HISTORICAL, PROCEDURAL AND PEDAGOGICAL ASPECTS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS

When a student of language needs to ask sociological questions about data, he is fortunate that the groundwork has been laid for this type of interdisciplinary research. Less than a generation ago, most invitations and suggestions for mutual involvement of sociologist and linguist remained unfulfilled. For example, in 1946, Raven McDavid, a dialectologist, lamented the fact that professionals in other social sciences were not making sufficient use of the increasing amount of linguistic data elicited by fieldworkers. And he pointed out that the study of the speech of a given community could reveal various factors concerning its social composition, e.g., urban vs. rural population and social class distribution (McDavid, 1946). By 1956, Glenna Pickford, a sociologist, held that sharing linguistic data would be profitable if the linguist took it upon himself to utilize the research methods of other social sciences in order to show not only what is said (actual utterances, with accompanying linguistic descriptions at various levels of grammar: phonological, syntactic, semantic, stylistic), but which social factors have conditioned what is said (the social environments of the utterances). She further implied that the linguistic reality of an utterance should be viewed properly as part of a larger social reality and stated that additional variables would necessarily have to be contended with besides those traditionally favored by the linguist, such as the age, education, occupation, geographic location, and native language of informants. In particular, Pickford stated that subdivisions of variables were possible, e.g., social class, and that these, in combinations, could be relevant for sociological identifications of linguistic data. For example, she mentioned that attitudinal patterns of informants as well as narrow delimitations of socio-economic levels and occupations could help supply specifications requisite to sociological analyses for the purpose of attaining an adequate definition of the concept of social class (Pickford, 1956). The need of sociology for linguistics was recognized, since it appeared to offer a worthwhile method of marking social distinctions (Pickford, 1956). And the need of linguistics for sociology has likewise been acknowledged (Hymes, 1966). Growing mutual interest by Iinguist and sociologist has resulted in the development of a new interdiscipli nary area: sociolinguistics. Both disciplines have shared the hope that reciprocal benefits would accrue, such as, for the sociologist, the role of language as a social behavior, and perhaps, because of its infinite capacity for variation, as the best reflection or measure of its social content, and for the linguist, how grammatical systems operate in more precisely. specified social