ABSTRACT
Modern sociolinguistic study differs from earlier interests in the relationships in that it views both language and society as structures, rather than as mere collections of items. The dimension of sociolinguistic study concerns the conditioning factors of linguistic diversity—the socially defined elements which determine the choice, within a particular society, of alternative linguistic forms. In South Asia, ones have of course to deal with sociolinguistic diversity both of the multilingual type—as in the competition between English, Hindi, and regional languages—and of the multidialectal type. The published data on Indian social dialects provide evidence which is quite adequate to establish that difference in semantic structures is in fact present. The semantic structure has only recently become a favored area of research for descriptive linguists. Descriptions of Indian caste dialects, like other sociolinguistic studies, have usually been organized along another dimension, corresponding to the divisions of language structure recognized by descriptive linguists.
