LIN100Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Idiolect, Language Death, Mutual Intelligibility
Document Summary
Membership of an exclusive group - secret language. Every society uses some language - which is equally complex. There is no such thing as a primitive" language. Humans have a predisposition to use language. We have an instinct to learn language. Every human speaks a slightly different language = idiolect. Dialects of the same language are generally mutually intelligible, but what distinguishes two languages is a political rather than a linguistic question. Politics has more power over the formal differences between dialects. Linguists observe, but they do not say that someone should speak a certain way. There is a lot of variation - not grammar troubles. There are multiple varieties, and one is the majority variety. Is about one variety (idiolect) being better than another. There is a lot of variability in language. Languages die at a rate of one every other week. We see faces when there are none.
