This course introduces students to the systematic study of language and society, and helps students achieve a better understanding of the relevant approaches and methodologies in the study of language and society, especially in the Hong Kong context. It also provides students with the appropriate tools, both theoretical and practical, to describe and analyse a number of language issues in Hong Kong society. Specifically, this course aims at enabling students to:

• Describe and exemplify some basic sociolinguistic concepts: biliteracy, trilingualsim, code-mixing and code-switching, standard language and dialect, written language and spoken language, speech community.
• Apply these concepts to analyse the main contextual variables of a communicative event: “who speaks what to whom when and where”.
• Apply these concepts to analyse the language situation in Hong Kong.
• Apply these concepts to analyse the language needs of ethnic minority groups in Hong Kong.
• Apply these concepts to analyse the relationships among language, identity, culture and society