Sociolinguistics

When people use language they do just more than try to get another person to understand the speakers' thoughts and feelings at the same time people use language in order to define the relationship to each other, thus language also has social function and in the normal transfer of information through language we use language to send vital social messages about who we are and where we come from. Sociolinguistics has become an increasingly important and popular field of study in the 1960 and was pioneered by such linguists as William Labov in the USA and Basil Bernstein in the UK although it should be mentioned that the social aspects of language where first studied by Japaness and Italian linguists in the 1930's but much attention was paid in the west until 1960's. Sociolinguistics is generally defined as the study of language in relation to society. So sociolinguists are interested in explaining why we speak differently in different social contexts. Like other subjects sociolinguistics is partly theoretical and it lies at the intersection of linguistics and sociology. Nowdays it is closely connected with social psychology, anthropology and human communication studies. Linguistics studies the rules of this/that language while sociolinguistics focuses on the way language is used and it may vary from culture to culture. Sociolinguistics studies language in relation to society while the sociology of language is defined as the study of society in relation to language.