Our courses: Sociolinguistics (1 and 2)

The course introduces various approaches to and case studies of sociolinguistic to analysis of linguistic data. Sociolinguistics use its own methods that are essentially different from the methods used in traditional descriptive approaches and language theory, focusing on social interactions and the role the language play in them and social meanings it conveys. We focus on variationist sociolinguistics of Russian and contact linguistics. These two domains of sociolinguistics, although they do not fully cover this discipline, are probably most relevant for language description as they answer important challenges that both a field research on minority languages and a scholarly description of major languages faces, such as non-inherited shared lexicon and structural convergence in contact linguistics and co-existence of different linguistic structures in variationist sociolinguistics. The course heavily relies on reading seminal papers and their presentation and discussion during the seminars.