Applied
Linguistics is concerned with the systematic study of language structure, the
acquisition of first and subsequent languages, the role of language in
communication, and the status of language as the product of particular cultures
and other social groups.
A
background in linguistics is essential for language teachers, translators,
speech-language pathologists, audiologists, and many other language
professionals.
Applied linguistics has been thought
to be a difficult concept to define. Here is the list of applied linguistics
definitions by some experts:
1.
Applied linguistics is defined as ‘the academic
discipline concerned with the relation of knowledge about language to decision
making in the real world. (Cook in Davies)
2.
Applied Linguistics [is now] a cover term for a
sizeable group of semi-autonomous disciplines, each dividing its parentage and
allegiances between the formal study of language and other relevant fields, and
each working to develop its own methodologies and principles. (Spolsky in
Davies )
3.
A working definition of applied linguistics will then
be the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which
language is a central issue.’ (Brumfit in Davies)
4.
Applied linguistics is the academic field which
connects knowledge about language to decision-making in the real world.”
(Simpson, 2011)
Well here i am going to
explain about sociolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics
is the descriptive study of the effect of any and allaspects of society,
including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language
is used, and the effects of language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs
from sociology of language in that the focus of
sociology of language is the effect of language on the society, while
sociolinguistics focuses on the society's effect on language. Sociolinguistics
overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.
It is historically closely related to linguistic anthropology and the
distinction between the two fields has even been questioned recently.
It also
studies how language varieties differ between groups separated
by certain social variables (e.g., ethnicity,
religion,
status,
gender,
level of education,
age,
etc.) and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize
individuals in social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage
of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among
social classes, and it is these sociolects
that sociolinguistics studies.
The social
aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and
Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Louis Gauchat
in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West
until much later. The study of the social motivation of language
change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model
of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics
was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his
1939 article "Sociolinguistics in India" published in Man in India.
ociolinguistics
in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov
in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK. In the 1960s, William Stewart and Heinz Kloss
introduced the basic concepts for the sociolinguistic theory of pluricentric languages, which describes
how standard language varieties differ between
nations (e.g. American/British/Canadian/Australian English; Austrian/German/Swiss German; Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
applications of Sociolinguistics
For
example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that
a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in
a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar,
phonetics,
vocabulary,
and other aspects of this sociolect much as dialectologists
would study the same for a regional
dialect.
The study
of language variation is concerned with social constraints
determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching
is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in different
social situations.
William
Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is
especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation
and change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline. Also, the sociolinguistics can study
a gradual transition of individual values of a word in the context its semantics
which occur in some ethnic, cultural or social groups. For example, Russian
linguist A.V. Altyntsev studied the semantics of word "love" (the Udmurt Idiom (Udmurtish)
of Yiddish
ליב ) among the Ashkenazi Jews from Udmurtia
and Tatarstan.
He was able to make up a gradation of meanings of this word (scale of
gradients) and established that the concept of love is a gradual transition of
individual values, where reference point raises the profile vector "State
– Ethnic commonality – Family".
sources:
https://brocku.ca/social-sciences/departments-and-centres/applied-linguistics/about/what-is-applied- linguistics
https://amigo36.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/applied-linguistics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics#Applications_of_sociolinguistics
