Sociolinguistics (Applied Linguistics)

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