Introducing Sociolinguistics

This paper presents an overview of sociolinguistics by examining the fundamental concepts and issues therein. Research efforts in sociolinguistics focus on speakers and their exploration of language to cope with their daily communicative goals in society. The innate potential of language to cope with a wide range of phenomena to be expressed by speakers is incredible. Indeed, the repertoire of language is not exhaustive. Speakers express cultural norms, political issues, legal discourses, religious messages and scientific facts by using a linguistic system of communication – language. Sociolinguistics is the study of language and society. It elucidates the co-existence of different languages in society. Within a social structure, there are varieties of languages which contribute to the linguistic system and facilitate choice-making. Sociolinguistics is about language and society. In this study, we introduce sociolinguistics by examining language (its definition, functions and varieties), society, speech community and other phenomena that are on the front-burner in the literature.