LIN101H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 14: Dialect Levelling, Quebec French, Phoneme
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LIN101H5 Full Course Notes
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Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between society and language. Details of word choice, syntax and pronunciation reveal us to be members of a particular speech community a group of people who share social conventions or sociolinguistic norms, about language use. A speech community"s norms affect both markers and indicators. As these norms are shared by all members of a speech community, sociolinguists study the language of the community, not the speech of a single speaker. Mutual intelligibility is what linguists usually use to determine whether people are speaking the same language or not; if people from two different places (i. e: birmingham, Alabama and birmingham, england), can understand each other, then they"re speaking the same language, and the systematic differences in their speech reflect different dialects (also known as different subsets, of the same language) Mutual intelligibility isn"t always used to decide whether two different ways of speaking should be considered different languages or dialects of the same language.
