Sociolinguistics

Alan Strode Campbell Ross (1 February 1907 – 23 September 1980) was a British academic specialising in linguistics. He is best remembered as the ultimate source and inspiration for author Nancy Mitford's "U and non-U" forms of behaviour and language usage as class indicators.

She is a third-person, singular personal pronoun (subject case) in Modern English. In 1999, the American Dialect Society chose "she" as the word of the past millennium.

Joual is an accepted name for the linguistic features of basilectal Quebec French that are associated with the French-speaking working class in Montreal which has become a symbol of national identity for some. Joual is stigmatized by some and celebrated by others. While joual is often considered a sociolect of the Québécois working class, many feel that perception is outdated.

Within the linguistic study of endangered languages, sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from an endangered language to a majority language, not all speakers acquire full linguistic competence; instead, speakers have varying degrees and types of competence depending on their exposure to the minority language in their upbringing. The relevance of speaker types in cases of language shift was first noted by Nancy Dorian, who coined the term semi-speaker to refer to those speakers of Sutherland Gaelic who were predominantly English-speaking and whose Gaelic competence was limited and showed considerable influence from English. Later studies added additional speaker types such as rememberers (who remember some words and phrases but have little or no grammatical competence and do not actively speak the language), and passive speakers (who have nearly full comprehension competence but do not actively speak the language). In the context of language revitalization, new speakers who have learned the endangered language as a second language are sometimes distinguished.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice. Scholars working in the tradition of CDA generally argue that (non-linguistic) social practice and linguistic practice constitute one another and focus on investigating how societal power relations are established and reinforced through language use. In this sense, it differs from discourse analysis in that it highlights issues of power asymmetries, manipulation, exploitation, and structural inequities in domains such as education, media, and politics.

Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture. Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term.

The Declaration on the Common Language (Serbo-Croatian: Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku / Декларација о заједничком језику) was issued in 2017 by a group of intellectuals and NGOs from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia who were working under the banner of a project called "Language and Nationalism". Before any public presentation, the Declaration has been signed by over 200 prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from the four countries. The Declaration on the common language is an attempt to counter nationalistic factions. Its aim is to stimulate discussion on language without the nationalistic baggage and to contribute to the reconciliation process.

Linguistic reappropriation, reclamation or resignification is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change (change in a word's meaning). Linguistic reclamation can have wider implications in the fields of discourse and has been described in terms of personal or sociopolitical empowerment.

Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is a field of linguistics that studies the relationship between language and culture and how different ethnic groups perceive the world. It is the combination between ethnology and linguistics. The former refers to the way of life of an entire community: all the characteristics that distinguish one community from the other. Such characteristics make the cultural aspects of a community or a society.

The usage of a language is the manner in which the written and spoken language is routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to theoretical or idealized models of how a language works or (should work) in the abstract. Fowler characterized usage as "the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used" and as the "points of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice of words."