Society is made up of human groups which engage in interaction. The groups – a family, a faith, women, children, the working class – can be identified through their roles in social systems: the legal, educational, religious, political, economic; while their interaction is revealed through such social processes as the differentiation of functions, the socialisation of children, or the dialectic of the power struggle. Social groups can interact in a number of ways: through political activity, economic domination, and through the exchange of symbols/language. There are three types of linguistic and attitudinal interaction:
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Based on a stratified (structural, functional) approach, allows correlation of linguistic and social variables: cooperation.
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Based on Marxist approaches, leads to analyses of conflictual power relationships as mediated through language.
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Interactional, based on the informal relationships contracted by the individual. May lead to the analysis of an individual’s linguistic repertoire and its relationship to his social network.
Most sociolinguistic research in France is based on the conflictual approach, while most American work is derived from the cooperative approach.
