Abstract

The author takes an outsider's look at sociolinguistics and aims various criticisms at it. He sees the discipline's reluctance to let go of proper sociological and historical questions while at the same time insisting on remaining strictly a branch of linguistics as its first and foremost problem from which the rest ultimately derive. More specifically, he criticizes the idealistic and ahistorical use of such terms as “language” and “dialect” and the failure to see the usefulness of “patois”; the failure properly to define “bilingualism” and “diglossia” and to see the fundamental distinction between them; and the unfortunate confusion created around the idea of “code switching,” which inextricably mixes together (i) sociologically significant language switching (typical of situations of bilingualism), (ii) cases of diglossia, (iii) the would-be monolingualism of as yet imperfectly assimilated immigrant or subject populations, and (iv) a ragbag of banal individual examples too idiosyncratic to be sociologically meaningful.