ANT253H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Functional Illiteracy, Calque, Tuscan Dialect
27 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
Sociolinguistics studies language in all kinds of spaces geographical, social, cultural and pragmatics. Study of variation came under 2 branches of linguistics: (1) dialectology study of dialects, (2) contact linguistics investigation of languages in contact (i. e. spanish in contact with. However, we call them national languages rather than dialects (i. e. american english) because they are spoken in territories that have political autonomy. Only variants within each national language are called dialects (i. e. newfoundland. It can be that the standard language is historically itself a dialect variant that became the norm at some point: this can be due to social (level of education), political and economic prestige. Determining whether 2 variants are dialects or distinct languages is guided by the notion of mutual intelligibility: if speakers understand each other, then they likely speak dialects of the same language. The problem with this method is that many levels of mutual intelligibility exists among unrelated languages.
