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This course is threefold :
1.The study of theoretical concepts : linguistic variation (language, dialect, "patois", etc.), languages in contact (bilingualism, diglossia, etc.), linguistic community, linguistic market (speakers and norms), linguistic utterances and speakers' representations.
2.The presentation of the technical skills required by the sociolinguistic inquiry (creating questionnaires, selecting samples, data processing, etc.).
3.The application of theoretical and methodological skills through field work.
At the end of this course, the student will be able:
1.To understand the conceptual framework developed by sociolinguistics for the analysis of the relationship between the speaker, the language and the social group.
2.To understand the methods of contemporary sociolinguistics, while applying critical points of view.
3.To make use of both theoretical and methodological competences as acquired in concrete situations (namely field inquiries).
The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.
The assessment is based on students' personal research, which will be synthesized in a written paper and presented verbally. During this oral presentation, students should also be able to answer questions regarding the general content of the course.
The course is mainly based on the teacher's lectures, but these are nonetheless completed by and fed with readings of seminal articles and students' discussions of sociolinguistic issues (via forums in i-Campus or during course sessions). Training is continued through meetings between teacher and individual students aiming at preparing the final assessment.
The course will first recount the historical context of the emergence of sociolinguistics and will thereafter present the various trends which were developed within this discipline (with a focus on their epistemological and methodological orientations). For each of them, the course will focus, on the one hand, on their main issues and on the vision of the links between language and society they put forward, and on the other hand, on their main research methods and types of data. This journey into the history and trends of sociolinguistics allows to discuss different themes (linguistic variation in relation with social class, age, sex ; linguistic attitudes in the French-speaking world, role language plays in the circulation of ideologies and critical analysis of political discourse, etc.).
See course website on i-Campus.
A course website will be available through i-Campus and will allow students to access information and documents related to the course (e.g. various papers illustrating each approach discussed during the course).
