Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationships between language use and social structure. It investigates the correlation between linguistic (i.e., phonological, lexical, and grammatical) variables and social (i.e., gender, age, status, and ethnicity) variables. Since sociolinguistics is concerned with both linguistic and social aspects of language, researchers identify two main distinctions in sociolinguistic inquiry. Micro-sociolinguistics focuses on the social aspects of language, while macro-sociolinguistics examines how linguistic features can provide explanations for certain social phenomena. In other words, micro-sociolinguistics investigates how society influences the way people communicate, while macro-sociolinguistics studies society in relation to language.

Sociolinguistics is a relatively new branch of linguistics. Despite a long tradition of dialect research dating back to the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1960s that sociolinguistics became a recognized area of language research. This came about as a result of the projects that were carried out by William...