One of the principal uses of language is to communicate meaning, but it is also used to establish and maintain social relationships. Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language in relation to society , or of the various functions of language in society.However, speech in almost any society may take many very different forms, and just what forms we should choose to discuss when we attempt to describe the language of a society may prove to be a contentious issue. Sociolinguistics is “a branch of linguistics that studies all aspects of the relationship between language and society. Sociolinguists study such matters as the linguistic identity of social groups, social attitudes to language, standard and nonstandard forms of language, the patterns and needs of national language use,social varieties and levels of language, the social basis of multilingualism, and so on” (Wardhaugh, 2010, P.11).
For example, one feature that seems to be a fairly stable indication of lower class and less education throughout the English-speaking world.