Entry #11 - Chapters 18,19 and 20

CHAPTER 18

• Every language has a lot of variation, especially in the way it is spoken.
• Language variation is based on where the language is used (linguistic geography).

The standard language

• This is aset of words and structures idealized  because it has no specific region.
• We find this version printed in books and newspaper, it is used in mass media and it is taught in most schools.
• We can refer to Standard American English in U.S.A or, in Britain, Standard British English. In other parts of the world we can recognize varieties such as Standard Australian English, Standard Canadian English or Standard Indian English.

Accent and dialect

• We all speak with an accent.
• Technically, the term "accent" is restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially.
• The term "dialect" is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as aspects of pronunciation.

Dialectology

• Dialectology distinguishes between two different dialects of the same language (speakers understand each other) and two different languages (speakers can't understand each other).
• The variety that develops as the standard language has usually been one socially prestigious dialect, originally associated with a center of economic and political power.

Isoglosses and dialect boundaries

 People from different areas refer to the same object but using diffente vocabulary,

The dialect continuum

• The drawing of iglosses and dialect boundaries is quite useful in establishing a broad view of regional dialets, but it tends to obscure the fact that, at most dialect boundary areas, one dialect or language variety merges into another.
• Speakers who move back and forth across this border area, using different varieties with some ease, may be described as bidialectal.

Bilingualism and diglossia

• Bilingualism at the level of the individual tends to be a feature of the minority group. Then, a member of a minority group grows up in one linguistic community, mainly speaking one language but learns another language in order to take part in the larger dominant linguistic community.
• Indiviadual bilingualism doesn't have to be result of political dominance by a group using a different language. It may be the result of having two parents who speak different languages. 
• In diglossia, there is a "low"variety, acquired locally and used for important matters.

Language planning

• Government, legal and educational organizations in many countries have to plan which variety or varieties of the language spoken in the country are to be used for official business.

Pidgins and creoles

• Pidgin is a variety of a language that developed for some practical purpose, such as trading, among groups of people who had a lot of contact, but who did not know each other'slanguages. As such, it would have no native speakers.
• When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade or contact languages and becomes the first language of a social community, it is described as creole.

The post-creole continuum: There was development from a pidgin to a creole, known as creolization, there is now often a retreat from the use of the creole by those who have greater social prestige are associated with a higher variety, a number of speakers will tend to use fewer creole forms and structures. This process, known as decreolization, leads at one extreme to a variety that is closer to the external model and leaves a basic variety with more local creole features. Between these two extremes may be a range of slightly different varieties, some with many and some with fewer creole features. This range of varieties is called the post-creole continuum.

CHAPTER 19

Speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language. The study of the linguistic features that have social relevance for participants in those speech communities is called "sociolinguistics".

• Social dialects  has been concerned with speakers in towns and cities.
• Two main groups are identified: middle class (people who have more years of education and perform manual work) and working class (people who have fewer years of education and perform manual work of some kind).
• Sociolect: The terms "upper" and "lower" are used to subdivide the groups making "upper-middle-class speech".

Education and occupation

• Idiolect: We tend to sound like others with whom we share similar educational backgrounds and/or occupations.
• As adults, the outcome of our time in the educational system is usually reflected in our occupation and socio-economic status.

Social markers: Particular speech sound functions as a social marker. In other words, having this feature occur frequently in your speech (or not) marks you as a member of a particular social group, whether you realize it or not.

Speech style and style-shifting: It is a social feature of language use. The most basic distinction in speech style is between formal uses and informal. Formal style is when we pay more careful attention to how we are speaking and informal style is when devote less attention. Also, they are described as "careful style" and "casual style". A change from one to the other by an individual is called style-shifting.

Prestige form as a way of explaining the direction in which certain individuals change their speech.

• Overt prestige: When the change is in the direction of a form that is more frequent in the speech of those perceived to have higher social status.
• Covert prestige: This hidden status of a speech style as having positive value may explain why certain groups do not exhibit style-shifting to the same extent as other groups.

Speech accommodation: People's ability to modify their speech style toward or away from the perceived style of the person that they are talking to.

• Convergence: People may adopt a speech style that attemps to reduce social distance and use forms that are similar to the other speaker.
• Divergence: Speech style is used to emphasize social distance between speakers.

Register and jargon: A register is a conventional way of using language that is appropriate in a specific context, which may be indetified as situational, occupational or topical.

Jargon is special technical vocabulary associated with a specific area of work or interest. In social terms, jargon helps to create and maintain connections among those who see themselves as "insiders" in some way and to exclude "outsiders".

Slang is more typically used among those who are outside established groups. Slangs describe words or phrases that are used instead of more everyday terms among younger speakers and other groups with special interests.

African American English: Also known as Black English or Ebonics, AAE is a variety used by many African Americans in many regions in U.S.A.

Social barriers such as discrimination and segregation serve to create marked differences between social dialects. In case of AAE, those different features have often been stigmatized as "bad" language, following a regular pattern whereby the social practices, especially speech, of dominated groups are treated as "abnormal" by those dominant groups who are in charge of defining "normal".

Vernacular language is a general expression for a kindof social dialect, typically spoken by a lower-status group, which is treated as "non-standard" because of marked differences from the "standard" language.

The sounds of a vernacular is the tencendy to reduce final consonant clusters, so that words ending in two consonants are often pronounced as if there is only one.

The grammar of vernacular are most stigmatized as being "illogical" or "sloppy".

• Illogical: It is he double negative construction.
• Sloppy: It is the absence of verb to be in AAVE.

CHAPTER 20

Culture: We refer to all the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things and people that we learn when we become members of social groups. It can be defined as "socially acquired knowledge". We develop awareness of our knowledge, and hence of our culture, only after having developed language. A particualar language provides us with a ready-made system of categorizing the world around us and our experience of it. 

Categories: A category is a group with certain features in common and we can think of the vocabulary we learn as an inherited set of category labels. These are the words for referring to concepts that people in our social world have typically needed to talk about.

Kinship terms: These are words used to refer to people who are members of the same family.

Time concepts: Abstract concepts that we inherit a conceptual system that operates with amounts of time as common categories.

Linguistic relativity: The structure of our language, with its predetermined categories, must have an influence on how we perceive the world.

Habitual thought: We think about things as we go about our daily lives, without analyzingh how we are thinking.

Snow:

• English does lexicalize some conceptual distinctions in the area of "snow".
• We enherit a language used to report knowledge, so we would expect that language to influence the organization of our knowledege in some way. However, we also inherit to influence the ability to manipulate and be creative with that language in order to express our perceptions.

Cognitive categories: We can look at language structure for clues, not for causes. Language systems can be "animate" as part of its culture or as its cultural interpretation of animate which may be closer to the concept "having special importance in life".

Classifies: These indicate type or class of noun involved.

• Classifiers are often used in connection with numbers to indicate the type of thing being counted.
• Unit of: We refer to certain types of things. There is a distinction in English between things treated as countable and non-countable.

Social categories: These are words that we use to say how we are connected or related to others. For example, uncle or grandmother.

Adress terms: This is a word or phrase for the person being talked or written to.

• An interaction based on an unequal relationship will feature address terms using a title, or title plus name for the one of higher status, and first name only for the one with lower status.
• More equal relationships have address terms that indicate similar status of the participants, such as first names or nicknames.

Gender: Biological, or natural, gender is the distinction in sex between the "male" and "female" of each species. Grammatical gender is the distinction between "masculine" and "femenine", which is used to classify nouns in languages such as Spanish. Social gender is the distinction we make when we use words like "man" and "woman" to classify individuals in terms  of their social roles.

Gendered words: There can be differences between the words used by men and woman in a variety of languages. There are other explamples, used to talk about men and woman, which seem to imply that the words for men are "normal" and the words for woman are "special aditions". Pairs such as hero-heroine or actor-actress illustrate the derivation of terms for the woman's role from the man's.

Gendered speech: In general, men have longer vocal tracts, larynxes and thicker vocal folds than women. The result is that men typically speak in lower pitch range. Although "normal speaking" takes place with substantial overlap in the pitch ranges of men and women, there is a tendency to exaggerate the differences in many contexts in order to sound more "like a man" or more "like a woman".

Among woman speaking in contemporary American English, there is also generally more use of pitch movement more rising and falling intonantion.

Gendered interaction: Many of the features in woman's speech facilitate the exchange of turns, allowing others to speak, with the effect that interaction becomes a shared activity. Interaction among men appears to be organized in a more hierarchical way, with the right to speak or "having the floor" being treated as the goal. Men generally take longer turns at speaking and, in many social contexts may be the only ones allowed to talk.

• One effect of the different styles developed by men and women is that certain features become very salient in cross-gender interactions.
• In the same-gender conversations,women produce more back-channels as indicators of listening and paying attention. The term back channel describes the use of words or sounds by listeners while someone else is speaking.