LING 320 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Speech Community, Sociolinguistics, Rhoticity In English
19 Nov 2012
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Sociolinguistics = study of language use within or among groups of speakers. Groups are useless and necessary constructs created for our purposes of research: must be careful about drawing conclusions about individuals, careful not to stereotype: to say a member of a group will always exhibit certain characteristic behavior. Speech community = type of group sociolinguists study. Chomsky: completely homogeneous: useless - theoretical construct for a narrow purpose. All the people who use the same language (lyons: must define language and dialect , same language can be spoken in a wide variety of ways (even in communities isolated from one another) Ie: english spoken in south africa and by expatriates in china: a single speech community can employ more than one language. Ie: canada, switzerland, nyc, many african states, over 300 languages are spoken in. London relationship between linguistic characteristics a, b and c and speech community x.
