LINGUIS 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Dialect Continuum, Phonetics, Idiolect
Document Summary
Chapter 10: what is language variation: language varieties. Language variety = any form of language characterized by systematic features. Idiolect- every native speaker has own, differs systematically from other native speakers. Sociolinguistics - the study of relationships between these language varieties and social structure as well as the interrelationships among different language varieties. Dialect - any variety of language spoken by a group of people that is characterized by systematic differences from other varieties of the same language in terms of structural or lexical features. The appropriate term for systematic phonological variation is accent, not dialect. A group of people speaking the same dialect = a speech community. Speech communities may be defined in terms of a number of extralinguistic factors, such as region, socioeconomic status, age, gender, and ethnicity. The identification of any speech variety as a pure dialect is spoken is rare, because it requires the assumption of communicative isolation.
