ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys sociolinguistic research on East Africa. The chapter first examines the macro-sociolinguistic areas of inquiry that have garnered the most attention from researchers, namely language policy and planning and language in education, before turning to the micro-linguistic analysis of language use in relation to social contexts. Existing sociolinguistic research in the region is rather uneven in terms of quantity of studies and focus. In the nations where sociolinguistics is nascent, existing research generally takes a macro-sociolinguistic lens, focusing on the sociology of language as in Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and South Sudan. In contrast, sociolinguistic research has had a much longer history in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and work on Ethiopia has been productive recently too. In these contexts, scholarship has developed which now includes studies of the linguistic landscape, language and popular culture, and the study of youth language and linguistic variation. This difference in focus and quantity points to drastically disparate resources and uneven opportunities to conduct research across East Africa, and it highlights potential areas of inquiry for future research.
