A sociolect is a language variety associated with a particular social group, defined by factors such as social class, age, gender, occupation, or ethnicity. Where dialect is primarily geographic, sociolect is primarily social.
| Variable | Example sociolect features |
|---|---|
| Social class | Working-class London: multiple negation (I don't know nothing), non-standard past tenses (I done it) |
| Age | Teenage slang: slay, no cap, lowkey, sus; older generation: different lexical items for the same concepts |
| Gender | Research (Lakoff 1975, Tannen 1990) shows gendered patterns in hedging, tag questions, interruption, and topic control, though findings are contested |
| Occupation | Medical jargon (stat, triage, presenting complaint), legal language (aforementioned, hereinafter) |
| Ethnicity | African American English (AAE): systematic grammar (habitual be, copula deletion, negative concord), a fully rule-governed variety, not "broken English" |
Sociolect and Register are distinct but overlapping concepts. A sociolect belongs to a group of people; a register belongs to a situation. A lawyer speaks legal register at work (situational) but may also speak a class-based sociolect at home (social). The same speaker shifts between registers; their sociolect is more stable.