Course Title：社会语言学——世界视野

In this course, students explore the field of sociolinguistics, which deals with all aspects of the relationship between language and society. A few questions might illustrate some aspects and areas for investigation in the course: What characterises the language of young people in China? How do Danes accommodate when speaking with Norwegians? And why? What does body language tell about the attitudes people convey to others? We will read an introduction into sociolinguistics and recent articles. We also discuss and present theories, methods, data, and results from worldwide studies. During the course we will cover topics such as language variation according to gender, age, region, ethnicity; linguistic accommodation related to age, region, identity, and urbanness; language attitudes; relations between speech and body language. However, students will develop their own research questions and conduct their own research project, getting hands-on experiences of collecting, and analysing data and presenting their project and their results. Students’ projects might deal with topics of current interest in the Chinese society today or be rooted in other parts of the world or address questions about how their own national language varies and changes and why. The variety of students' projects will show the importance of sociolinguistic studies, and what we can learn from them, for instance, with regard to our understanding of society, each other, and our selves.