LING 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Lingua Franca, Isogloss, Speech Community
14 May 2018
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UNIT 07: Language in society
Languages and Dialects
- dialect: describes differences in not only the pronunciation (accent) but in syntax and vocabulary
as well
o differences in vocabulary: Canadians use hood, trunk and elevator and British speakers
use bonnet, boot and lift
- Idiolect: unique characteristics of an individual speaker
- Dialect levelling: movement towards a greater uniformity or decrease in variations due to mass
media
- Regional dialect: change that occurs in one region and fails to spread to other regions
- Social dialect reveals what country or what part of the country the person grew up in
- Accent: refers to someone who speaks a language nonnatively
- Receieved pronounciation (RP): speakers of most prestigious dialect
- Isogloss: when you cross is, you are passing from one dialect to another
- Standard dialect: dominant or prestige dialect
- Lingua franca: frnakish language, common agreement for social and commercial communication
between people speaking divergent languages
Physical and linguistic isolation
- dialectology: most studied factor in language variation has been geographical location of
speakers, focusing on regional differences in language and historical events that shaped a
particular society and in turn languages
- Methods used in diectology
o Finding non-mobile older, rural males (NORMs), presumably because they had
the least outside influence.
o Getting them to answer a long questionnaire to elicit words that are known to be
regionally different.
o Recording their answers in writing (there weren’t any tape recorders yet)
o Quantifying the results from the questionnaires to discover how different words
that refer to the same thing are distributed in the region, and to draw boundaries
of use, or isoglosses. For example, the use of pop and soda may indicate an
isogloss between Canada and the U.S.
o Finding several isoglosses to propose dialect areas and boundaries
- Physical isolation
o Speech communities that are isolated physically, socially or linguistically tend to
preserve older forms of language, hence the desire for dialectologists to study speech
communities who have been isolate
- Linguistic isolation
o Languages that live in isolation tend to retain older features of a language and go through
their own internally driven changes
- Social isolation
o Remaining separate from others because of lack of roads, transportation and racial
segregation
Languages in contact, pidgins and creoles
- languages in contact: speakers of different varieties → Spanish and English in US
- code-switching: speakers share more than one langue and can often switch from one language to
another within one conversation
- pidgin: contact situations that create new languages that develop out of the necessity to
communicate among speakers of various languages
- relexifier language: language that provides most of the vocabulary
- creole: when pidgin speakers have kids that are born to become native speakers of pidgin →
pidgin becomes a creole → more vocab gets added and grammar rules increase
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Dialect: describes differences in not only the pronunciation (accent) but in syntax and vocabulary as well: differences in vocabulary: canadians use hood, trunk and elevator and british speakers use bonnet, boot and lift. Dialect levelling: movement towards a greater uniformity or decrease in variations due to mass media. Regional dialect: change that occurs in one region and fails to spread to other regions. Social dialect reveals what country or what part of the country the person grew up in. Accent: refers to someone who speaks a language nonnatively. Receieved pronounciation (rp): speakers of most prestigious dialect. Isogloss: when you cross is, you are passing from one dialect to another. Lingua franca: frnakish language, common agreement for social and commercial communication between people speaking divergent languages. Dialectology: most studied factor in language variation has been geographical location of speakers, focusing on regional differences in language and historical events that shaped a particular society and in turn languages.
