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Recommended: Introduction of social class and language

The term 'sociolinguistics' has been first used in 1939 by T.C. Hodson in relation to language study in India (Le Page 1997: 19)
Sociolinguistics, the studies of relations between language and society has been formed not long time ago and since then it has produced many explanations to a vast number of questions concerning the matter. At the beginning the term was not quite popular until the publishing of a paper written by Haver C Currie “Projection of sociolinguistics: the relationship of speech to social status”, however the publication started the sociolinguistic revolution, yet by some scholars the phenom was neglected. The situation has changed in the early 1960s, when a series of articles were published after the first conference which dealt with sociolinguistics. The articles have opened a way for new to come, and a demand for inclusion of this new branch of science has been fulfilled. The new branch of linguistic connected science has grown to a vast proportions and from todays point of view it is almost unbelievable that not so long ago it was not considered as a field for scholars to deal with . (Coulmas F. 1998: 5).

1.1.1. Language and society

Language does not only convey meaning, refer to ideas, events or entities. Whenever using language a speaker will inevitably signal his or her social and personal background, therefore language is said to be indexical of a person's class, social status, gender, age, region of origin, etc.
One may ask, what is index?, consequently:

“An index involves a logical relation between sign and object (such as cause and effect), for example a weathercock, which stands for the wind but which is directly influenced by the wind direction”
(Noth W. 1990:112)
In the sociolinguistic sens...

... middle of paper ...

... that set the direction for the future and account for language change, both linguistic and sociolinguistic. Consequently many linguists state, that language should be treated as a societal resource and as other types of resources, could be shaped to achieve sociopolitical goals. In that sense, language planning is an action which aims to influence language and its use therefore it must be a intenrional and conscious choice which could either support and accentuate the ongoing sociolinguistic direction of the speech community, or to change direction of those changes (Coulmas F. 1985:
All in all, Sociolinguistics may be roughly defined as a the study of a relationship between language and society, it combines two fields of study linguistic and sociology, yet the aim of this thesis is not strictly sociological, therefore linguistic part will be discussed further .

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