Sociolinguistics is the study of the structure and use of language in its social and cultural contexts. This course is intended to provide students with a sound, basic coverage of some topics dealing with regional and social dialects, gender and age, as well as topics on multilingual speech communities: language choice, language maintenance, and language planning.

1. Identify research questions appropriate to the discipline of sociolinguistics and explain why they are important, i.e., how answering them could contribute to an understanding of the nature of human language. 2. Practice some of the methods that sociolinguists use to collect and analyze data. 3. Critically read and evaluate published research in sociolinguistics.

Ahearn, Laura. 2011. The Socially Charged Life of Language: Living Language. Malden, MA: Blackwell.