Sociolinguistics and language creativity

This paper introduces the special issue of Language Sciences on Sociolinguistics and Language Creativity. Current interest in language creativity is located within a wider interest in creativity in everyday life, evident across the humanities and social sciences. The paper argues that such vernacular creativity is particularly relevant to the concerns of sociolinguistics. The special issue considers how the adoption of a sociolinguistic lens may contribute to our understanding of creativity; and how the study of creativity in language may itself contribute to sociolinguistic and linguistic theory. Creativity is theorised here in terms of poetics (Jakobson, 1960); performance/critique (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Hymes, 1981); Bakhtinian dialogics/heteroglossia (Bakhtin [1935] 1981); and aesthetics (e.g. Saito, 2015). We argue that a particular value of sociolinguistic analysis is its ability to reveal micro processes of creativity: for instance aesthetic performance that emerges in the moment, with the potential discursively to transform both language and social relations. Aesthetics, it is argued, 'carries the politics of discourse' and its study may therefore also enrich sociolinguistic theory. More broadly within linguistics, the study of creativity alerts us to the plasticity, or messiness, of language, challenging the concept of 'linguistic rules' that is embedded within linguistic thinking.