Course Title：全球视野下的社会语言学

The course Sociolinguistics -A Worldwide view is research based and deals with common sociolinguistic subjects, methods and theories. In this course, students explore the field of sociolinguistics, which deals with all aspects of the relationship between language, society and culture worldwide. A few examples might illustrate some aspects and different types of questions which students can chose to study: How do Chinese students speakdifferently in varying social contexts? What characterises the language of young people in China and Denmark and Norway? Which attitudes toward English do young Chinese have? How is Chinese influenced by English? How do Danes accommodate linguistically when speaking with Norwegians? And why? We will read the book Sociolinguistics. A very short introduction by John R. Edwards and a number of recent articles. We discuss and present theories, methods, data sociolinguistics, and results from worldwide studies. 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 relevant topics in the Chinese society or be rooted in other parts of the world. The variety of projects will show the importance of sociolinguistic studies, and what we can learn from them. Key concepts of the course include language variation, language change, language attitudes and perceptions, linguistic accommodation, body language, gender, age, ethnicity, identity, urbanness, power, region, social context, and society.