Perm school of sociolinguistics: results and prospects for development

The Perm School of sociolinguistics arose in the early 70-s of the XXth century on the basis of the Petersburg linguistic School’ and on the views on language and linguistic phenomena based on the ideas of the leading researchers of St. Petersburg. The main research trend of the Perm School of sociolinguistics is urban speech sociolinguistic study, and one of the first of scientific problems is the theory of urban literary language local variability, from which subsequently develops 1) study of social variation in urban speech, and 2) theory of regiolect. The distinctive character of this scientific school is a concord of proper sociolinguistic approaches and psycholinguistic ones. Scientific problems relevant to schools today are the study of urban speech and different types of sociolects; study of social and local variability of word semantics and worldviews; analysis of the linguistic situation of the Perm territory, the regiolect and the Russian speech of bilinguals in the territory; study of language and textual expression of social values, identities and stereotypes; analysis of language subcultures and the Internet communications; investigation of the mental lexicon social variation. At present there are about 40 members in the school. The article considers the results of the group for the last 3 years: publication and editorial activity, software registration, participation in research projects and in organization of scientific events, and a number of Master’s theses. Prospects for further studies of the Perm School of sociolinguistics are primarily in the development of study of cognitive structures social variation. In traditional sociolinguistics linguistic units and their forms are still examined as linguistic variables, while the social variation of the cognitive basis of the language - the cognitive linguistic structures - as well as the modification in the relationships between proper cognitive linguistic structures and their external representations requires currently a special focus and a careful study. Therefore, we are talking about the formation of a new scientific field - cognitive sociolinguistics.