What is the sociolect?
The sociolect is a social dialect, that is, a variety of language spoken by a social group. It refers to the way in which a certain society or social class makes use of the language, the way in which a certain sentence is expressed in one class or another.
There may be several levels of sociolect, for example, a cult level, a colloquial level and a vulgar level. In this way, the sociolect is closely linked to the academic and cultural formation of a social group, which ultimately comes to mark and condition the way of expressing each other.
For example, there are ways to express the same idea in a cultured language and in a colloquial one.
Examples of sociolect:
- We went shopping / We went to the store.
- My stylus was damaged / My face was damaged.
- We are friends / We are partners.
- Let me know / Throw me water
- I do not have money / I am without wool
- The lady went into hysteria / The spoon went wild
- That man has hyperhidrosis / That man sweats a lot
- I had an episode of headache / I had a headache
Culture depends a lot when it comes to using a particular language. The planet Earth is full of a surprising cultural richness of languages.
Image: wikipedia.org + flickr.com
