Blackwell Reference Online

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The interaction between language and society has been one of the major concerns of linguistic science over the last 40 years, but until recently the findings of sociolinguistics have not been applied to speech and language disorders. In this chapter we outline some of the areas of research subsumed under the heading of sociolinguistics, and show how they have been applied to communication disorders in recent times. However, the area of sociolinguistic concern is a broad one; covering language variation and change at the micro- and macro-levels, language planning, bilingualism, discourse, and pragmatics. Some of these topics are dealt with in other chapters in this volume (see chapters 9 by Hua & Wei, 1 by Müller, Guendouzi, & Wilson, 5 by Perkins and 6 by Wilkinson), therefore this chapter is more narrowly focused, mainly on the variationist paradigm developed in the early work of such researchers as Labov (e.g. 1963, 1966a, 1972a, b) and Trudgill (e.g. 1972, 1974) among many others.Variationist sociolinguistics developed partly out of the long-standing dialectology tradition (concerned with preserving the older forms of regional speech), and partly in reaction to the dominant paradigm of generative linguistics with its emphasis on the ‘ideal speaker-listener’ and on the exclusion of variation in linguistic output in preference for describing the invariate underlying linguistic ... log in or subscribe to read full text