Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.
Ulrich Beck was a German sociologist, and one of the most cited social scientists in the world during his lifetime. His work focused on questions of uncontrollability, ignorance and uncertainty in the modern age, and he coined the terms "risk society" and "second modernity" or "reflexive modernization". He also tried to overturn national perspectives that predominated in sociological investigations with a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the interconnectedness of the modern world. He was a professor at the University of Munich and also held appointments at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in Paris, and at the London School of Economics.
Peter Trudgill, FBA is an English sociolinguist, academic and author.
Michael Mann FBA is a British-born emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the University of Cambridge. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received a B.A. in modern history in 1963 and a D.Phil. in sociology in 1971 from the University of Oxford.
Sociology of language is the study of the relations between language and society. It is closely related to the field of sociolinguistics, which focuses on the effect of society on language. One of its longest and most prolific practitioners was Joshua Fishman, who was founding editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, in addition to other major contributions. The sociology of language studies society in relation to language, whereas sociolinguistics studies language in relation to society. For the former, society is the object of study, whereas, for the latter, language is the object of study. In other words, sociolinguistics studies language and how it varies based on the user's sociological background, such as gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. On the other hand, sociology of language studies society and how it is impacted by language. As Trent University professor of global politics Andreas Pickel states, "religion and other symbolic systems strongly shaping social practices and shaping political orientations are examples of the social significance such languages can have." The basic idea is that language reflects, among several other things, attitudes that speakers want to exchange or that just get reflected through language use. These attitudes of the speakers are the sociologist's information.
Saskia Sassen is a Dutch-American sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in New York City, and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. The term global city was coined and popularized by Sassen in her 1991 work, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.
The University of Duisburg-Essen is a public research university in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. In the 2019 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the university was awarded 194th place in the world. It was originally founded in 1654 and re-established on 1 January 2003, as a merger of the Gerhard Mercator University of Duisburg and the university of Essen. It is based in both the cities of Duisburg and Essen, and a part of University Alliance Metropolis Ruhr.
Hans Joas is a German sociologist and social theorist.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in sentence word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate with language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.
Francisco Moreno-Fernández is a Spanish dialectologist and sociolinguist.
The economics of language is an emerging field of study concerning a range of topics such as the effect of language skills on income and trade, and the costs and benefits of language planning options, preservation of minority languages, etc. It is relevant to analysis of language policy.
Monica Heller is a Canadian linguistic anthropologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. She was the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 2013 to 2015.
Sigrid Quack is a German social scientist working in the field of comparative sociology. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, where she is the Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, and was a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.
In applied linguistics, an error is an unintended deviation from the immanent rules of a language variety made by a second language learner. Such errors result from the learner's lack of knowledge of the correct rules of the target language variety. A significant distinction is generally made between errors and mistakes which are not treated the same from a linguistic viewpoint. The study of learners' errors has been the main area of investigation by linguists in the history of second-language acquisition research.
Taasisi ya Taaluma za Kiswahili, known by its acronym TATAKI, is a research body dedicated to the research of the Kiswahili language and literature at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
Franz Bosbach is a German historian and university professor.
Ursula Reutner is a German linguist. She holds the Chair of Romance Languages and Cultures at the University of Passau. Reutner is an internationally renowned expert in Romance Studies and Intercultural Communication, who has won several awards for her work, including the Prix Germaine de Staël, the Elise Richter Prize and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad del Salvador.
Karl-Rudolf Korte is a German political scientist and since 2002 professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen on Campus Duisburg. He appears regularly in national media as a guest for election analyses.
John Gordon Baugh V is an American academic and linguist. His main areas of study are sociolinguistics, forensic linguistics, education, and African American language studies. He is currently the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, and President of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2020 Baugh was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the section on Linguistics and Language Sciences, and in 2021 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kerstin Brückweh is a historian with a focus on German and British modern and contemporary history. She is a professor in economic and social history at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences and Technology in Berlin, Germany.
