230237 Doing Sociolinguistics (S) (SoSe 2026)

Sociolinguistics is the study of of the interaction between language and society and looks at the social functions of language. This includes matters of language and identity, the investigation of social factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age and their influence on language (variation), but also questions of multilingualism and language contact. In this course, we will be looking at the development of the field of sociolinguistics and a number of different methodological approaches to sociolinguistic research, such as corpus linguistics, ethnography, surveys etc., that have been successfully applied more recently. Furthermore, we will be looking at a number of sociolinguistic studies, reflecting different research agendas as well as theoretical and methodological orientations. We will discuss the advantages and limitations of approaches, but you will also spend a significant amount of time in the field, as you will design and conduct your own small-scale research project and present the results of your investigation at the end of the semester.