Abstract

Sociolinguistics is a young and vigorous branch of linguistics. Brought to life in the late 1960s through the pioneering work on urban dialects by William Labov and his students, it developed rapidly. From the end of the 1970s, it expanded to include a vast range of studies focusing on various relations between language and society. From sociolinguistics in the narrow sense—the study of correlations between linguistic and nonlinguistic variables—it came to be used as an umbrella term of loosely connected research into the interdependence and mutual influence of language and social life. Nowadays, sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary field, focusing on such issues as social dialects, multilingualism, language planning, and language reform and change.