Language and Social VariationChapter 19

Language and CultureChapter 20

Speech Community / Social Dialects

• Speech Community – a group of people who share the same linguistic variety; they share a set of sociolinguistic norms for language use.

• We may belong to several speech communities.• Different speech communities may have different

grammars, phonemes, preferences for words/morpheme

• What are some of your speech communities?

Speech Style/Style-Shifting*How do we know when to evoke formal or informal? *What type of interaction (with whom) warrants one speech style or the other?*Would you consider “foreigner talk” or “caregiver speech” as SPEECH STYLES?

Social VariationEach person has his/her own individual way of

speaking called an idiolect.Our idiolect will tend to sound like

others who have similar education, socio-economic status as us.

Social marker – a particular linguistic feature that MARKS you as being part of a particular social group.

Register, Jargon, and SlangA register contains jargon.Different registers are used in different contexts:

situational, occupational, or topical(p. 210-211) What are some different social registers of

English?What jargon is used in those registers?

Slang is colloquial speech. Slang varies through different generations.

African American Vernacular EnglishVERNACULAR=SOCIAL DIALECT

Your book talks about the GRAMMAR of a common vernacular in the USA, AAVE (p. 213-214). Below are some linguistic features of AAVE.

Give and example of each of these features. Why is this information about AAVE important? *reduction of final consonant clusters*pronunciation of initial dental consonants as alveolar stops*possessive -‘s,3rd person singular -s, and often the plural -s omitted *double-negative construction*frequent absence of ‘to be’ forms*substitution of ‘to be’ auxiliary form with only ‘be’ or ‘bin’

Language & Culture

Chapter 20

CULTURE

How do you define it?How does language fit into culture?

What do you think?

Does language determine how we think, or is it how we think that determines our language?

Think about lexicalized/non-lexicalized items in certain cultures–

Hawaii – rainEskimos- snow

Poststructuralism and Language

What do you think about this statement?

If one is not able to talk about one’s experience(s), then the

experience(s) didn’t happen.

English as World Language (Lingua Franca)LINGUA FRANCA=a language used by two people who

are both non-native speakers of the language to communicate.

Which countries use ENGLISH as a lingua franca?Do you think English will be the “world language” or is

it already?Why do you think Mandarin Chinese or Hindi are not

widely-used lingua francas, even though there are more speakers of those languages than English?