Sociolinguistics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course covers the inherently interdisciplinary underpinnings of sociolinguistics, the distinct subfield of linguistic study which seeks to understand the complexities of how human language is used in a myriad of contexts. More simply put: determining and measuring the relationship between language and society. Students examine spaces where language and constructs like class, gender, race, regional orientation, come together to affect our interactions on a micro (interpersonal) and macro (international) scale. With sociolinguistic lenses, we can evaluate how we use language to influence large-scale discourse like political rhetoric to anthropological understandings of diverse cultural identities and even internally investigating how our brains react to varieties of linguistic style, register, and dialect based on the social constructs informing the social group in question.