Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
sociolinguistic
What is sociolinguistics?
Language variation
Dialects
Sociolinguistics?
● The study of the relationship between language and society, of language
variation, and of attitudes about language
● Variation may occur at all levels of the language
Language variation?
● No two speakers of a language speak exactly the same way
Between group variation = intergroup variation
● No individual speaker speaks the same way all the time
Within-speaker variation = intraspeaker variation
Variation is very slow
Dialect?
● A variety of a language spoken by a group of people that is characterized by
systematic features (e.g., phonological, lexical, grammatical) that
distinguish it from other varieties of that same language
● Idiolect: the speech variety of an individual speaker
● Language = a continuum of dialects
Misconceptions about ‘dialect’
● Dialect # ‘substandard’
● Dialect # ‘incorrect’
● Dialect # ‘slang’
● FACT: Everyone speaks a dialect
Language vs. dialect?
Linguistic criterion
● Mutual intelligibility YES? = dialects NO? = languages
e.g., British vs. American vs. Irish vs. Australian (= dialects of English)
Sources of dialects
Q: Why do dialects exist?
A: Because of isolation or long term separation of groups
Isolation can be across time, geography or social barriers.
Two types of “dialects”:
● (1) sociolects or “social dialects”: linguistic differentiation based upon on
membership in a longstanding socially-isolated or separate group
● (2) regional dialects: linguistic differentiation based upon on membership in
a longstanding geographically-isolated or separate group
Issues 1
Asymmetries in intelligibility, e.g.,
● Danish speakers understand Swedish, but not vice versa
● Brazilian Portuguese speakers understand Spanish, but not vice versa 2.
● Nonlinguistic criteria (political, historical, geographic etc.) may play a role
● Mandarin, Cantonese are mutually unintelligible, but are referred to as
‘dialects’ of Chinese
● Serbian and Croatian are mutually intelligible, but are referred to as
separate languages
○ Czech vs. Slovak
○ Norwegian vs. Swedish
Ways dialects vary
● Phonological (‘accent’)
● Morphological
● Syntactic/grammatical
● Semantic/lexical
More issues Perceptions:
● ‘Bad’ Vs ‘good’
● This is no OUR way
● The native speaker concept
● Standard language
community
2.2 What is a community?
A community has a shape and a structure, which is internally cohesive and
externally distinctive. Members of a community must have enough in common
to be identifiable (both to others within the group and to external observers) as
members of that community, and must show enough differences from non-
members to indicate that they do not belong to any other contrasting
communities. Membership of a community can be both voluntary and enforced,
though enforced membership is rare, and arises usually as a result of dependence
on others: for example, children in many societies have no option but to be
members of a particular community, but as they age, and begin to establish their
own sense of identity and distinctiveness, their allegiance to that community may
change. Much more common
2.4 Communities of practice
Communities of practice are defined by three particular characteristics:
mutual engagement, a jointly negotiated enterprise, and a shared repertoire
An example of a community of practice is a school rock band. Here, a number of
individuals come together in face- to- face contact (mutual engagement) for a
particular purpose, that is, to play music (jointly negotiated enterprise), often
conversing using jargon common in discourse on popular music, such as riff,
bridge, amp, bass guitar and so on (shared repertoire)
Examples:
● Reducing linguistic diversity:
a national language in a multilingual country (Bahasa Malaysia in Malaysia)
a single variety of a language where divergent dialects exist (Mandarin in
China)
Competing linguistic groups over access to the mechanisms of day-to-day
life
● A particular linguistic minority is denied access to such mechanisms.
Court Interpreters
● Governmental and social institutions must effectively and equitably meet
the
● needs of the population so that groups varied in linguistic repertoire have
an
● equal opportunity to participate in their government and to receive
services from their government.
Diachronic variation?
What is the extent of variation?
Example?
Orthographic change: þ
Morphological change: hem
Semantic change: seethe
Syntactic change: seethe
Lexical change: chilly
Stylistic or textual change: Imperatives
Constraints:
what constraints exist on possible changes (including those specifically
in a given language at a given time)?
Actuation:
why does a change begin in a language at time t1, and not at time t2?
Why does the change begin in variety v1 but not in variety v2?
Transition:
how does a change develop, from stage s1 to stage s2, o from form f1 to
form f2?
Embedding:
how is the change embedded in both the linguistic system and the
community in which the language is spoken?
Evaluation:
how do speakers in the community evaluate the change?
Are they aware of the change? Has f1 or f2 become
Stigmatised?
Traditional Dialectology
Aims:
1. Provide a historical record of the language
2. Show areal distribution of unique
linguistic features
3. Not concerned with representing the speech of the community
Method:
1. Administer a dialect survey targeting specific lexical items,
pronunciations (diagnostic forms)
2. Collect data from representative community members, called NO
3. Typically, sampling was done by relying on population density
Lines indicating the distributional limits of lexical items or linguistic
forms are called isoglosses.
Focus:
1. Lexical
2. Grammatical
3. Phonological
Two recent subfields of sociolinguistics in which dialect
descriptions are now accomplished:
Sociophonetics -- Instrumental phonetics supplements auditory
phonetic and phonological analysis
Urban Dialectology -- Utilizes updated lexical cartographic method
(TELSUR)
Variationist Sociolinguistics
Styles in focus
1. Establish what aspects of a speaker‟s social make- up
correlate with the use of particular linguistic forms.
2. Investigate the effects of speech style on the kind of language
used
3. Investigate the linguistic behaviour of the individual (outliers)
Methods
- Increasing smaple size
- Randomising sampling
- Varying test tasks
- Ethnographic appraoch
Overall, emphasis on quatitative distribution of variants and varian
patterns
proof that variation in language was not random, but
structured – the “orderly heterogeneity”