3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

We all use language every day—not just to communicate information, but to communicate who we are. How does this work? What do our language choices tell others about us? This course will consider some of the ways in which language and society are entangled—both the ways that different social categories are encoded in language, and the ways that groups of people use language to define themselves. Along the way, the course will address questions of dialect, diglossia, multilingualism, style, language planning, politeness, language and gender, language and power, and more. This course is designed for students without a background in linguistics. During the semester students will learn the basic research methods used by sociolinguists, then complete a project on a topic of their choosing.