Sociolinguistics and Sociology: Current Directions, Future Partnerships

In this article, I discuss the past, present, and future of interdisciplinary scholarship between sociolinguists and sociologists. After detailing some of the broader history of collaboration between sociolinguists and sociologists, I examine two sub-areas of scholarship: the variationist tradition from sociolinguistics and the social stratification tradition from sociology. I contend that, given their complementary research questions and analytic traditions, these areas provide new potential for interdisciplinary research initiatives. I give suggestions for research partnerships between sociolinguists and sociologists, and close with a discussion of some practical ways in which sociolinguists and sociologists can build interdisciplinarity both pedagogically as well as professionally. Relationships between Sociolinguistics and Sociology Modern sociolinguistics originated in the 1960s as an interdisciplinary subfield intersecting sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. In 1963, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that the methodological similarity between sociology and linguistics ‘imposes a special obligation for collaboration upon them’ (32). A 1964 seminar at the LSA Summer Linguistics Institute and a 1966 session at the Ohio Valley Sociological Society’s annual meeting were each on the topic of sociolinguistics (Fishman 1997, Shuy 2003). Courses were being developed in the sociology of language/ sociolinguistics, and critical works were being published. Despite this early engagement, the attentions of sociologists and linguists and, to a lesser extent, anthropologists, diverged. Sociologists often lacked basic training in linguistics and generally did not see language as a source of sociological data, though they expressed interest in the social patterning of linguistic variables. And sociolinguists ‘seemed interested in broad contextualization but not necessarily in sociology’ (Shuy 2003:6). Part of the problem lay in the time required to understand both fields. A sociologist who took the time to train in linguistics ‘ran the serious risk of sacrificing other aspects of sociological knowledge required by that field’, and the same went for anthropologists and linguists (Shuy 2003:7).