Social dimensions of language change

Language change results from the differential propagation of linguistic variants distributed among the linguistic repertoires of communicatively interacting individuals in a given community. From this it follows that language change is socially-mediated in two important ways. First, since language change is a social-epidemiological process that takes place by propagating some aspect of communicative practice across a socially-structured network, the organization of the social group in question can affect how a variant propagates. It is known, for example, that densely connected social networks tend to be resistant to innovations, where as more sparsely connected ones are more open to them. Second, social and cultural factors, such as language ideologies, can encourage the propagation of particular variants at the expense of others in particular contexts, likewise contributing to language change. The purpose of this chapter is to survey our current understanding of the social factors that affect the emergence and propagation of linguistic variants, and thus language change, by bringing together insights from variationist sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and evolutionary approaches to language change. It is important to note that there are, as discussed in Chapter 1, important factors beyond the social ones discussed in this chapter that affect variant propaga-