Sociolingvistikos aktualijos
Topical issues of sociolinguistics

Summary/Abstract: The paper offers a review of Richard Hudsonís Sociolinguistics (1999), one of most famous textbooks in sociolinguistics. The textbook defines sociolinguistics as a linguistic science dealing with the relations between language and society, sociolinguistics is discussed in opposition to language 157 sociology. The author points out that sociolinguistics aims at dialectology with its deep traditions of investigation and research into the relation between the meanings of words and culture. The nature of language and research into the structure of the language of society could be treated as an updated object of sociology. The textbook also gives evaluation to the main works in the area in the world. The paper aims at comparing Lithuanian linguistics and traditional sociolinguistics, reviewing the main sociolinguistic works of Lithuanian linguists. It is assumed that sociolinguistic works are not popular in Lithuania due to the prevailing branches of linguistics, like linguistic geography, structural linguistics, historic comparative linguistics, which in their nature are against the main ideas of sociolinguistics. However, there are several sociolinguistic works that are worth mentioning. They are mainly concerned with the research into the city language (social dialects) and dialectal contacts. There is hope that further sociolinguistic research will be undertaken due to a number of innovationsónew methods and instruments, different types of databases, new Lithuanian script Palemonas; they all would contribute to a faster processing of data.

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