What is the study of how social conditions influence the use of language called?

Sociolinguistics is the study of how social conditions affect language use, considering factors such as social class, ethnicity, gender, and context. This field examines how these variables influence linguistic behavior and language variation within different communities. Sociolinguists analyze how societal factors shape language, including the way people speak in various situations, the emergence of dialects, language change over time, and the relationship between language and identity.

While dialectology focuses specifically on the geographic and social distribution of dialects, and anthropology deals with the broader aspects of human cultures, including social norms, customs, and linguistic behaviors within those cultures, these fields do not target the interplay of social factors and language use as directly as sociolinguistics does. Psycholinguistics, on the other hand, studies the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and production, which is distinct from the social dynamics that sociolinguistics explores. Thus, the emphasis in the correct choice is on the social aspects influencing language, making it the right answer.