Syllabus
Session
Topic
Recommended Readings 1
Introduction to sociolinguistics: What do sociolinguists study? 2
Social dialects, varieties
Wardhaugh, 2006, chapter 2 3
Standardization of English in Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Rwanda)
Dialect levelling in the UK
The status of English in the Caribbean
Age-grading in dialects
Ethnic identity and heritage languages
Boberg, 2004
Kim & Chao, 2009
Pearson, 2013
Torgersen & Kerswill, 2004
Youssef, 2010 4
Linguistic variation and change
Labov, 2010
Wardhaugh, 2006, chapter 8 5
Great Lakes Vowel Shift (Northern Cities Vowel Shift)
Canadian Raising and its dissemination in North America
Vocalization of /l/ in English varieties
Frequency effects in language changes
Role of social media in language change
Bybee, 2002
Dailey-O’Cain, 1997
Eisenstein et al., 2014
Horvath & Horvath, 2002
McCarthy, 2007 6
Language, identity, and social class
Guy, 2011 7
Language contact
Drager, 2012
Sankoff, 2004
Thomason, 2001, chapter 1 8
English-based creoles and pidgins (e.g., Tok Pisin)
English as a lingua franca in India
Language contact and code switching in South African English
Contact between Maori and New Zealand English
Gibraltarian English (Llanito)
Calude, et al., 2020
Dowling et al., 2019
Goria, 2021
Handman, 2013
Maxwell et al., 2021 9
Language, sex, and gender
Kleinman, 2002
Meyerhoff & Ehrlich, 2019
Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015, chapter 12 10
Language and social interaction: Communication Accommodation
Giles & Ogay, 2007 11
Political correctness
This American Life (podcast): “Words you can’t say“ 12
Social and linguistic networks
McFaul, 2016
Milroy, 2004
Milroy & Milroy, 1985 13
World Englishes
Crystal, 2003: 86-122
Kirkpatrick, 2014
Annotation
Sociolinguistics is a discipline within the field of linguistics concerned with the systematic investigation of human language in relation to the social life of its speakers. This course is designed to offer introductory knowledge of basic sociolinguistic concepts (e.g., accent, dialect, diglossia) and methodology (i.e., real-time, apparent-time experiments) used by researchers to investigate language in its social context.
We will discuss several of the topics that sociolinguists traditionally study, including the relationships between social identity and language use, linguistic diversity, language variation and change, and language contact. We will also examine some of the methods for collecting and analyzing data.
By the end of this course, students will have acquired the ability to understand aspects of sociolinguistic theory and data, based on knowledge of the scholarly research in the field.