Ch. 2 - Languages, Dialects, and Varieties Flashcards
Variety
any body of human
speech patterns which is sufficiently homogeneous and analyzable
Vernacular
The language one grows up with and uses in everyday life
- sometimes difficult to tell if it’s a language or a dialect
Standardization
Attempts to reduce variability within a language
- has it been codified? is it mostly oral
- one of the 7 criteria for the status of a language or a variety
Vitality
the existence of a living community of speakers
- is it gaining or losing speakers or domains of use
- stability
- one of the 7 criteria for the status of a language or a variety
Historicity
Association with ethnic identity, cultural history
- one of the 7 criteria for the status of a language or a variety
Autonomy
Whether it is seen as a dialect or a separate language
-e.g. ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible, but seen as different languages, whereas mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible, but considered dialects by their respective speakers
- one of the 7 criteria for the status of a language or a variety
reduction
is the language reduced in status?
- e.g. french is not reduced in montreal, due to signage and gov’t, even though there are a lot of english speakers
- one of the 7 criteria for the status of a language or a variety
mixture
how much the language is diluted by other languages
- one of the 7 criteria for the status of a language or a variety
de facto norms
Popular attitudes about proper usage, good and poor varieties and speakers
Standardization
what’s taught in schools and spoken by dominant socio-economic class, also in most official contexts
- often taken from capital city
Isoglosses
a line on a dialect map marking a change between a linguistic feature
Sociolects
- Usually the subject of Socioling
- based on class, ethnicity, religion, urban-rural status
Sociodialectology
looks at the intersection of regional and social variation
Registers
- usually vocational or associated with a community of practice
- developed from regularly participating in similar situations
- (also called Jargon Pejoratively)
Speech Styles
forms of speech used in different scenarios
- informal vs. formal
- style shifting
dialect
the more commonly accepted term for a regional variant of a language
- sometimes only used when there is a literary history in the dialect
- more neutral
- usually
Patois
less used term for a dialect
- more useful in other languages where dialect has a negative connotation
- more rural or lower strata connotations
dialect geography
attempts to map the distributions of linguistic features
RP in England
basically the standard there, though few people actually speak it
- it’s the standard for
“received pronunciation”
Estuary english
another dialect of england, becoming more of the standard than RP as of late
Social Dialects/sociolects
dialects originating among social groups
- e.g. gay voice, castes in india, African American English (AAE)
Receptive vs. productive Capabilities
Our receptive capabilities are much greater than our productive capabilities, leading to dialects of greater languages
Dialect vs. Accent
Accent is more confined to phonetics, whereas dialects include information about vocabulary and phonology
Dialects, sociolects/social dialects, and Registers usually work completely dependent of each other
