Chapter 5 Variation
– Language forms (such as phonological, grammatical) vary constant across both time and space
– If there is a lot of variant forms, they are said to constitute a version of a language called dialect
Diaelct overview
– Geographical dialect or simply dialect – different speech in different regions
– Social dialect or sociolects– how social groups of communities speak
– Dialects develop over time due to regional or societal(economic classes or religion) seperations
– Dialect speech is often considered to be a marker of identity- e.g. Massachusetts people have
different vowel pronunciations than the tourists
– Dialect is simply a variant version of a language- but the distinction is not so obvious
– e.g. “Romance language” such as French, Spanish, portuges etc. turn out to be moderd-day
dialects of latin- spoken – they are spoken in territories that became countries after the
breakdown of the Roman Empire
– They were granted the status of official national languages because the countries they were
spoken in received political independence
Dialect
– deried from dialektos meaning speech – indicating that the term was innitially coined to refer to
the ways people commonly use language in everyday communication – different from the
standard set up of a proper/official language
– e.g. french spoken in Paris = the standard form of French; all other varients = dialect
– it doesn't have to do with Parisian French being more cultured or the quality of its structual
features (pronunciation, lexicons, etc.)
– similarly Tuscan as the basis for the standard language of Italy mainly because it was used by
great medieval writers (Dante, Petrarch, etc.) and was guarenteed a wide audience
– determining whether 2 languages are dialects or different languages is difficult
– Dialectologists usually rely on mutual intelligibility to make the distinction
– if two linguistic codes cannot be understood mutually by the speakers of both languages –
they are distinct linguages
– if they are intelligible, then they are considered to be dialects of the same language
– Chambers and Trudgill
– explained that this view of languages can be used classify dialects as subparts of a language-
and providing criteria for distinguishing two languages
– Problems with this criterion
– many levels of mutual intellibility exists- at level can you decide that they are no longer
mutually understandable?
– most people can usually tell the distinction though –e.g. canadian and american English are
dialects of the British English- where Canada tries to preserve more of the British English
(colour vs. color)
– Although it is becoming more similar to theAmerican recently – especially when it comes
to vocabulary (e.g. gasoline instead of petrol, friend instead of mate, etc.)
3 Major dialectal variants of English in the US
1. Northern – called Eastern or New England
– typically spoken in New England or New York
– its charecteristics include:
– dropping the r sound at the end of words e.g. cark pronounced as Kah
– short close o sounds instead of open o (e.g. in fog) 2. Southern
– spoken in the southern states
– features include:
– the loss of r sound
– the use of broad a (e.g. time = taahm)
– the use of short i for e before a nasal sound (pen = Pihn)
3. Midland- Called Western or Midwestern
– spoken in pennsylivania, West virginia and mostAppalachian mountain states
– sometimes considered the standard form of English because it is spoken in the largest
geographic are
– include the use of the r sound, the use of open o,the use of long ay in time
Study of Dialects
– there are many tools developed
– Dialect atlas
– collection of maps of specific regions
– each map shows morphology and pronunciation a word rakes in a specific region/area
surveyed
– Georg Wenker
– the first person to study such maps
– he sent a list of sentences written in standard German to other schoolteachers in North
germany, asking them to write the list into local dialect
– This questionaire method led to two setps of maps
– The questionaire method sti
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