Sociolinguists Changing Perceptions of Language & Language Research in the Age of AI

Sociolinguists' engagement with AI technology has received little attention in their own publications and as a topic of research and discussion within the discipline, despite a rise in the promotion and use of AI tools in academic contexts. In order to investigate this issue, we launched a survey in 2025 to obtain information from sociolinguists about their use of AI, their understandings and use of it and tools that make use of it as well as their perceptions of how this is affecting their own work and their understandings of language and sociolinguistic research. The results paint a heterogeneous picture. While researchers in the broad area of sociolinguistics are overtly critical of AI technologies citing in particular a range of ethical and professional concerns, they surprisingly report making quite substantial use of these technologies in their research and administrative/teaching work. Close analysis of responses to open questions using a language ideology approach suggests that sociolinguists’ usage and engagement with GenAI tools is contributing to new understandings of language and language research among sociolinguistics. For example, language appears to no longer be a uniquely human practice and AI appear to open up new insights into humans’ languaging practices to researchers.