Sociolinguistics

Speech community

A group of speakers who share sociolinguistic norms about language use

Free variation

Allophony not conditioned by phonological environment

Can depend on the variety you speak, who you are speaking to, what the situation is, etc.

Ex: Voiceless stops are in free variation with unreleased stops in word-final in English

Dialects vs. accents

Dialect: geographically separate and mutually intelligible speech variety

Accent: Phonetic component of a dialect

Real time study

Measures the same at different points in time

Accurate but time consuming

Apparent time study

Measuring the same variable at one point in time across age groups

More error

Overt prestige

When linguistic features associate the speaker with a higher socio-economic class

Covert prestige

When non-standard linguistic features associate the speaker with a desired but non-standard speech community

Linguistic change from above

New linguistic feature is perpetuated by the higher social class, overt and likely to be led by women

Change form below

New linguistic feature is perpetuated by the lower class, covert and likely to be led by men

Sociolinguistic dependent variable

Depends on the host of the independent variables

Ex: Whether diphthongs get centralized, how the vowel is produced in pasta

Sociolinguistic independent variable

Social class, gender, age, speech context, experiment task (interview, reading list, etc.), syntactic context for a given variable, phonological context for a given variable, morphological context for a given variable