The Importance Of Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is primarily concerned with what affects people including the relationship between language and society. Sociolinguistics is also concerned with how multilingual speech communities use language as they interact with one another (Wardhaugh, 2006). As proposed by the term, it primarily involves two disciplines which are linguistics and sociology (Spolsky as cited in Nooyen, 1999). Sociolinguists are interested in language because of its characteristic which explains why people speak differently in different social contexts which includes people’s varied ways of saying strings or set of words and sentences.

Semantics, as one subfield of linguistics is pedagogically significant. In terms of meaning making, Spring (2003) posited in his study the importance of semantic competence, for it comprises the skills to identify meaning of words and relationship of syntactic structures. These relationships of structures include entailment, uniformity, and ambiguity. Pyykkönen (2009) furthermore stressed in his study that it is commonly

It is anticipated that the results of the study would provide additional information that recognizes the complementary relationship between semantics and contexts and that both of them share a relationship that will make communication and interpretation somewhat clearer and understandable for the participants.

This study looks into what happens in conversations in the use of Philippine English and Native languages by Filipino speakers. It has been observed that certain expressions in the English language have different meanings in conversations carried out in specific contexts and the native language can create a great effect to the variations of meaning implied in conversations. Thus, this paper is primarily concerned with the English expression “joke” and its perceived effect in the