An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

This book has been written for people who have never heard of sociolinguistics, but who would like to know what it is.;It assumes that readers will be familiar with very basic grammatical terms, but little more. The glossary at the end of the book defines more specialized grammatical terms which crop up in the text. It uses a minimum of phonetic symbols in the text, but a sociolinguist cannot avoid talking about speech sounds, and phonetic symbols are the only really satisfactory way of conveying different pronunciations. Appendix 1 describes the phonetic symbols used, with a glossary to help readers work out what they sound like.;There are exercises at the end of each chapter and discussion examples to help the reader to build on all of the points learnt throughout the book.;All the basic themes of sociolinguistics are covered including multilingualism; social variation in language (by class, age and sex); its social context; language and power in society; applied sociolinguistics and the issues of language planning.