Hi I think that the general public and non-linguists consider (socio-)linguistics as esoteric simply because they use language/dialect everyday and think that they "master" it, so they do not need to have any academic or scientific endeavour to study it.

Hi, I think that the public consider socio-linguistics as esoteric because it focuses on the language dialects caused by regional and social-class differences, which seems to be of trivial importance to the public.

Hi! There is no doubt that there are many possible answers to this question. I think that this problem is at least in part associated with the growing bad attitude towards humanities in general. Therefore we should be more concerned with the question why some linguists perceive sociolinguistics as an esoteric discipline. :-)

Vuk-Tadija Barbarić you are right as far as linguists are concerned, but this goes much further for there are researhers from other fields (Civilisation, Literature, ect;) who think that linguistics is "just" a technical discipline.

Bachir Bouhania you are right that the scale of the problem is greater than my answer would suggest. I am aware of that, I was only aiming to shed a light to a part of a problem that I considered to might become overlooked. As for those other fields that you have mentioned, I think that the problem lies in a somewhat special position of linguistics within humanities. Linguistics sort of "hangs in Limbo" between its object of study and methodologies trying to mimic other ("formal") sciences, and this, at least in some instances, gives it a "technical" appearance. However, I am adopting here a scientific approach to a problem, and yet this could and should be also looked at from a more popular point of view, which your first reply adopts. When you realize that this works both ways (linguists may also be prone to think that other fields such as those that you have mentioned are also esoteric), one might be inclined to conclude that there is something more primitive underlying it all: One can never truly and fully understand what the other one is doing and why. The only way to cope with this, in my opinion, is: "De gustibus non est disputandum." This is all quite complex, you should also take into consideration that those dealing with Civilisation/Literature and adopting the view, in general, that linguistics is just a technical discipline might very well have more understanding for a discipline such as sociolinguistics, or at least for some aspects of it.

Vuk-Tadija Barbarić I agree with you but I do also think that when someone from the field of English language teaching considers sociolinguistics esoteric, this is worse than someone from the general public.

Bachir Bouhania it is worse, I agree. However, and fortunately, I believe that this particular case is rare. It is more likely to happen in non-English speaking countries where sociolinguistic theory and methodology was introduced rather late.

I wonder which general public you're referring to? I don't know anyone in the US outside of linguistics and related fields (psychology, anthropology, sociology) that is even aware of the term let alone has an opinion about the field.

Ronnie Silber put plainly, non-linguists.

Dear colleagues, the general public knows the language/dialect but doesnt care about it, i.e.: knowing the lge vs. Knowing about the lge

Haroun, It's good to know that there is so much awareness outside linguistics. Bachir I think my original comment is more aligned with yours. I.e., the general public is aware of dialect (aka "accent") but seems to me to be less aware of formal linguistics and its subspecialties e.g. psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics. They may be more aware of computational linguistics as AI, machine learning, and deep learning are making the news.

@Ronnie Silber I totally agree with you. It is like talking about tachnology and nana-technology or physics and quantum-physics. Thnx