Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language use and the structure of society. It takes into account such factors as the social backgrounds of both the speaker and the addressee (i.e. their age, sex, social class, ethnic background, degree of integration into their neighbourhood, etc.), the relationship between speaker and addressee (good friends, employer–employee, teacher–pupil, grandmother–grandchild, etc.) and the context and manner of the interaction (in bed, in the supermarket, in a TV studio, in church, loudly, whispering, over the phone, by fax, etc.), maintaining that they are crucial to an understanding of both the structure and function of the language used in a situation. Because of the emphasis placed on language use, a sociolinguistically adequate analysis of language is typically based on (sound or video) recordings of everyday interactions (e.g. dinner-time conversations with friends, doctor–patient consultations, TV discussion programmes, etc.). Recordings of language use, as described above, can be analysed in a number of different ways depending on the aims of the research. For instance, the sociolinguist may be interested in producing an analysis of regional or social dialects in order to investigate whether different social groups speak differently and to discover whether language change is in progress. Rather different is research into the form and function of politeness in everyday interaction, an interest which will lead to a search for markers of politeness in conversations and how these are related to social dimensions such as those enumerated above. Alternatively, the focus may be on so-called minimal responses (such as mmm, yeah and right) or discourse markers (such as well, you know and actually).
