Week 13 - Sociolinguistics Tuesday, January 8, 2019 3:54 PM - The study of linguistic structures as they are used in discourse and in social contexts - How language varies across social contexts (across people or geographic locations or Some examples of variation - Words: aunt/auntie, eh, right, clicker/remote - Pronunciation: Caribbean, coyote, Toronto - Morphology: I see, he has took it, beers/beer - Syntax: intensifiers (really, very, so), I'm done my homework/I have finished my home - Variation is possible in ALL parts of grammar o In lexicon o In syntax ? In morphology ? In pronunciation - Mutual intelligibility is the general marker for whether two people speak the same lar though. - Varieties - What about a person might predict how they say things? ? Geographic variation o Heritage language or where family is from ? Class/Education ? Age ? Native Language ? Gender - A type of syntactical variation is Quotatives: when quoting, using like instead of said: sweater'. Speech Communities - Any group of people who speak to one another. Usually people who share something - Every speech community has some variation inside of it on an individual Varieties
e) ork age. It's a continuum like, 'wheres my out the way that they talk.
something about the way that they talk. - Every speech community has some variation inside of it on an individual Varieties - A specific form of a language. - Varieties include accents or dialects of a language. - Variation in any kind; what words people use, syntactic structures. Mutual intelligibility and dialect continua - A dialect continuum is a range of dialectal change. There may not be mutual intelligibility on opposite sides of the continuum. - Romance dialect continuum ? East to west continuum - Arabic dialect continuum - Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. There is intelligibility between these, but not always mutual. Norwegians understand Swedish but not Danish. Even though they have mutual intelligibility, they are considered three separate languages for cultural, national and political languages. Standard vs Non Standard Varieties - Ways of speaking that are associated with certain kinds of prestige - Prestige = class, education, age, culture or race, prescriptivism, - Standard varieties are often associated with education. - People are usually taught to write in the standard variety - Example, no stranding prepositions, using whom. Linguistic Insecurity - When people value a variety other than the one they speak. Ex, Canadians think British English sounds more prestigious. Non-standard varieties - Having a standard variety implies there are non-standard varieties. - Sometimes suggests non-standard varieties are illogical. Ex double negatives, two negatives should cancel out. - Non-standard varieties are as 'correct' as standard ones, but are associated with less prestige. The only real difference is cultural, political or economic association, not the variety in itself. - When you judge the way someone speaks, you are probably actually judging the person themselves.