Linguistics 1028A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Social Isolation, Quebec French, Dialect Levelling

• School: Western University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: Linguistics 1028A/B
• Professor: Stephanie Kelly

Document Summary

Physical isolation mainly geographical: distance, e. g. Newfoundland english: the water separates them as an island (geographic feature, although there are visitors, they"re less frequent, speakers rely on speaking to individuals of the same speech community. Linguistic isolation - isolated from other speech communities of that same speech community/variety: e. g. Quebec-french: given the rest of canada is dominated by english, quebec is isolated because of their speech community being french. Social isolation social status, how you rank in a social hierarchy: speech community isn"t being affected by an outsider, e. g. The changes that occur in the language spoken in one area or group do not necessarily spread to another. Physical barriers impede transmission of linguistic changes and reinforce dialectal differences. Political separation border between us/canada although isolation is less pronounced today there is no evidence to show that dialect levelling is underway despite increased communication among geographically distant communities. Dialect levelling movement toward greater uniformity.