Editing Sociolinguistics (section)

==Applications==
Sociolinguistics can be divided into subfields, which make use of different research methods, and have different goals.  Dialectologists survey people through interviews, and compile maps.  Ethnographers such as [[Dell Hymes]] and his students often live amongst the people they are studying.  Conversation analysts such as [[Harvey Sacks]] and interactional sociolinguists such as [[John J. Gumperz]] record audio or video of natural encounters, and then analyze the tapes in detail.  Sociolinguists tend to be aware of how the act of interviewing might affect the answers given.

Some sociolinguists study language on a national level among large populations to find out how language is used as a social institution.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Sociolinguistics {{!}} Linguistic Society of America|url=https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/sociolinguistics|access-date=2021-04-19|website=linguisticsociety.org}}</ref> William Labov, a Harvard and Columbia University graduate, is often regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics which focuses on the quantitative analysis of [[variation (linguistics)|variation]] and [[language change|change]] within languages, making sociolinguistics a scientific discipline.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Gordon|first=Matthew J.|date=2017-05-24|title=William Labov|url=https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-364|access-date=2021-04-19|website=Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics|language=en|doi=10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.364|isbn=978-0-19-938465-5}}</ref>

For example, a sociolinguistics-based [[translation]] framework states that a linguistically appropriate translation cannot be wholly sufficient to achieve the communicative effect of the source language; the translation must also incorporate the social practices and cultural norms of the target language.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Pan |first=Yuling |url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429294914/sociolinguistics-survey-translation-yuling-pan-mandy-sha-hyunjoo-park |title=The Sociolinguistics of Survey Translation |last2=Sha |first2=Mandy |date=2019-07-09 |publisher=[[Routledge]] |isbn=978-0-429-29491-4 |location=London |doi=10.4324/9780429294914 }}</ref> To reveal social practices and cultural norms beyond lexical and syntactic levels, the framework includes empirical testing of the translation using methods such as [[Cognitive pretesting|cognitive interviewing]] with a sample population.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Sha |first=Mandy |last2=Pan |first2=Yuling |date=2013-12-01 |title=Adapting and Improving Methods to Manage Cognitive Pretesting of Multilingual Survey Instruments |url=https://www.surveypractice.org/article/2888-adapting-and-improving-methods-to-manage-cognitive-pretesting-of-multilingual-survey-instruments |journal=Survey Practice |language=en |volume=6 |issue=4 |doi=10.29115/SP-2013-0024 |doi-access=free |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221228125828/https://www.surveypractice.org/article/2888-adapting-and-improving-methods-to-manage-cognitive-pretesting-of-multilingual-survey-instruments |archive-date= Dec 28, 2022 }}</ref><ref name=":0" />

A commonly studied source of variation is regional dialects. [[Dialectology]] studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Sociolinguists concerned with grammatical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas are often called dialectologists.