What is address in sociolinguistics terms?
It is the terminology used by people when they are talking to others and this varies according to their education, their social standing, their profession or their specific kind of work. It can even be determined by their nationality or their ethnicity. You can often deduce from the way people speak to others what social background they come from. The Queen will talk to people in a very different way for instance than that from a person who has been brought up in slums. Likewise an engineer will use terminology which will be familiar to his/her peers but not necessarily so to people in other professions. A person of Asian origin will talk to someone with the same roots in way that they both find natural but which will be different from that which they would use when addressing a white British person. An American will use terms, such as “dude”, which differ from those in use in other English speaking countries . An untitled person will address someone with a peerage as “Your Lordship”,
