Lingvistički kolegiji, fonologija, morfologija i sintaksa, često prikazuju jezik kao homogeni entitet. Sociolingvistika gleda na jezik kao okvir različitih varijeteta, inačica, kao što su dijalekt, sociolekt, registar (žargon), sleng, stil itd. te opisuje i tumači njihovu funkciju u jezičnoj zajednici. Student se osvješćuje za društveni učinak tih varijeteta, tj. kako govornik njihovom naizmjeničnom uporabom, primjerenoj različitim situacijama i različitim sugovornicima, ostvaruje svoje namjere i označuje svoj identitet. U tom smislu kolegij pridonosi komunikacijskoj kompetenciji polaznika.
- Sociolinguistics as a branch of linguistics. The fiction of homogeneity versus language stratification and its varieties. Langue and parole, competence and performance versus communicative competence. Speakers’s repertoire within speech community.
- Regional (rural) and urban dialectology. Horizontal and vertical view of language. Social class, age, and gender as extra-lingistic element in the explanation of language varieties and free variants.
- Language as a component of ethnicity. Substratum effect. Hypercorrection as a result of social pressure. African American Vernacular English and its origin. Is there a connection between race and language? Matched- guise experiments results.
- Language and gender. Grammatical and natural gender in languages (English, French, Croatian). Difference between male and female use of language. Language taboo for women . Women’s language use in ‘primitive’ societies. Accounting for differences between women’s and men’s language. Activities to change the present usage.
- Language varieties in context. Linguistic communities verbal repertoire. Registers. Style as a continuum. Slang. Elicitation of normal, informal speech.
- Address reciprocal, non-reciprocal . Polite and familiar V/T. Address in some Asian languages. Power and solidarity.
- Diglossia and monolingualism( Ch. Ferguson). Diglossia and bilingualism.(J. Fishman). H (high) and L (low). varieties. Code switching.Language switching in multilingual communities.Identities.
- Revision . Assignments presentations.
- Conversation analysis as structured, non random, sequences of utterances. Cooperative principle (Grice) and forcing utterance interpretation. Direct and indirect speech acts. Intercultural misunderstandings. Interethnic communication differences. Men and women in conversation.
- Nation states, monolingualism and multilingualism. Individual and social bilingualism.
Minority languages in nation states. Welsh and Scots Gaelic. ‘Melting pot’ in USA; bilingualism and ‘English Only’.
- Standardization. E. Haugen’s model. Status planning and corpus planning (H.Kloss) Standardization of English. Samuel Johnson and his dictionary. Standardization of Croatian and Norwegian ( Bokmal and Nynorsk).
- Language and Geography. Traditional dialectology. NORM. The spread of innovations. The loss of /r/ in English. Dialect levelling. Koineization.Dialects in USA. Innovations across language barriers: Schprachbund, Balkanisms.
- Languages in Contact. Lingua franca. Simplification and reduction of language in pidgins. Portuguese as the basic structure of pidgins? Creole. Structural similarities in Creoles.
- Sociolinguistics and ‘new social sensibilities’ . Intentional efforts to change language and language behaviour towards women and minorities. Language discrimination, racism and sexism. ‘Political correctness’.
- Revision and assignment presentations.