OVERVIEW

After briefly introducing the concepts of sociolinguistics and language ecology, this chapter looks at the nature of speech communities and communities of practice, especially professional communities, and the role of language use in these communities. It then concentrates on the notions of communicative competence and academic and professional literacy, as well as exploring the related sociolinguistic areas of language inequality and deficit.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE ECOLOGY

Sociolinguistics looks at how language is used in social contexts and shaped by them, and in turn, how the language use affects the social contexts. Thus sociolinguists explore ‘the commonplace observations that everyone does not speak language in the same way, that we alter our speech to suit our audiences, and that we recognise members and non-members of our communities via speech’ (Silberstein 2001: 100). Sociolinguistic research is often interdisciplinary and uses a series of social categories, including age, gender, class, ethnicity and employment, to investigate a range of speech communities and how the power relationships in and between those communities are linked to and affected by language use. Sociolinguists examine the relationships between language and society using insights from various disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and linguistics. Their findings, for example Labov's seminal work on language and social stratification in New York City (Labov 1972a and b), have had an important influence on attitudes and policies regarding language status and language learning.

The concept of ecology is used in various disciplinary areas including biology, geography, economics and sociology, and the concept of language ecology, ‘the study of the relations between language use and the world within which language is used’ (van Lier 2004: 44) is a useful way of making sense of language use in the age of globalisation and a world of ‘changing language in a changing society’ (Blommaert 2010). It was first used in language studies by the Norwegian linguist Einar Haugen who ‘was particularly sensitive to various forms of linguistic discrimination between native speakers of American English, and those speakers who, like him, spoke English with a “foreign” accent’ (Baugh 2011: 20). Generally speaking, ecological approaches to language studies ‘draw on parallels between languages in society and models of biological diversity’ (Tollefson 2011: 369). Language ecology has a particular resonance as regards the close link between languages and biological diversity (Loh and Harmon 2014), and the related notions of endangered languages and language death.