ESLM 577

Sociolinguistics

Code Switching

A common occurrence in bilingual and multil-lingual communities, code-switching refers to instances in which people alternate between at least two languages or language varieties in a single conversation, across sentences or clause boundaries. 
Sometimes called code-mixing

Creole

A language variety that develops out of a pidgin in a language contact situation. Unlike a pidgin, a creole is spoken as a first language of some community or group of speakers, and can be used in the entire range of social settings. 

Dialect

A term that tends to refer to subvarities of a single language. Non-linguists sometimes use this term as synonym for accent, though dialects differ in terms of not only pronunciation but also words, sentence structure and meaning.

Diglossia

A situation in which two distinctly different language varieties co-exist in a speech community, acting as social register, in which the high variety is used in formal situations and the low variety among friends. 

Discourse/ Conversation Analysis

An extended language interaction that is longer than a sentence. Also the study of such interaction. Conversation Analysis, among other tings is a method that looks at the sequential organization of conversation and how participants manage the conversation using strategies like turn-taking. Conversation analysis allows researchers to search large collections of recorded natural speech to discover patterns in the distribution of utterances. 

Frame-Switching

The process of where individuals, particularly those who are bicultural, shift between different cultural frameworks or “frames” in response to situational cues.

Intercultural Pragmatics

The concern of the way the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages, communicate in a common language, and, usually, represent different cultures 

Interlocutor

The person with whom you are speaking.

Pidgin

A language variety that is stripped down to its essential, that is, not very linguistically complex. Pidgins arise in language contact situations, for example, trade and are used as a lingua franca. often a precursor or early stage of creoles, pidgins tend to have a fairly develop vocabulary and basic linguistic structure but, unlike creoles, pidgins are not spoken as a first language and are used in limited social settings.  

Pragmatics

The branch of linguistics dealing with language in use and the contexts in which it is used

Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis

A theory about language and thought that argues that the way a particular language describes the world actually affects its speakers view of reality.

Speech Act

A communicative activity or utterance that odes something. See also directive function, expressive function, phatic function, referential function. 

Speech Community

A group of people who are in habitual contact with one another, who share a language variety and social conventions, or sociolingusitic norms about language use. 

Vernacular