LING 320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Sociolinguistics, Some Cities, Isogloss

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 320
• Professor: Charles Boberg

Document Summary

All of the speakers of a given language. Languages are made up of a speech community and not the opposite. Canada is at least two speech communities (french and english, and these are also divided into several speech communities) We find common linguistic features that extend in their spatial domain over a set of other geographic languages. Even though those languages are not genetically related to one another. Speech community: group of people who share the same speech or language, no larger than a language (a subdivision of the total set of speakers of the language) They share a linguistic variety and they share a set of norms about that variety. Groups of people characterized by varieties of a language. E. g. , english, canadian english, ontarian english, torontonian english, urban. Torontonian english, middle-class urban torontonian english, and so on. Relative to what we are comparing the language to. Or are we comparing urban torontonian english vs. rural torontonian.