LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Sociolinguistics
Document Summary
Linguistic variation: any type of variation in language. Its meaning is more general and neutral than what sociolinguistics suggests. Sociolinguistics: the study of the interrelationships between language and social structure; centrally concerned with how language varies (at a single point in time) and changes (over time) according to how people in society use it. Dialect: any variety of a language spoken by a group of people that have systematic differences from other varieties. Language vs. dialect: variation, variation in different subareas, variation conditioned by different factors, language, culture, and identity. Dialects (linguist"s definition: mutually intelligible varieties, e. g. English spoken in seattle, english spoken in london u. k: dialects are on a continuum, asymmetries in intelligibility. Language variation in the u. s: geography, socioeconomics, gender, age, occupation. Syntactic/morphological: southern american english varieties vs. standard english, she done already told you, she has already told you, southern american english varieties (double modals, you might could do that, you might be able to do that.
