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 important issues in sociolinguistics and explain why they are significant. 2. Train critical thinking on how language represents and reproduces ideologies. 3. Formulate viewpoints on various types of interaction by which people achieve different social purposes.

Electronic files of journal articles and book chapters will be provided in iLearn. Besides weekly reading assignments, students need to download or print weekly handouts from PowerPoint files. Reading assignments and handouts are both required for class discussion.

In order to protect Intellectual Properties of individual authors and publishers, hardcopies of the textbook are not allowed in class.