This paper presents an overview of sociolinguistics by examining the fundamental concepts and issues therein. Research efforts in sociolinguistics focus on speakers and their exploration of language to cope with their daily communicative goals in society. The innate potential of language to cope with a wide range of phenomena to be expressed by speakers is incredible. Indeed, the repertoire of language is not exhaustive. Speakers express cultural norms, political issues, legal discourses, religious messages and scientific facts by using a linguistic system of communication – language. Sociolinguistics is the study of language and society. It elucidates the co-existence of different languages in society. Within a social structure, there are varieties of languages which contribute to the linguistic system and facilitate choice-making. Sociolinguistics is about language and society. In this study, we introduce sociolinguistics by examining language (its definition, functions and varieties), society, speech community and other phenomena that are on the front-burner in the literature.

This study is a socio-pragmatic analysis of selected utterances of interlocutors whose discourse subject is “Covid-19”. In using language, it is not enough to be grammatical; language use should be underpinned by contextual nuances because this is a good way of using language as actions that produce results or effects. Therefore, the analysis of the selected linguistic structures in this study is an investigation of linguistic competence demonstrated through lexical choices and speech act sequencing. The approach explored in the study is discursive and integrative; for example, instead of strictly listing the speech acts performed in each utterance, they are mentioned in terms of how they impinge on the on-going interaction. The study underscores who says “what?”, “how?” and “why?”. Although this study is mainly hinged on the Pragma-crafting Theory, Bach and Harnish’s [1] speech act taxonomy is explored in the classification of the speech acts performed in the utterances. On the whole, the study concludes that the socio-pragmatic use of language is underpinned by the psychological and situational context(s), and produces expected results due to speaker-hearer shared knowledge.

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This paper is an overview of the discourse strategies involved in buyer-seller conversational exchanges. Discourse is truly human interaction, whether written or spoken. An analysis of discourse can simply be viewed as a conversational analysis. Contemporary use of the term discourse analysis covers several activities and disciplines which provide insights for the discourse analyst in the interpretation of language-use in a wide range of discourses or genres, including sellerbuyer discourse. This study hinges on both the Pragma-crafting Theory and Bach and Harnish"s speech act theory for the analyses of data. The analyses reveal that in using language to communicate in different contexts and situations in buyerseller conversation, the interactants (the sellers and the buyers) demonstrate the various functions that language performs therein: to bargain, to persuade, to greet, to explain, to undertake, to confirm, to affirm, among others.