Multilingualism

Though Nepal in all its diversity is unquestionable our dominant national language the country has always had a complex multilingual history. Monolingualism that is the qability to use but a single language code is such a widely accepted norm in  so many parts of the western world that it is often assumed to be a world wide phenomen to the extent that bilingual and multilingual individuals may appear to be unusual. However in  many parts of the world an ability to speak more than one language is not at all remarkable. In fact a monolingual individual would be regarded as a misfit lacking an important skill in society the skill of being able to interact freely with the speakers of other languages with whom regular contact is made in the ordinary bussiness of living. In many parts of the world it is just a normal requirement and yet another for contact with the outside world of wider social or political organization. These various languages are usually acquired naturally and unconsciously and the shifts from one to another are made without hesitation.

language and gender

various sociolinguistic researches have explored that women regardless of other social characteristics. Such as class, age etc. use more standard forms of language than men. It is also claimed that this pattern of sex differentiations is so ubiquitous in western societies today that one could look at women's speech to determine which forms carry prestige in a community and conversely at men's to find out which are stigmatized. While many reasons such as women's alleged greater status consciousness and concern for politeness have been put forward to try to explain these results, they have never satisfactorily accounted for generally women appear to use language that expresses more uncertainity than men, suggesting less confidence in what they say. Men have been reported to inturrupted more than women and to use stronger expletives while the latter use more polite forms. Gender differences in the use of english are subtle. Nonetheless notions of men;s and women's language use abound. Men are said to swear a lot to be more coarse and csual studies claim that American women know more color terms and men know tool names, that women use more qualities and more likely than men to end  declarative sentence with a rise pitch.

Language variation

Language variation focuses on how language varies in different contexts, where contexts refers to things like ethnicity, social class, sex, geography, age and a number of other factors. In sociolinguistics a variety also called a lect is a form of a language used by speakers of that language. this may include dialects accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation. Variety avoids the terms language which many people associate with the standard language and dialect which is associated with non-standard varieties thought of as less prestigious or correct than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard varieties. Infact one of the most important domain of linguistics is language variation, which refer to different sorts of language and different sub varieties of the same language that are used in different situations. Under language variation we can study the varieties such as dialects, registers, ideolects, deal languages pidgins, creoles, lingua francas etc. varieties such as dialects, ideolects and sociolects can be distinguished not only by their vocabularly, but also by differences in grammer, phonology and prosody. For instance the total word accents of scandinavian languages have differenging realizations in many dialects.

Ethnography of speaking

Ethnography of speaking is the study of ways of speaking as they competences that is knowledge of appropriate ways of speaking within their culrure. The unit of analysis is  the communicative event a single verbal interaction within a specific communicative siktuations as recognized by the study of language and bring in socaial context. It must deal with the real texts that make up human communication and the social situations in which they are used. That is the focus of attention shifts from the sentence to the act of communication, the sppech event. Ethnography of speaking is an anthropologically based sociolinguistic model the central concepts of which were developed, building on a mdel of communication. Any communicative use of language or speech event is constituded by seven distinct factors each associated with a different function. The first two are the speaker- writer and the hearer-reader from the resources of a speech code. The massage from expresses of a topic sme physical means some chanel visual in the case of writing or sign language or other. It is possible to study these one at a time, but each must be included to understand the working of the system.

Social and linguistic variables

Social often involves studies making use of quantative analasys which establishes correlations between certain social and linguistic variables. In many cases once a sample of sppeech data has ben obtained from a groupe of speakers representing particular social catagories, the emphasis is subsquently almost entirely on quantifying, formalizing and analyzing the linguistic variables. For example words, like singing and fishing are sometimes pronounced as singin and fishin. The final sound in these words may be called the linguistic variables (ng) with its two variants singing and singin. Another linguistic variable can be the cases of re-pronounciations. In words like farm and far, sometimes it is given r-less pronunciations. Accordingly we have a linguistic variable (r) with two linguistic variants of (r) and zero. Like wise we also have a linguistic vaqriants [h] and zero pronunciations. The linguistic variable can also be seen at the syntactic level in black english such as the presence or absence of be with as the 3rd person singular subject the negative particle with multiple newgations.

Components of sociolinguistics study

Components of sociolinguistics study: sociolinguistics methodology requires a number of stages in preparation for the collection, processing and selection of the appropriate speakers, circumstances and linguistic variables. Ther are a number of obvious problems with trying to apply a labovian. Style quantitative model, based on the selection of representative informants and the composition of a balance corpus to the study of a past language state. Invitably the socio-historical linguist is obliged to adopt methodologies which would be deemed unacceptable for a sociolinguistic, analysis of contemporary french. In this section we will discuss problems associated with identifying appropriate textual sources. Inaddition we will consider the difficulties of deciding upon the variables and particularly of treating syntactic issuses in a socio-historical perspective. The following are the major components of sociolinguistic study: social factors, social dimensions, explanations. Social factors related to the users of language- the setting and functions of the interaction. Social dimension related to social distance, status, formality, functions and explanations need to identify clearly the linguistic variation involved and different social or non-linguistic factors.

Sociolinguistics methodology

Sociolinguistics methodology : Often it is claimed that sociolinguistics has lacked a convincing theoretical model within which to situated and explain its findings. While sociolinguistics have shown the importance of heterogeneity and developed powerful stastistical methods for analyzing it, some critics have claimed that they have not really explained it. There has been some confusion in sociolinguistic discussions about what it means to explain something, as about cause and effect.This is particularly true in studies making use of quantitative certain social and linguistic variables. Infact it is almost paradoxical that for many this kind of speech data has been obtained from a group of speakers representing particular social catagories such as class, gender etc. are taken as given and the social context which motivated the collection of data in the first place is often lost sight of in the final product within such stastical studies it is often easy to forget that speakeakers create and interpret language rather than merely respond passively to variables such as style, social class membership etc.