Glossary of Sociolinguistics

1. Sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is used in society,

explaining why we speak differently in different social contexts. Identifying the social

functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning. It also studies

how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g.,

ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and

adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic

classes.

2. Accent: distinctive way of pronouncing a language, especially one associated with a

particular country, area, or social class, which allow a speaker to be identified regionally

or socially.

3. Argot: An argot is a language of a closed social group of people, invented to prevent

outsiders from understanding their conversations or just for fun. 

4. Bilingualism: The ability to speak two languages with native-like competence.

5. Bilingual: It refers to a person speaking or using two languages with a native-like

proficiency.

6. Code-mixing: It is defined as all case where lexical items and grammatical features from

two languages appear in one sentence.

7. Code switching: Code switching refers to when a speaker alternates between two or

more languages (or dialects or varieties of language) in one conversation. 

8. Creole: A creole is a language that forms from two parent language merging together

into a new language. and has become the main language in a particular place. Creole

language is a language English creoles are spoken by some of the people in Jamaica,

Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and parts of Georgia and South Carolina.

9. Dialect:  A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language used by the people of a

specific area, class, district, or any other group of people and involves the spelling,

sounds, grammar and pronunciation used by a particular group of people and it

distinguishes them from other people around them.

10. Ethnicity: It is an involuntary group of people who share the same culture or descendants

of such people who identify themselves and/or identified by others as belonging to the

same involuntary group

11. Idiolect:  An idiolect is a person's specific, unique way of speaking.

12. Isogloss: Isogloss refers to the maps are drawn to show actual boundary lines between

regions using different dialects.

13. Jargon: Special words and phrases which are used by particular groups of people,

especially in their particular profession.

14. Mutually intelligible: It refers to a situation where speakers of 2 different varieties are

able to understand one another's speech

15. Langue: A term used by Saussure to refer to the collective knowledge of a community of

the language spoken by its members.

16. Lingua franca: It refers to a language used for the primary purpose of communicating

across speech communities whose members speak different languages usually the second

language of all speakers involved

17. Multilingual: It refers to a person speaking or using more than two languages.

18. Parole: A term deriving from Ferdinand de Saussure and which refers to language as it is

spoken, contrast this with langue.

19. Pidgin:  A language that has developed from a mixture of two languages. It is used as a

way of communicating by people who do not speak each other's languages.

20. Plurilingualism: It is the ability to use several languages, as an integrated whole, for the

purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural action.

21. Prestige: It is the degree of esteem and social value attached by members of a speech

community to certain languages, dialects, or features of a language variety and frequently

also believed to be the grammatically "correct" form.

22. Register:  It is a part of sociolinguistics, which is the study of the way in which we use

language in a social context. the term register refers to specific lexical and grammatical

choices as made by speakers depending on the situational context.

23. Regional dialect: It is a way of pronouncing a language which is common to a region.

24. Sociolect: It refers to a variety of language associated with a particular social group.

25. Speech community:  Any identifiable group of speakers who use a more or less unified

type of language.

Style: It is defined as a "variation in the speech of individual speakers".

26. Slang: It is highly informal and is often used in colloquial speech.

27. Standard English: It is that variety of English, which is usually, used print, and which is

normally taught in schools and to non-native speakers learning the language and the

variety, which is normally spoken by educated people and used in news broadcasts and

other similar situations.

28. Standard variety: It refers to the variety of language spoken by the most powerful group

in a community and generally held to be "correct" by prescriptive grammarians.