Unit – 2
Language and Regional Variation
Ø The Standard Language
Ø Accent and Dialect
Ø Dialectology
Ø Regional Dialects
Ø Style, Slang and Jargon
THE STANDARD LANGUAGE
Definition
Dictionary definitions of “standard (language)” are limited while linguists apply wildly different approaches when describing this language variety.
· The Standard Language a particular variety of a language that is regarded as the most correct, widely accepted, or prestigious way of writing or speaking the language.
· It is a variety of a language selected and promoted by some authority. (sociolinguistics)
· It is a particular variety of a language that is regarded as the most correct way of writing or speaking the language.
Explanation
Standard variety is usually the nation-wide, non-regional form of language used for public communication and particularly for writing. In many countries, the standard variety is based in some dialect, often the one spoken in the capital city. This variety is then adopted by the upper class and everyone who doesn’t want to sound regional.
Standard variety of a language is used in the following contexts.
· A recognized standard of pronunciation;
· Mention of the language in legal documents (for example the constitution of a country);
· The use of the language throughout public life (for example in a country’s parliament) and its formal instruction in schools;
· A body of literary texts;
· Formal instruction of and research into the language and its literature in institutions of higher education;
· An institution promoting the use of the language and its formal instruction in educational institutions abroad;
· Translations of key religious texts such as the Bible or the Koran.
Standard languages arise when a certain dialect begins to be used in written form, normally throughout a broader area than that of the dialect itself. The ways in which this language is used—e.g., in administrative matters, literature, and economic life—lead to the minimization of linguistic variation. The social prestige attached to the speech of the richest, most powerful, and most highly educated members of a society transforms their language into a model for others; it also contributes to the elimination of deviating linguistic forms. Dictionaries and grammars help to stabilize linguistic norms, as do the activity of scholarly institutions and, sometimes, governmental intervention. The base dialect for a country’s standard language is very often the original dialect of the capital and its environs—in France, Paris; in England, London; in Russia, Moscow. Or the base may be a strong economic and cultural centre—in Italy, Florence. Or the language may be a combination of several regional dialects, as are German and Polish.
Even a standard language that was originally based on one local dialect changes, however, as elements of other dialects infiltrate into it over the years. The actual development in any one linguistic area depends on historical events. In the United States, where there is no clearly dominant political or cultural centre—such as London or Paris—and where the territory is enormous, the so-called standard language shows perceptible regional variations in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. All standard languages are in any case spoken in a variety of accents, though sometimes one particular accent (e.g., Received Pronunciation in Britain) may be most closely associated with the standard because of its shared social or educational origins.
In most developed countries, the majority of the population has an active (speaking and writing) or at least passive (understanding) command of the standard language. Very often the rural population, and not uncommonly the lower social strata of the urban population as well, are in reality bidialectal. They speak their maternal dialect at home and with friends and acquaintances in casual contacts, and they use the standard language in more formal situations. Even the educated urban population in some regions uses the so-called colloquial language informally. The use of this type of language is supported by psychological factors, such as feelings of solidarity with a certain region and pride in its traditions or the relaxed mood connected with informal behaviour.
ACCENT AND DIALECT
Definitions
This distinction between accent and dialect is not that important for a layperson. Unless a person is a linguist, the difference between these two words is pretty abstract.
Accent
· Accent, or pronunciation, is a special element of a dialect.
· An accent is the way that particular person or group of people sound. It’s the way somebody pronounces words, the musicality of their speech, etc.
· When a standard language and pronunciation are defined by a group, an accent may be any pronunciation that deviates from that standard.
Dialect: a way of pronouncing words that shows which country or area you are form
He speaks English with a faint French accent.
I find it difficult to understand Sarah. She speaks with a broad Scottish accent.
Dialect
· Dialect is a type of language that is derived from a primary language. A dialect describes both a person’s accent and the grammatical features of the way that person talks.
· A dialect is a variety of language differing in vocabulary and grammar as well as pronunciation. Dialects are usually spoken by a group united by geography or class.
Accent: a form of language that is spoken in a certain area
Even though my English is pretty good, I can’t understand the Yorkshire dialect.
There are many different dialects in China.
Explanation
Accent and dialect are two different words that are commonly heard in linguistics. These two words refer to a certain way of speaking a language and are often confused, resulting in being used interchangeably; however both the words have different meanings. In linguistics, an accent depends mostly on pronunciation of specific words or phrases. An accent is the manner in which different people pronounce words differently from each other. For example, the word ‘route’ is pronounced as ‘roote’ in the US, while as ‘raut’ in the UK.
In linguistics, an accent depends mostly on pronunciation of specific words or phrases. An accent is the manner in which different people pronounce words differently from each other. Accents differ depending on a particular individual, location, or nation. The accent can also help identify the locality, region, the socio-economic statues, the ethnicity, caste and/or social class of the speaker. All these factors affect the accent of a person. Diversity also plays a huge part in shaping different accents. Accents usually differ in the quality of voice, pronunciation of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. An accent may be associated with the region in which its speakers reside (a geographical accent), the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language (when the language in which the accent is heard is not their native language), and so on.
Though certain accents, such as American, British or Australian, stand out, almost everyone speaks with a certain kind of accent and accents vary person to person. As accent is just a way of pronouncing or putting stress on certain vowels and consonants, almost every has an accent that differs from another person. Accents are developed as children learn to speak and pronounce words. As human beings spread to the different parts of the world, speaking the same language in different ways forms different types of accents. Accents also refer to the little diacritical marks that are placed on certain words in languages such as Spanish, French, etc. These marks change the pronunciation of the word and it lets people know where to put extra stress when saying the word.
Accents are usually considered as a subset of dialects and are gaining popularity due to the increase in international Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies. Due to the outsourcing, a lot of people look for people with an American accent to work at such places.
Dialect
The term dialect is derived from the ancient Greek word ‘diálektos’ meaning "discourse". A dialect is a variation in the language itself and not only in the pronunciation. Dialect is a type of language that is derived from a primary language. For example, Sanskrit being a primary language, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati are all considered as dialects of that particular language. It is used to refer to the language that deviates from the original language. The second language differs with regards to grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc. In certain cases, a mix of two languages is also considered as a dialect, such as Spanglish is considered as a dialect of Spanish and English.
Sometimes, dialects are used to refer to regional languages that are spoken in a particular place or region. Linguists believe that dialects are usually impure in nature to some extent, due to being borrowed mostly from the parent language. Dialects also include other speech varieties such as jargons, slang, patois, pidgins and argots. There is no set standard in order to distinguish a dialect from a particular language and in many cases linguists refer to dialects as languages, claiming that there is no difference between the two.
DIALECTOLOGY
The study of language in society is called sociolinguistics. The real basis for much of sociolinguistics is that the differences in language among members of a speech community or between different regions speaking different varieties of the same language are often meaningful for society. Language variants spoken by entire groups of people are referred to as dialects.
Dialectology is a branch of sociolinguistics that studies the systematic variants of a language. The term dialect was first coined in 1577 from the Latin dialectus, way of speaking. Dialectal variation is present in most language areas and often has important social implications.
Definition
Dialectology is the systematic study of dialects. That is the study of variant features within a language, their history, differences of form and meaning, interrelationships, distribution, and, more broadly, their spoken as distinct from their literary forms. The discipline recognizes all variations within the bounds of any given language; it classifies and interprets them according to historical origins, principles of development, characteristic features, areal distribution, and social correlates.
Explanation
The scientific study of dialects dates from the mid-19c, when philologists using data preserved in texts began to work out the historical or diachronic development of the Indo-European languages. Their interest was etymological and systematic. Scientific phonetics and the principle that sound change was not erratic but followed discoverable rules or laws, were a basic part of the growth of dialectology. Living dialects were seen to furnish a huge treasury of living data on phonology, lexicology, and other features of language that written texts could not furnish. The linguist's task was to gather, analyse, and interpret this living body of language.
Dialectology is pursued through a number of methods; the American linguist W. Nelson Francis (Dialectology, 1983) describes the prevailing methods as traditional, structural, and generative.
In traditional dialectology the collection of data is the primary requirement. This entails fieldwork, the more detailed and massive the better, within the limits of practicability, and its presentation in the form of dictionaries, grammars, atlases, and monographs. This method Francis calls ‘item-centered’, emphasizing the individual datum and paying little attention to underlying system.
In traditional dialectology the collection of data is the primary requirement. This entails fieldwork, the more detailed and massive the better, within the limits of practicability, and its presentation in the form of dictionaries, grammars, atlases, and monographs. This method Francis calls ‘item-centered’, emphasizing the individual datum and paying little attention to underlying system.
In structural dialectology, the investigator seeks to find both the structure or system by which a dialect holds together or achieves synchronic identity and how it is changed by the introduction of any new feature. Since any change in the system affects every feature of it, it becomes in effect a different system, whose parts are, however, diachronically connected. There is a paradoxical element here which is partly due to difficulties of definition.
In generative dialectology, the investigator holds that the language exists within the speaker as a competence which is never fully realized in performance. This competence, lying beneath actual language as it is produced (and as it is recorded by traditional dialectologists), works by a series of rules which transform it into actual speech. Thus, it is the dialectologist's task to find a basic system whose rules produce as economically as possible the surface structure of actual dialect. The complexities or variations within a language (its dialectal variants) may thus be traced back to a putative source form from which in the course of time they could by speciation have developed. However, without the mass of data which traditional dialectologists have furnished, theoretical systems could not have been either proposed or refined.
To study dialects we must first decide how to determine when two similar forms of a language are merely dialects of the same language and when are they separate languages. The difference between dialect and language is not clear-cut, but rather depends on at least three factors, which often contradict one another.
1. The first criterion is purely linguistic, mutual intelligibility. Can the speakers of two different language forms readily understand one another? If they cannot, then the two forms would normally be considered separate languages--at least by linguists. If language differences cause only minimal problems in communication, there is a tendency to call the variants dialects of a single language: such is the case with British, Australian, American English and the English of India--all dialects of English.
2. The second criterion is cultural, and takes into account the opinion of the speakers: do the speakers themselves think of their form of language as a variety of a more standard form of speech? Is there a neutral or standarized form of the language that speakers look to as the norm. This is certainly true of the varieties of English spoken in the United States. Most speakers of American English would also consider American English and the English spoken in Britain--which subcribes to a slightly different standard--to be variants of a single language. (There are differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, punctuation, etc. between standard American English and British English.)
3. A final criterion in differentiating language from dialect involves a language's political status, a factor that is external to the form of the language and sometimes even at variance with the culture of the speakers. Do the political authorities in a country consider two language forms to be separate languages or dialects of a single language? Extremely different, non-mutually intelligible language forms may be called dialects simply because they are spoken within a single political entity and it behooves the rulers of that entity to consider them as such: this was the case with Ukrainian and Russian in the days of the Russian Empire, where Ukrainian (called Little Russian) was considered a substandard variety of Russian (called Great Russian). This could also be said to be the case with the so-called dialects of Chinese in the People's Republic of China.
On the other hand, language forms that are quite mutually intelligible can be considered separate languages also for purely political reasons. Such is the case with Serbian and Croatian in the former Yugoslavia. Linguistically, these two language forms are more similar than the English spoken in Texas and New York; linguists, in fact, usually called them both by the name Serbo-Croatian. However, for entirely political reasons the Serbs and the Croats have deliberately invented separate literary standards to render their language more divergent than it really is. If two language variants are mutually intelligible and subscribe to the same literary standard, they are dialects of the same language rather than separate languages. If two language variants are not mutually intelligible, they are different languages.
REGIONAL DIALECTS
In addition to geography, other factors may lead to dialectal change. One is ethnicity, the cultural, religious and racial differences that separate groups of people. The dialect of an ethnic group within a larger speech community is often marked by certain unique features.
Definition
· A regional dialect is a distinct form of a language spoken in a particular geographical area. It is also known as a regiolect or topolect.
· A regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, especiallya variety of speech differing from the standard literary language or speech pattern of the culture in which itexists: Cockney is a dialect of English.
· A variety of language that with other varieties constitutes a single language of which no single variety isstandard: the dialects of Ancient Greek.
Explanation
As opposed to a national dialect, a regional dialect is spoken in one particular area of a country. In the USA, regional dialects include Appalachian, New Jersey and Southern English, and in Britain, Cockney, Liverpool English and 'Geordie'.
If the form of speech transmitted from a parent to a child is a distinct regional dialect, that dialect is said to be the child's vernacular.
Some differences in U.S. regional dialects may be traced to the dialects spoken by colonial settlers from England. Those from southern England spoke one dialect and those from the north spoke another. In addition, the colonists who maintained close contact with England reflected the changes occurring in British English, while earlier forms were preserved among Americans who spread westward and broke communication with the Atlantic coast. The study of regional dialects has produced dialect atlases, with dialect maps showing the areas where specific dialect characteristics occur in the speech of the region. A boundary line called an isogloss delineates each area.
In contrast to a regional dialect, a social dialect is a variety of a language spoken by a particular group based on social characteristics other than geography."
Another factor in the development of dialects is social differentiation. In England the upper classes speak different dialects than the lower classes. Usually, dialects developed on the basis of several interacting factors. The classes of Britain, for example, originate in large part from historical differences in ethnicity. Even today, by and large, Britain's lower classes trace their ancestry to the original Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles who were defeated by the Anglo-Saxons. Many upper class British families trace their ancestry back to the Norman French who conquered England in 1066.
STYLE, SLANG AND JARGON
STYLE
Definition
Style is language variation which reflects changes in situational factors, such as addressee, setting, task or topic.
Explanation
It is a choice of a particular way of saying or writing something as there is often more than one way of conveying the same message. The style changes from formal to informal, as the situation becomes more urgent. Other terms that are used to identify different context-dependent styles include frozen, casual and intimate. Style choices affect both grammar and vocabulary. Words that are used only in certain styles are often identified as such in dictionaries. Styles include literary, old-fashioned, humorous and medical.
The choice is determined by the following:
Specific contextual factors, such as the degree of formality that is required.
A particular effect that the person wants to achieve.
Addressee as an Influence on Style
Age of addressee
= People generally talk to the very young and to the very old. Forexample: Baby-talk
Social background of addressee
= People talk differently to the higher class and to thelower class. For example:
The pronunciation of newsreaders on different radio station
Context, Style and Class
(Some Examples)
• Formal contexts and social roles
• Different style within an interview
• Colloquial style or the vernacular
• The interaction of social class and style
Stylistics is the study of style, or the way language is used to create particular effects, especially those associated with the expressive and literary uses of language.
SLANG
Definition
Slangs are the words and phrases which are highly colloquial and informal in type, occurring more often in speech than in print. It is consists either of newly crafted words or existing words employed in special sense. It is making abstract concrete and memorable, by employing imagery.- are very informal English and maybe understood only within a certain group of people. Words often have short shelf life, fading away after a generation. Some slang words have endured and entered the general lexicon, including bogus, geek, mob, hubbuband. Slang exist alongside jargon and argot.
Reasons for Using Slang
For fun
As an exercise either in wit and ingenuity on in humor
To be different; to be novel
To be secret or not understood by those around.
The use of slang plays a major role in the maintenance of the gang’s group identity. It separates the in-group, who use the slang, from the rest of society who do not and are not part of the gang.
Types of slang
Abbreviations
Etc- etcetera (and so on)
Vid-video
Po-po= police
Acronyms
TLC-Tender Loving Care
BFF- Best Friends Forever
JPEG- Joint Photographic Experts Group
Shorthands
GR8=great
24/7= 24 hours a day,
7 days a week4.
Symbols
$$$= a lot of money
Idiomatic expressions/Phrasal verbs
Pain on the neck= somebody who is annoying
Knock out= somebody who is extremely stunning or gorgeous
Lost the plot= to become crazy or mentally unstable
To goof up= to make a serious mistake
To make waves= to cause trouble
Screw around= to waste time
To catch some Z’s= to get some
JARGON
Definition
The French word is believed to have been derived from the Latin word gaggire, meaning "to chatter", which was used to describe speech that the listener did not understand. Middle English also has the verb jargounen meaning "to chatter", which comes from the French word.[5] The word may also come from Old French jargon meaning "chatter of birds". American Dictionary defines jargon as “the language, especially the vocabulary, peculiar to aparticular trade, profession, or group; medical jargon”.
Explanation
Jargon is a type of language that is used in a particular context and may not be well understood outside of it. The context is usually a particular occupation (that is, a certain trade, profession, or academic field), but any in group can have jargon. The main trait that distinguishes jargon from the rest of a language is special vocabulary—including some words specific to it and, often, narrower senses of words that outgroups would tend to take in a broader sense. Jargon is thus "the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group". Most jargon is technical terminology, involving terms of art or industry terms, with particular meaning within a specific industry.
Jargon is a language that is characterized by uncommon or pretentious vocabulary and convoluted syntax and is often vague in meaning. Unlike most slang, academic jargon is typically not imaginative or picturesque. Too much of it would make one feeling stifled, even oppressed. Like some slang, jargon might keep outsiders out, serving to exclude. Nonetheless, jargon has its place, enabling members of a group to communicate about their interests. The terms jargon and argot are often used almost interchangeably to refer to “obscure or secret language” or “language of a particular occupational group”.
KINDS OF JARGONS
1. Medical Jargons
BP - Medical shorthand for blood pressure
FX - Medical jargon meaning bone fracture
JT - A joint
NPO - A patient should not take anything by mouth
IM - Intramuscular
2. Business Jargons
Bang for the buck - A term that means, to get the most for your money
Due diligence - Putting effort into research before making a business decision
Sweat equity - Getting a stake in the business instead of pay
The 9-to-5 - Business jargon meaning a standard work day
Chief cook and bottle-washer - A person who holds many responsibilities
3. Police Jargons
Suspect - A person whom the police think may have committed a crime
Code Eight - Term that means officer needs help immediately
Code Eleven - A code that means the individual is at the scene of the crime
FTP - The failure of an individual to pay a fine
4. Military Jargons
TD - Temporary duty
AWOL - Absent without leave
SQDN - A squadron
5. Political Jargons
Left wing - Political jargon for liberal, progressive viewpoint
Right wing - Jargon meaning a conservative viewpoint
Getting on a soapbox - Making a speech in public
POTUS - President of the United States
SCOTUS - Supreme Court of the United States
6. Internet Jargons
BTW - By the way
CYA - See you around
FAQ - Frequently asked questions
HTH - Hope this helps
MOTD - Message of the day
YMMV - Your mileage may vary
IIRC - If I remember correctly
LOL - Laugh out loud
BFF - Best friends forever
TTYL - Talk to you later
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