A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

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as the linguistic identity of social groups, social attitudes to language, standard
and non-standard forms of language, the patterns and needs of national
language use, social varieties and levels of language, the social basis of
multilingualism, and so on. An alternative name sometimes given to the
subject (which suggests a greater concern with sociological rather than linguistic
explanations of the above) is the sociology of language. Any of the branches of
linguistics could, in principle, be separately studied within an explicitly social
perspective, and some use is accordingly made of such terms as sociophonetics
and sociophonology, when this emphasis is present, as in the study of the
properties of accents. In Hallidayan linguistics, the term sociosemantics has a
somewhat broader sense, in which the choices available within a grammar are
related to communication roles found within the speech situation, as when a
particular type of question is perceived in social terms to be a threat.
The term overlaps to some degree with ethnolinguistics and anthropological
linguistics, reflecting the overlapping interests of the correlative disciplines
involved – sociology, ethnology and anthropology. The study of dialects
is sometimes seen as a branch of sociolinguistics, and sometimes differentiated
from it, under the heading of dialectology, especially when regional dialects
are the focus of study. When the emphasis is on the language of face-to-face
interaction, the approach is known as interactional sociolinguistics (see interaction).
Sociological linguistics is sometimes differentiated from sociolinguistics,
particularly in Europe, where the term reflects a concern to see language
as an integral part of sociological theory. Also sometimes distinguished is
sociohistorical linguistics, the study of the way particular linguistic functions
and types of variation develop over time within specific languages, speech communities,
social groups and individuals.
sociological linguistics, sociology of language
see sociolinguistics
sociophonetics, sociophonology, sociosemantics (n.)
see sociolinguistics
sociopragmatics (n.) A term sometimes used within the study of pragmatics,to
refer to the way conditions on language use derive from the social situation.
It contrasts with a view of pragmatics in which language use is studied from
the viewpoint of the structural resources available in a language (sometimes
referred to as pragmalinguistics).
soft consonant An impressionistic term sometimes used in the phonetic
descriptions of particular languages, referring to a consonant which is palatalized;
also called a soft sign. Russian is a language which has several such
soft (as opposed to hard) consonants. In Russian the [ symbol (‘soft sign’)
typically marks the palatalization (or ‘softening’) of the preceding consonant.
soft palate
soft sign
see palate
see soft consonant
sonagraph (n.) The commercial name of the most widely used model of
sound spectrograph, its visual displays being referred to as sonagrams (cf.
‘spectrograms’).