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. All students should seek approval from the teacher responsible before completing course selection. 

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 seminars and 10 hours of classes in the AT. 10 hours of seminars and 10 hours of classes in the WT. 1 hour of seminars and 1 hour of classes in the ST.

Two hours per week, featuring: (a) Presentations on a range of concepts and themes; (b) classes including students' presentations; (c) revision workshops.  Students on this course will have a reading week in week 6 of AT and WT.

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
• McConnell-Ginet, S., (2020). Words matter: Meaning and power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Mooney, Annabelle et al (2015). Language, Society and Power. An Introduction, 4th edition, London: Routledge
• Ottenheimer, H. J., & Pine, J. M. (2018). The anthropology of language: an introduction to linguistic anthropology. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. 
• 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

Coursework (50%) in the WT and ST.
Take-home assessment (50%) in the ST.

The coursework consists of a sociolinguistic project which includes an oral presentation of the project (10%, 500 words) in the WT and a project essay (40%, 4000 words).

The take-home assessment set during the spring exam period will have to be completed over a period of seven days.