The term sociolect is a cultured word and belongs to the field of linguistics and, more specifically, sociolinguistics, the branch of language that studies the relationship between society and language.
By sociolect is understood the way of speaking of a certain social group. In the daily use of spoken language, the same language can be spoken in many ways and, in this sense, when a collective or social group has its own way of expressing itself, it is using a sociolect. The sociolect can have several levels: the cult, the colloquial or the vulgar. Let us imagine a group of learned language teachers who usually interact for professional reasons (they communicate with a sociolect, since they speak the same language but at a higher level). At the opposite extreme, we could think of a marginal group that when communicating uses a series of common words and expressions and creates a "particular language", a sociolect.
The sociolect of a social stratum has a direct relationship with its formation and culture as a social group. Thus, studying a particular sociolect is a way of understanding the links between language and society within a community. It is evident that a social group that lives in an isolated area and is part of the rural environment does not speak the same way as another social group of the university elite.
Sociolect, dialect, interlect, idiolect and slang
Linguists who study the relationship between society and language analyze some key concepts. We have said that sociolect, also known as social dialect, is the language spoken by a specific social group. By dialect we understand the way of speaking a language in a specific geographical area (for example, Spanish is the official language of Argentina but Argentines have a series of peculiarities that make up a dialect variety).
Interlect refers to the use of a second language based on the influences of the mother tongue (if a Spanish speaker learns French as a second language, his / her phonetic command of the language will not be the same as that of a native French).
By idiolect we understand the way of speaking of each individual (a group of friends from the same place of birth share a language but each of them has their own way of expressing themselves). A slang is a linguistic variety different from the standard language of the majority (lunfardo is a Spanish slang that is spoken in Buenos Aires but we can also talk about medical slang, student slang or prison slang).
Photos: iStock - vitapix / Rafal Stachura
