the lives of the people who used language were considered secondary to understanding the actual language characteristics themselves. However, studies in anthropology, particularly those of Charles Darwin, sparked curiosity for finding different approaches to understanding the role that language plays in the development of peoples.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Language researchers acknowledge the theories of a Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), as having provided a revolution in thought regarding the study of languages that led to the growth of linguistics as a science and the development of the field of sociolinguistics in the 20th century. Although he did not write down his ideas in any lengthy pieces of text, the dissemination of his class lectures by his students after he died enabled linguists to take a look at the manner in which they had been approaching language study up to the end of the 19th century and to consider what Saussure thought was most important: language is a means for the communication of thoughts and ideas by individuals who belong to communities in which they developed their language; individuals gain an understanding of reality through social use of the language they know.

The Course in General Linguistics of Saussure continues to be read and cited to this day, and some linguists state that because of Saussure a tremendous shift, a Copernican revolution, occurred in the study of language and society. Saussure's theories caused the end of what was termed a Socratic tradition of linguistic thought. Instead of framing the study of language as governed by a set of rules that are applied to some word or statement all by itself, Saussure emphasized that language was a structured system that could be understood scientifically by watching how individuals in a community used it at given points in time, synchronically. Linguists have classified the Saussurean approach to language as holistic and one of structuralism.

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