LINA02H3 Lecture Notes - Sociolinguistics, Voicelessness, Canadian English
Document Summary
Children in isolation do not (generally) acquire human language. No two humans speak in exactly the same way. Humans need social context in order to learn language: humans are by definition social entities. The relationship between language and society is studied by the vast field of sociolinguistics. Native speakers of any language can talk to and understand each other, no two people speak alike. We have the ability to recognize acquaintances by hearing them talk. Every speaker has idiodlect: the unique characteristics of the language of an individual. Do not divide accents by region, because every person has different phonetic environments. Groups within the same language can be different among themselves. When systematic differences between groups appear, dialects are formed. Intelligible differences between people within the dialect: unintelligible differences from people outside the dialect. A language is a collection of dialects. When two dialects become mutually unintelligible, they change into separate languages.
