Linguists vs the public: An electronic database of letters to the language consulting service as a source of Sociolinguistic information*

Abstract

The topic of this paper belongs to the domain of the sociology of language. It deals with the language behaviour of language users in a specific sociological role ‐ in the role of questioners, or correspondents, of the Language Service, The Czech Language Institute, Prague. I shall attempt to model some features of their behaviour, using methods of mathematical statistics and probability theory, and to find motives and reasons for their behaviour. The subject to be discussed belongs to applied linguistics rather than to theoretical linguistics, but it is a topic of current concern in linguistics, as is language treatment, language management, or language education.