Pour un état de la question sur les variables sociales en linguistique «variationniste»

Abstract

If sociolinguistics generally observes language in its social context, scientists have, nonetheless, different points of view. Some of them talk about the “sociology of language” (which targets a better understating of the society through language) while some researchers distinguish “sociolinguistics” (which highlights the relationship between human being and its language usages). In this article, we propose a brief review about another program. Indeed, the “variationnist” linguistics (directly inspired by Labov’s surveys) poses some systematic correlations between language and social factors. It is with the main social variables that we want to deal. Their theoretical issues and practical aspects will be exposed. For each of them, we will present a particular instance (applied to French and English) extracted from some of the major surveys realized over the past thirty years.

Keywords

• variation
• social classes
• age
• sex
• talk market
• social networks