Latgalistikys kongresu materiali, III. 2011. - Latvijas Universitāte

— Sociology of language: sociology with a focus on language (no interest
in geographical variation);
— Geography of language: geography with a focus on language (no interest
in social variation).
Linguistics
Geography
Sociology
Space
(diatopic
variation)
Geolinguistics
Geography
of languages
Language
Society
(diastratic
variation)
Sociolinguistics
Sociology of
language
72
Figure 1: Language as research focus
It is clear that specific studies and scientific analyses can be based on
more than one of these (sub)disciplines, or on an overlapping of any of
them.
Survey Latgale, for example, the data of which will be taken in consideration
here, is a research project that approaches language use from
both geographical and sociological points of view. It consists of a large sociolinguistic
survey of language use as declared by the residents of Eastern
Latvia. It aims at analysing when, where and with whom the languages of
the region are used — but not at internal language variation within society.
For this survey, more than 9100 persons were interviewed in
125 municipalities of Eastern Latvia — mainly in the historical region of
Latgale — grouped into 74 demographically homogeneous areas (see Lazdiņa,
Šuplinska 2009, Dell’Aquila, Iannàccaro 2008c and, for a cartographical
approach, Dell’Aquila, Iannàccaro 2009).
In this paper we will discuss a type of cross-disciplinary analysis
which adds a geographical point of view to sociolinguistics and, more
deeply, to sociology of language. In particular we will consider a dialectometric
approach to the sociolinguistic data (see also Dell’Aquila, Iannàccaro
2008a, 2008b, and Dell’Aquila 2010).