Akademik Məlumat İdarəetmə Sistemi
Forum for Linguistic Studies (FLS) Partners with the International Digital Education Conference (IDEC) 2025, vol.7, no.12, pp.316-327, 2025 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
This paper examines the evolving dynamics of sociolinguistics in the 21st century, focusing on how language reflects and shapes social realities in diverse societies, with a comparative lens on India and Azerbaijan. Both nations present postcolonial, multilingual, and digitally transforming complex linguistic ecosystems where power, identity, and tradition are encoded in language practices. By integrating traditional sociolinguistic theory with contemporary developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), this research explores how technological mediation is reconfiguring linguistic hierarchies, access, and representation. The study adopts a comparative sociolinguistic methodology, combining ethnographic insights, AI-enabled linguistic corpus analysis, and critical discourse analysis of public and social media. It interrogates how variationist phenomena (e.g., code-switching, diglossia, lexical borrowing) operate across caste, ethnicity, and region in India, and across post-Soviet national identity formations in Azerbaijan. The impact of AI—particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning-based dialect analysis, and voice recognition algorithms—is analyzed for its dual role: as a democratizing force in linguistic research and as a potential agent of linguistic erasure and bias. Drawing from scholars such as Labov, Hymes, Woolard, and Gikandi, the paper argues that AI tools are often trained on dominant linguistic codes, reinforcing existing inequalities. Language embodies not only communication but “a repository of memory and identity,” which technology risks flattening through algorithmic standardization.