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Language and Regional variation. The standard Language. Idealized variety: accepted official language of a community or country. Standard English: printed in newspapers, books, widely used in mass media, and taught at schools.
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The standard Language • Idealized variety: accepted official language of a community or country. • Standard English: printed in newspapers, books, widely used in mass media, and taught at schools. • It is the variety taught to those who want to learn English as a second or foreign language
It is clearly associated with education and broadcasting • It is more easily described in terms of written language than spoken language.
Accent and Dialect • Accent: technically restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially. • Dialect is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as pronunciation
Dialectology • There is a general impression of mutual intelligibility among speakers of different dialect despite some differences. • This is one of the criteria used in the study of dialects or dialectology • It is important to emphasize that none of the dialects is inherently better than any other. They are simply different.
Regional Dialects • All languages are spoken in different ways in different regions. • This led to the recognition of regional dialects.
Isogloss, dialect boundaries and The Dialect Continuum • If a vast majority of speakers in one area say they carry things home from store a paper bag while the majority in another area say they use a paper sack, then it is usually possible to draw a line across a map separating the two areas. • This line is called isogloss
However, the drawing of isoglosses tends to obscure the fact that at most dialect boundary areas, one dialect merges into another. Thus, forming form a dialect continuum.
Bilingualism and Diglossia • Bilingualism is a situation where two official languages are used. • Diglossia describes a situation involving two distinct varieties. • In diglossia, there is a low variety used for every day affairs and a high variety learned ins schools.
Pidgin and Creoles • A pidgin is a variety of language developed for some practical purpose, such as trading among groups of people who had a lot of contact but did not know each other’s language. • When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade or contact language and becomes the first language of a social community, it is described as Creole.
