social variation

Social Variation
Research in language variation has shifted to sociolinguistics for over past 40 years. This field is concerned with the interrelationship between the language of a group and its social characteristics. Regional dialectology and sociolinguistics are mutually exclusive and fields of study. On the contrary, researchers in regional dialectology often include social logical information about their informants such as, age and education. Likewise, sociolinguistics must often take into account regional influences on the social dialects they are studying. Nevertheless, we can draw a few generalizations about why research in language variation toward sociolinguistics.
Several trends developed in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s that shifted attention to social variation. First, since regional dialectologist had been collecting information about social variables such as age and education, it was a natural step for linguist to become interested in social variables for their own sake. Second, linguistics found it impossible to deal with language variation without acknowledging the fact that listeners often make social judgments based on characteristic of a speaker’s dialect. Thus arose in interest in standard and non standard dialects. It's no simple matter to define the differences between a standard and non standard variety of a language. Usually standard dialect draws no negative attention to it self. However nonstandard dialect draws negative attention to itself. Third, the interest in nonstandard dialects in the 1960s and 1970s led quiet naturally is interest in what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Research on non standard dialects in general and on AAVE in particular has been especially relevant to practical problems in public education.
A final reason for the increased interest in social dialects is that, while regional dialects are characterized largely by lexical variation ; social dialects are more likely to reflect grammatical variation – variation of phonology, morphology, and system. On this case grammatical variation tends to be more systematic and predictable.