Hi Laiba. I was also sort of confused as to what topic to choose for my MA thesis, and I thought I could share some tips my MA thesis supervisor gave me. He suggested I do a typical variationist-sociolinguistic study since that was a great way to get familiarised with fieldwork and try to uncover how social organisation is built through linguistic structures. This sort of studies are quite simple and straightforward to carry out. And although data analysis and interpretation might sometimes get a little tricky, I'd encourage you to embark on such an adventure because variationism helps you understand how language change proceeds from a sociological perspective by looking at who uses one specific language variant and who doesn't. Here are some guidelines to get started with a variationist-sociolinguistic project I shared with a friend a few months ago (there's way more to it, but let's just look at the basics):

Select one linguistic variable in the speech community that's closest to you: it might be a given realisation of a vowel due to a following consonant (or vice versa), the recession of a dialect rule due to the adoption of the standard in an area, a particular innovative feature in youth speech that may attract some social awareness, the linguistically unconditioned but socially relevant formation of plurals... What's important is that what you choose to settle on shows variability. This is, I feel, the hardest bit by far because there's just so many features we'd like to focus on. One thing to remember is that you won't need to keep working on this variable if you pursue further studies, but bare in mind the data you collect now may eventually become a fruitful source material for future research.

Get to know your speech community, and select your informants on the basis of representativeness. For instance, there might be no point factoring in the gender variable if you're focussing on the speech of miners if these happen to be 90% males. Likewise, there might be no point looking at social class in non-urbanised small villages. You'll have to stratify your sample population according to relevant social categories. Don't overdo it, though: gender (male/female), age (18-25 yo / 26-45 yo / 46-65 yo / 66+ yo), and social class (lower working class / upper working class / middle class) or level of education (low/medium/high) would be ideal, but you've no time for that.

For an undergrad or Master's thesis I'd recommend no more than 10-16 participants (8's also fine esp. for undergrads). So say you've got two generations (one aged 18-25, who haven't entered the job marked yet; and another aged 50-55, who are well established in the community and have been active workers for years) and two genders (males and females), but leave out the class/education variable. You'd end up with 8 informants, with two of them sharing the age/gender category. Of course, this implies you'd need to keep the social variables you don't control for constant, meaning you can't have one adult female with tertiary education while all other adults have mid or low education. Mid-level eductaion or middle class tend to be the most representative categories, but you should definitely consult the local census to make sure that is the case.

I hope that was of any help. Please don't hesitate to contact me back if you have any questions. And make sure to always listen to your supervisor, if you have any.

Best of luck

Hi Laiba, I think if you give more details, it wiil be easier to answer. Which context are you investigating? What is you body of work? Texts/interviews? Questionnaires? Experiment? Is it variationist? Would you like to work on language planning-policy? Would you like to work on sociolinguistic representations? Do you investigate a diglossic context? Are there linguistic conflicts? etc.

Gook luck

Hi Laiba,

SL is a vast and interesting field! One project I did was about politeness.

We compared an observation of interactions at a small grocery store to questionnaire results for another set of subjects. That questionnaire was constructed from the scenarios that we witnessed in the Grocery store observation. We found that the differences in what people say that they do and what people actually do are differentiated along categories like, culture, gender, and socioeconomic strata.

Basically you should ask yourself . . .

"What differences in the way people speak interest me?"

then ask

"How can I study that?"

Sociolinguistics is broad and interdisciplinary. It is recommended that you choose a topic based on your interest. That being said, you might find one of the following topics interesting:

- Language and identity: (e.g., How people use language to construct and reflect particular aspects of their identity?)

- Language and Culture: (e.g., How certain cultural aspects influence language use?)

- Language and gender: (e.g., How men and women use certain linguistic features and practices in particular contexts/settings?)

- Language and Media: (e.g., How certain language features used differently according to particular media modes?)

- Language of Social Networking Sites: (e.g., How certain linguistic features are shaped by human interaction on a particular SNS platform?)

Besides, I would also recommend you go through the following textbook for further help.

Wardhaugh, R., & Fuller, J. M. (2015). An introduction to sociolinguistics (7th ed.). Wiley Blackwell. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/An+Introduction+to+Sociolinguistics%2C+7th+Edition-p-9781118732298

Being an Undergraduate student, you can choose academic language and business language or language used in different societies or language used by L1 learners and L2 learners. A practical survey

Whatever you do, do something you actually have an interest in. Don't do something just to impress a faculty member or an audience. Think outside the box!

Hi Laiba,

In addition to the suggestions above, you may also like to consider Language Attitude, Language Policy and ELF (English as a Lingua Franca, or World Englishes or Global Englishes). Hope that helps.

Laiba Akhtar

I have always been interested in the Creole and Pidgin languages, especially their importance in understanding language history. Just saying . . . Perhaps there's something in that realm that might be of interest.

Sociolinguistics, the study of the sociological aspects of language. The discipline concerns itself with the part language plays in maintaining the social roles in a community. Sociolinguists attempt to isolate those linguistic features that are used in particular situations and that mark the various social relationships among the participants and the significant elements of the situation. Influences on the choice of sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary items may include such factors as age, sex, education, occupation, race, and peer-group identification, among others. For example, an American English speaker may use such forms as “He don’t know nothing” or “He doesn’t know anything,” depending on such considerations as his level of education, race, social class or consciousness, or the effect he wishes to produce on the person he is addressing. In some languages, such as Japanese, there is an intricate system of linguistic forms that indicate the social relationship of the speaker to the hearer.

I faced similar questions when I did my MA. Teachers suggested me looking at things that interested me. I did two essays and one thesis using three very different types of texts: teacher forum, fortune-telling, and warning signs. All gave me very interesting experience to understand language (e.g. modals, stories, prohibitions) and social interaction (request, prediction, space). Some classmates did studies on teacher talk, advertisement, conversations of wedding parties, and other use of language in everyday life. Good luck :)