LING 204 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Mutual Intelligibility, Speech Community, Social Distance
Document Summary
Variationist linguistics- explain why language varies and changes, focus on. Societies choose which language or dialect to use based on official languages, schooling, media, and attitudes towards other varieties. We define and study society by speech communities, social networks, and communities of practice. The sociolinguistic perspective is empiricist, language as actually used and recorded, everyday real language is more structure than you"d think. Linguists are descriptive, how people actually talk, not how they should . Social distance can affect how much we expect to understand somebody, as well as context. Slang- lexicon (words) that are new or have new meanings. Variety- what many sociolinguists call a subset of a language. Dialect- usually a regional subset of a language, but sometimes used to mean variety. Mentalist- the philosophy or approach hat describes how language is represented in the mind. Competence- a distinction drawn by chomsky that refers primarily to what speakers know about language.
