Abstract
The sociology of language is the study of the relationship between language and society. It ‘focuses upon the entire gamut of topics related to the social organization of language behavior, including not only language usage per se but also language attitudes and overt behaviors toward language and toward language users’ (Fishman, 1971, p. 217). The field begins from the assumption that language is a social value, and pursues research on language in contact among social groups, especially phenomena such as language conflict and multilingualism. While Fishman tends to characterize the study at two levels: descriptive sociology of language, describing ‘who speaks what language to whom and when’, and dynamic sociology of language, explaining the different rates of change of language behavior in different groups, his definition is far from clear in terms of levels of analysis. This gap was bridged by McKay & Hornberger (1996, p. x), who have established a distinctive four-level model for approaching the study of language and society. The scope of this essay falls within the macro-macro level in their model, i.e. the area of sociolinguistics dealing with the relationship between the larger social and political contexts and language use at a macro level.
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Chen, SC. (1997). Sociology of Language. In: Hornberger, N.H., Corson, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4535-0_1
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