Sotsiaallingvistika

Sotsiaallingvistika, or sociolinguistics, is the study of how language varies and changes in society. It investigates the relationships between linguistic form and social factors, such as speaker identity, group membership, and social context. The field seeks to understand why speakers alter their speech and how these variations convey social meaning and influence language change over time.

Core concepts include variationist analysis, style-shifting, language attitudes, and indexicality—the way linguistic features signal social meanings. Key variables often include age, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, region, and institutional setting. Researchers collect data through sociolinguistic interviews, naturalistic observation, and corpora, then analyze phonetic, lexical, and grammatical variation, frequently using quantitative methods to link features to social factors.

Subfields encompass dialectology, language contact and multilingualism, diglossia, code-switching, and language policy and planning. Applications span education, media, and urban planning, where understanding language variation informs policy and public attitudes. In Estonia and related Nordic and Baltic contexts, sotsiaallingvistika examines the dynamics of Estonian, Russian, and other languages in bilingual communities, language shift, and the construction of social identities through language.