ABSTRACT
In the last two to three decades there has been rapid development in the branch of linguistics now known as sociolinguistics, i.e. the study of language as it is used by real speakers in social and situational contexts of use. These developments have been accelerated by technological advances, the first of these being the tape-recorder. Since the 1950s, it has become much more feasible than it formerly was to collect very large samples of speech in naturalistic contexts and to develop sophisticated methods of analysis of the corpora collected at all linguistic levels—from phonology to discourse and conversational structure. Before that time, those who were interested in language in social contexts were much more dependent for their data on either formal questionnaire techniques (which tend to encourage rather formal or brief responses from informants) or on relatively unsystematic observation of language in use. One obvious disadvantage of reliance on these methods was that, because of the limitations of human memory, it was difficult to study empirically linguistic organisation at any level above that of the sentence. Through advances in field techniques, including access to a much greater range of the speech behaviour of live speakers, sociolinguistics has opened up a number of questions of research interest—such as attitudes to language, the relation of the speaker to the language, the role of the speaker in linguistic change—that can now be investigated empirically much more fully than formerly.
