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Language variation takes place not only in multilingual communities but also in monolingual ones. No two people speak exactly the same. There are infinite sources of variation in speech. Some are individual specific while others are group specific. Some features of speech, however,
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Language variation takes place not only in multilingual communities but also in monolingual ones
No two people speak exactly the same. There are infinite sources of variation in speech. Some are individual specific while others are group specific
Some features of speech, however, are shared by groups, and become important because they differentiate one group from another. Just as different languages often serve a unifying and separating function for their speakers, so do speech characteristics within languages. The pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of Scottish speakers of English is in some respects quite distinct from that of people from England, for example.
So, speech provides ample social information. Dropping the initial [h] in words like house and heaven often indicates a lower socio-economic background in English. And so does the use of grammatical patterns such as they don’t know nothing them kids or I done it last week . We signal our group affiliations and our social identities by the speech forms we use.
All languages exhibit internal variation, that is, each language exists in a number of varieties and is in one sense the sum of those varieties
For many people there can be no confusion at all about what language they speak. For example, they are Chinese, Japanese, or Korean and they speak Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, respectively. In these cases, many people see language and ethnicity or nationality as virtually synonymous. However, for many people, there is no one-to-one correlation between these categories; some people are both Chinese and American……
Ordinary people use these terms quite freely in speech, for them a dialect is almost certainly no more than a local non-prestigious (therefore powerless) variety of a ‘real’ language. In contrast, scholars may experience considerable difficulty in deciding whether one term should be used rather than the other in certain situations. How, then, do sociolinguists define the difference between a dialect and a language?
Sociolinguists view every variety as a dialect, including the standard variety, and there is an increasing trend toward discussing discrete languages as ideologically constructed rather than linguistically real entities
There are infinite sources of variation in speech. Some of them are related to the individual speakers who pronounce sounds differently. Some features of speech, however, are shared by groups, and become important because they differentiate one group from another.
Pronunciation and vocabulary differences are probably the differences people are most aware of between different dialects of English, but there are grammatical differences too.
The diffusion of a linguistic feature through a society may be halted by barriers of social class, age, race, religion or other factors
Social distance may have the same effect as geographical distance : a linguistic innovation that begins amongst the highest social group will affect the lowest social group last.
Social Stratification Is a term used to refer to any hierarchical ordering of groups within a society. Social classes are generally taken to be aggregates of individuals with similar social and or economic characteristics.
Social classes are not clearly defined or labeled entities but simply aggregates of people with similar social and economic characteristics; and social mobility- movement up or down the social hierarchy is perfectly possible
Power and Solidarity Power requires some kind of asymmetrical relationship between entities: one has more of something that is important, for example, status, money, influence, and so on, than the other or others. A language has more power than any of its dialects. The standard is the most powerful dialect but it has become so because of non-linguistic factors.
Power and Solidarity Solidarity , on the other hand, is a feeling of equality that people have with one another. They have a common interest around which they will bond. A feeling of solidarity can lead people to preserve a local dialect or an endangered language in order to resist power, or to insist on independence. It accounts for the persistence of local dialects, the modernization of Hebrew, and the separation of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian and Croatian.
