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Finnegan 1994: 4 defines sociolinguistics as “the study of language in use. It specially focuses on the relationship between language and society, and its principal
concerns address linguistic variation across social groups and across the range of communicative situations in which women and men deploy their verbal repertories.
Further discussion by Fishman in Suwito 1994: 3 defines two factors that should be studied in sociolinguistics. Those are linguistics and non linguistics factors.
Non-linguistic factor influences language through the social factor such as the social status, age, level of education, sex and, etc. Meanwhile, Holmes 2001: 12 adds the
non-linguistics related to all kind of situation such as the participants consists of who is speaking and who are speaking to, the setting or social context of the interaction
consists of where are they speaking, the topic consists of what is being discussed, and the function consists of the reason why they are speaking.
Based on definition above, sociolinguistics is a large field of knowledge studying the relation between language and its society. Sociolinguistics focuses on
how people use languages differently by its region, how individual speaker use language, and how language is used differently between at school and at home.
2. The Scope and Sub-Division of Sociolinguistics
The study of sociolinguistics is divided into two different scopes. They are known as macro-sociolinguistics study and micro-sociolinguistics study. Trudgill
1992: 51 states that macro-sociolinguistics puts large groups of speakers as the starting point. The example of macro-sociolinguistics research is genealogy of
language that emphasizes on the history of language.
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Meanwhile, micro-sociolinguistics is kind of research dealing with discourse analysis, face to face interaction and the other studies in sociolinguistics field covers
the study of relatively small group of speakers. On the other hand, in Chaklader 1990, Fishman divides sociolinguistics into
three subdivisions. First, Descriptive sociolinguistics investigates the answers of who speaks, what language, to whom, when and to what end. It concerns with the use of
language and its norms. Second, dynamic sociolinguistics investigates the answer of what accounts for
different rates of change in the social organization of language use and behavior toward language. The example of dynamic sociolinguistics is the Italian immigrant
living in USA or Canada. They have shown different language of language persistence or shift ibid: 6.
The last, applied sociolinguistics is dealing with the application of language in social setting. The suitable examples for applied sociolinguistics are the study of
native language teaching or second language teaching, language planning, language policy decision, and, etc.
Concerning the discussion above, this research takes micro-sociolinguistics as the frame of study since this research focuses on particular community namely
American family. This research is categorized into descriptive sociolinguistics research because it investigates the description of slang base on the slang type and
social function of slang related to the social factors.
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B. Ethnography of Communication
