Course Description

Sociolinguistics investigates the interactions between language and society. Sociolinguistics, as a field that crosses the boundaries between disciplines, is the study of language in society and there are a lot of major sub-areas in this field including discourse analysis, studies of interaction, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, feminism, etc. (Meyerhof, 2011). In this course we will be concerned with all of language and social factors, language in society and multilingualism. A special attention will be given to dialectology i.e. Social dialectology & regional dialectology. As far as the former is concerned, students will explore how different social factors like ethnicity, social class, gender, and age account for language variability. The latter however will consider how language and stylistic variations are remeniscent of geographical considerations. Students will also understand the mechanisms by which a speaker is deemed a multilingual and how well this will affect their language use; they will explore phenomena like code switiching and borrowings.