Empiricism in Interpretivist Sociolinguistics

This chapter offers an immanent critique of empiricism within interpretivist sociolinguistics, traces of which can be noted in scholars’ tendencies to reproduce the epistemic fallacy, and to explain broader social mechanisms and phenomena including linguistic inequalities by drawing directly from empirical evidence found in texts. Of specific critical interest in this chapter are works in raciolinguistics, a recent strand of interpretivist sociolinguistics which critically unpacks the said co-naturalisation of language and race. Although revealing valuable insight into the colonialist heritage of academic research on language and society, works in raciolinguistics are critiqued in this chapter as (a) reducing discourses to their producers, (b) failing to account for the necessary relationship between discourse and non-discursive phenomena, (c) providing reductive views of conceptual abstractions in sociolinguistics, and finally (d) denying the importance of universalism as crucial to the broader project of social emancipation. The contribution of critical realism in strengthening sociolinguistics as an interdisciplinary strand of the social sciences is also highlighted.