Sociolinguistics of Technology and Artificial Intelligence: where have we come from, where are we going, and how might we navigate?

Sociolinguistics has, it can be argued, had an uneasy relationship with technology. The discipline has its origins in the imperative to observe, describe, and explain real language, spoken naturally and produced by humans in social settings. The focus has thus inevitably been on the spoken word. With the advancing encroachment and mainstreaming of mediating technologies in our lives, there have been movements away from this exclusive focus on spoken language to incorporate mediated language. However, often the aim has been to compare and contrast this variety with the ideal of unmediated, naturally occurring spoken language, which has remained a touchstone and the ideal source of data, even as the focus has shifted in the discipline ever more towards mediated data. This distrust of technologically mediated speech in the discipline is at odds, however, with how language has evolved in society, since all aspects of what sociolinguists study, e.g. variation, contact, etc. as well as how these phenomena are studied rely on technology. Digital technology has presented a particular challenge as it has come to have meaning equal to co-present interaction for many individuals, blurring the lines between mediated and naturally occurring speech. Artificial intelligence, the latest incarnation of digital technology, moves beyond a blurring to a merging of the human and the technological in the production of speech and interaction. As it becomes more challenging to work with and around this development, it seems particularly apt at this point in time to revisit some of our basic tenets in relation to how language functions in society and to question what becomes of these tenets and their associated methodologies with the mainstreaming and omnipresence of smart technologies and Artificial Intelligence.