regional variation

Regional Variety

a form of language which conveys information about a speaker‘s geographical origin via

words, grammatical constructions or features of pronunciation which are present in some regions but absent in

others

Dialect

differences between varieties related to vocabulary and grammar

Accent

differences in pronunciation

Isogloss

a line on a map which denotes the boundary between linguistic features (of vocabulary, grammar and

pronunciation)

Intra-national variation

variation within a country

intro-continental variation

variation within a continent/large world region, as opposed to differences between nations, continents

Standard English

emerged 'naturally' in the 15th century

from a variety of regional English dialects

• Area: triangle containing London, where the Court was

based, and the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge

• Prestigious because of its use in Court and education

• Influential because it was used by the economically

powerful class

Syntactic Variables

are spread across much wider geographical spaces than phonological ones

→ not quite as regional

• Much more data is necessary for dialect work: syntactic constructions occur less frequently than phonemes

e.g. relating to verbs, Syntactic doubling, or double negation, Use of ain‘t: neutralization of be and have, Dialect variation relating to noun phrase

Personal pronoun you

Phonological Variables

any linguistic element that has more than one physical realization in a given speech

community

Lexical Sets

group of words that share a similar phonetic feature

3 types of phonological realisation

• Systemic differences

• Realizational differences

• Distributional differences

systemic differences

A systemic difference occurs when one variety makes a contrast between words that is impossible in

another variety

realisational differences

Varieties may share the same phonemes but realize them differently

distributional differences

How phonemes are distributed into lexical sets, and the position in a word in which phonemes appear