Sociolect

A sociolect characterizes the speech of a social group.

The French literary critic Roland Barthes has paid special attention to the relationship between the individual language ("idiolect") and the language of a collective of speech ("sociolect"). Public life is characterized by "social multilingualism." There are a number of languages, such as the language of the church, the language of the prison, the language of the children, the language of the ruling elite, and other "social languages."

[…] I believe that it is mistaken to maintain that the language of ideology is a discrete ‘sociolect’, a sort of meta-language which draws upon but remains distinct from the language of everyday life.

This paper uses sociolect as a cover term for slang, technical jargon (professionalisms), and argot. From the point of view of its secret nature, two kinds of sociolects are distinguished: slang and technical jargon on the one hand, and argot on the other, with the difference being in the presence or lack of an intention of secrecy.

In sociolinguistics, a sociolect or social dialect is a variety of language (a register) associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group (precisely termed ethnolect), an age group, etc. Sociolects involve both passive acquisition of particular communicative practices through association with a local community, as well as active learning and choice among speech or writing forms to demonstrate identification with particular grounds. Sociolinguists define a sociolect by examining the social distribution of specific linguistic terms.