Sociolinguistics: From Everyday Speech to Political Articulation

Abstract

Whether in face-to-face conversation or in the construction of political categories like the people, elites, the state, the nation, the economy, and race, language does not just label preexisting objects but helps construct the realities it aims to describe. No dictionary definition can capture this process. So sociolinguistics studies everything about language except what is in dictionaries and grammar textbooks. The process of typification is the key. In everyday communication, people typify by screening out what seems irrelevant in a situation, word, or concept so that actors can share a focus. The field’s three main subsets are, first, the ethnography of communication, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis, all of which focus on how everyday interaction takes place; second, language politics; and third, the process of typifying and retypifying political concepts, people, and movements over history, which researchers call political articulation. How do people arrive at implicit definitions of situations? What are the consequences when people miss each other’s cues? How do keywords like race or nation transform over time? In all, such questions are about the processes by which people typify each other, situations, and institutions.