Dr Peter Skrandies PEL.6.01f

Available as an outside option to all undergraduate and General Course students. Students can take this course in any year of their studies following approval from the teacher responsible and subject to their own programme regulations.

The course will introduce students to key (socio)linguistic concepts (semantic and pragmatic meaning, discourse, register, genre, dialect, idiolect, sociolect) employed in the analysis of language use as a social process. Students will explore the reciprocal relationship between language and specific social contexts and structures (class, gender, ethnicity), and study the role that language plays in the creation, maintenance and change of social relations and institutions. Important themes are changing attitudes to language and the prestige afforded to particular languages and language varieties. The use of language for academic purposes will be analysed, as will be situations of language contact, multilingualism and the role of translation in intercultural and international communication. The implications and consequences for less widely used languages of the emergence of English (and other widely spoken languages) as global lingua francas will be outlined and discussed.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the MT. 10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the LT. 1 hour of lectures and 1 hour of classes in the ST.

Two hours per week, featuring: (a) Lectures on a range of concepts and themes; (b) classes including students' presentations; (c) revision workshops; (d) tutorials.  Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6 of MT and LT.

Short essays, linguistic analyses, presentations.

• Edwards, John (2013). Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Mesthrie, Rajend (ed) (2011) The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Meyerhoff, Miriam (2018). Introducing Sociolinguistics, 3rd ed., London: Routledge;
• Mooney, Annabelle et al (2015). Language, Society and Power. An Introduction, 4th edition, London: Routledge
• Wardhaugh, Ronald (2014). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 7th ed., Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 
• Wodak, Ruth et al (2011) The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics, London: SAGE
• Yule, George (2016). The Study of Language, 6th ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Exam (60%, duration: 2 hours) in the summer exam period.
Coursework (40%).

The coursework consists of a sociolinguistic project which includes an oral presentation of the project (10%, 500 words) in the LT and a project essay  (30%, 4000 words) in the ST.