Conclusion about Agnes's group

INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Language is  a tools or method and system of conventional spoken, manual, or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

Sociolinguistics is concerned with language in social and cultural context, especially how people with different social identities (e.g. gender, age, race, ethnicity, class) speak and how their speech changes in different situations. Some of the issues addressed are how features of dialects (ways of pronouncing words, choice of words, patterns of words) cluster together to form personal styles of speech; why people from different communities or cultures can misunderstand what is meant, said and done based on the different ways they use language. Sociolinguistics encompasses a range of methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative.

Definition of Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguists study the relationship between language and society. They are interested in explaining why we speak differently in different social contexts, and they are concerned with identifyng the social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning. Here,  socio means society and linguist meansstudy of language. So, sociolinguist is the study of language that is related to society condition. There are some definitions about sociolinguistics based on some sociolinguist. They are:

1.    Sosiolinguistics are interested in explaining why we speak differently in different social contexts, and they are concerned with identifying the social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning. (Janet Holmes: 1947)

2.    Sosiolinguistics is the study of the caracteristics of language varieties, the carakteristics of their functions,and the characteristics of their speakers as these three constlantly interact, change and change one another within a speech community.(Firsman: 1972)

3.   Sosiolinguistics is a developing subfield of linguistics which takes speech variation as it’s focus, viewing variation or it social context. Sociolinguistics is concerned with the correlation between such social factors and linguistics variation. (Nancy Parrot Hickerson, 1980:81)

Minor = ( semantics, phonology, morphology, syntax etc)

Major = ( sociolinguistics, psicolinguistics, historical study etc )