Notes on Varieties and Variation of Language
Varieties and Variation in Language
Language is not uniform; each language has more than one varayti (variety), especially in spoken form. Variation is a normal, important part of daily use across different regional and social communities.
George Yule’s framework (The Study of Language): two main kinds of variation:
Geographic/ regional variation (regional varieties)
Social variation (factors in how language is used in society)
Most later discussions of this topic draw on Yule’s distinction and extend it to other social and linguistic factors.
The Istandard (Standard) of a language refers to a particular variety that underpins written language, mass media, and schooling; it is what many people learn as a second language or as the model variety to imitate.
Standard English (Istandard Ganito/Ganoon) forms the basis for print English, newspapers, books, media, and classroom instruction.
Some languages have institutional bodies similar to a national academy for deciding whether words or forms are part of the Standard (e.g., the French Academy in France determines whether loanwords are considered standard French). Such bodies often resist borrowings, though everyday usage may still introduce loanwords (e.g., le whisky, le weekend in Standard French).
Practical tension: Standard varieties are prestigious and often associated with politicial/cultural centers (e.g., London for British English, Paris for French), but other regional varieties remain widely spoken.
Accent (Punto) and Dialect
All speakers have an accent (punto) that signals origin (regional or social) in pronunciation.
Accent is about phonology; dialect includes grammar and vocabulary as well as pronunciation.
Two speakers can share a “standard” pronunciation but differ in accent (e.g., American vs Scottish pronunciation of the same sentence).
Example: You don't know what you're talking about (both may use Standard English) vs Ye dinnae ken whit yer haverin' aboot (Scottish English approximation, different pronunciation, some differences in vocabulary and grammar).
Dialect Continuum: regional varieties blend into neighboring varieties; there is no single hierarchy that makes one variety inherently better than another from a linguistic standpoint.
Social prestige: some dialects gain prestige over time and are valued for sociopolitical reasons, contributing to language planning and education.
Regional Dialects
Regional dialects are widely recognized and can be sources of humor or stereotype (e.g., Americans joking about Southern English vs Brooklyn speech; in the Philippines, jokes about Jiji vs Jeyjey or KiKiKi in impeachment contexts).
Sociolinguistic surveys study stable, consistent features of speech tied to geographic location, using careful informants to ensure representativeness.
Informants are often selected to minimize outside influence (older, rural, male speakers) which can bias data toward earlier dialect features; data yields detailed linguistic atlases (e.g., Linguistic Atlas of the U.S. regions).
Isogloss and Dialect Boundaries
Isogloss: a line on a map separating areas with different linguistic features (a particular linguistic variable).
When multiple isoglosses are mapped, thicker lines may denote a dialect boundary.
Example from the Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest (U.S.):
Grocery terminology boundary: most informants in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Northern Iowa prefer one form; while Iowa and Nebraska show Midland features.
Voiced examples:
Northern: uses forms like "paper bag" for groceries, "pail" for bucket, "kerosene" for oil, etc.; phonological cues include certain vowel/consonant realizations.
Midland: uses forms like "paper sack", "bucket", "coal oil", "slick".
Phonetic/bigram contrasts: Northern vs Midland realizations for words like taught, roof, creek, greasy, and lexical forms: Northern: paper bag, pail, kerosene, slippery, get sick; Midland: paper sack, bucket, coal oil, slick, take sick.
The isogloss approach highlights regional differences but also reveals that many speakers in a region will share a mix of features from neighboring dialects.
The True Dialect Continuum
Isoglosses can create a map of regional boundaries, but speech varieties blend across space; there is no abrupt switch from one dialect to another.
The Sociolinguistic continuum recognizes gradual shifts and overlaps between neighboring dialects, especially in politically adjoining areas (a continuum in Dutch-German, Scandinavian languages bridging Norwegian, Swedish, etc.).
Bidialectal or bilingual speakers may comfortably switch between dialects or languages depending on context and interlocutors.
Bilingualism and Language Planning
In many countries, regional variation is not just dialectal but involves two distinct languages (e.g., Canada with English and French as official languages). Bilingualism may involve a dominant community language with minority languages coexisting.
Indvidual bilingualism can arise from parental language differences; one language may be dominant in daily use, another in formal or wider contexts.
Language planning involves government, legal groups, and education to decide which varieties will be official or used in formal domains. A phased approach typically includes:
Codification: develop standard grammar, dictionaries, and usage norms.
Elaboration: expand standard usage to cover all domains of social life.
Implementation: government drives adoption of standard language in education, administration, law, etc.
Acceptance: majority of population uses the standard and regards it as national language.
A classic example: Swahili as the national language of Tanzania, introduced gradually in education, law, and government despite many other local languages.
Pidgin and Creole: in some places, the standardized form may be an original pidgin (no native speakers). When a pidgin becomes a native language for a community, it becomes a creole (e.g., Tok Pisin in New Guinea; creoles in Haiti, Jamaica, Sierra Leone).
Pidgin characteristics: limited grammar, no native speakers, lexical borrowing from the superordinate language, functional morphemes replace inflectional morphemes, and flexible syntax (e.g., Tok Pisin examples show simplified syntax like bilonge yu and buk bilong yu).
Estimates: pidgin languages have roughly
speakers; creoles around .As pidgins become creoles, they often acquire native speakers and rich sociolinguistic functions beyond trade pidgin usage.
Pidgin and Creole: Examples
Tok Pisin (Tok Pisin, Melanesian Pidgin) features include:
Phrases like "bilong yu" (belong you);
Lexical borrowing and reanalysis of English words with new meanings or syntax.
Example gloss (illustrative Tok Pisin line):
Your head will soon get well again.
Tokenized forms such as "bilong yu" (belong you) and "buk bilong yu" (your book) show possession marking.
The distinction between pidgin and creole often correlates with the presence of native speakers and the expansion of function beyond trade language into community-wide communication.
Language, Society and Culture
Language variation is shaped by social identity and cultural context; speech acts can index regional identity, social class, ethnicity, and education.
Identities and social roles influence how people speak in different contexts; language is a resource for signaling membership in social groups.
Modern sociolinguistics emphasizes the documentation of social variables (education, occupation, income, age, gender) and their correlations with speech features.
Socio-dialect Variation: Education, Occupation, Social Class
Education level correlates with systematic changes in speech; people outside formal schooling may show more vernacular forms; those with higher education often show features tied to written or formal speech.
Occupation and social class contribute distinctive jargon and register differences; specific occupations (e.g., service workers) may exhibit a distinctive pronunciation and vocabulary (e.g., a waiter’s order in a restaurant).
An often-cited study compared salespeople in three NYC department stores (Saks, Macy’s, Klein): differences in speech linked to store status and customer base.
In British English, more marked socio-phonetic variation exists for the -ing suffix (e.g., walking, going) across social strata than in American English.
Age, Gender
Variation exists within the same social group due to age and gender. Younger speakers may adopt prestige forms more readily than older speakers; older generations may retain older pronunciations.
For example, differences between gendered speech patterns are documented (e.g., some forms more common among men; others among women), though patterns vary by culture.
Studies across Indigenous languages in North America report gender-based differences in vocabulary and pronunciation; historically, early European observers noted distinct male/female speech patterns in some tribes.
Ethnic Background
Ethnic identity influences linguistic variation; immigrant communities and their children often display distinctive speech patterns.
Black English or African American Vernacular English (AAVE) serves as a salient example of a socially stigmatized but systematic dialect with distinctive features, such as copula absence in certain constructions (e.g., They mine; You crazy) and features like double negation (e.g., He don't know nothing; I ain't afraid of no ghosts).
It is important to understand that such dialects are systematic, rule-governed varieties rather than “bad” speech; stigma arises from social attitudes toward the dialect rather than intrinsic linguistic flaws.
Idiolect
Idiolect describes the unique combination of all linguistic features that characterize an individual speaker.
Beyond regional and social variations, a person’s speech includes personal voice qualities, physics of speech, and individual social experiences.
In analysis, the idiolect accounts for personal speech patterns within the broader context of regional and social variation.
Register: Tenor, Field, Mode
Register refers to variation according to user and usage context; it encompasses style and situational language use.
Key concepts for register:
Tenor: social relationship and level of formality; who you are talking to and the social distance.
Field (Domain): what the talk is about; domain-specific vocabulary (e.g., computing terms, legal terms).
Mode: channel of communication (spoken vs written); immediacy and formality of the medium.
Examples of situational variation by register (illustrative):
Prescription for a patient (doctor-patient): formal medical register.
Recipe instruction: instructional register with imperative forms and procedural language.
Advertising copy: abbreviated, punchy register with repeated structures and marketing diction.
Catalog/industrial text (e.g., product specs): formal but concise register with domain-specific nouns.
Tenor and pronoun use: different address forms reflect status and relationship (e.g., formal vs informal address in English, Japanese honorifics, French tu/vous, German du/Sie, Spanish tú/usted).
Style-shifting: speakers adjust language according to role, audience, and setting (e.g., individuals addressing different people: former president Reagan gets different forms depending on whether you address him as Reagan, Ron, Mr. Reagan, etc.).
Written vs spoken: written language tends to be more formal; spontaneous speech includes interruptions, hesitations, and discourse markers that do not typically appear in writing.
Mode and social interaction: the mode of communication shapes linguistic choices and the formality of the language used.
Mixed and Interacting Modes of Communication
In practice, written and spoken modes are not strictly separated; modern media (telephone, voicemail, messaging) blur the lines between registers and modes.
New technologies expand the ways communities express language and can influence standardization processes.
The emergence of writing-based standardization often drives the prestige and adoption of a particular dialect or variety within a community, especially when literacy supports broader dissemination.
Diglossia
Diglossia describes a social situation with two distinct varieties of a language within one community, each with clear social functions.
A 'high' variety used in formal, educated, or religious contexts (lectures, sermons, formal writing).
A 'low' variety used in everyday conversation and informal settings (local dialects, colloquial speech).
Examples include:
Arabic-speaking regions with Classical/High Arabic for formal contexts and local dialects for everyday use.
Ancient Latin as a high variety in Western Europe and vernaculars (French, English) as low varieties in different historical periods.
Paraguay with Spanish as high variety and Guarani as low variety in some contexts.
Language and Culture
Language variation is often discussed in relation to cultural differences; language encodes and reflects cultural worldviews and social beliefs.
The study of culture and language shows that language is a vehicle for expressing and shaping social identities and worldviews.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Linguistic Determinism): the idea that language determines or strongly influences thought and perception.
Classic illustration: Eskimo (Hopi) vs English speakers in describing snow/winter. Hopi might differentiate snow types in grammar, whereas English speakers do not, suggesting language shapes perception in some limited way.
The debate includes counterarguments: generativity of thought and cross-language analogy show that speakers can think about things even when their language lacks specific terms; speakers can rephrase or coin new terms to fit new concepts.
Determinism vs. agency: even if language shapes some perceptual tendencies, it does not rigidly fix thought; speakers can adapt and create new categories when needed.
A frequent critique (Sampson, 1980) concerns conflating linguistic categories with biological or social categories; language features do not map cleanly onto social categories like gender or ethnicity.
Snippets from Hopi vs Eskimo examples illustrate that language can influence perception but does not rigidly determine it; culture and experience shape how language is used and what concepts are salient.
Notable Examples and Takeaways
The Standard vs regional varieties are not hierarchically ranked as 'better' or 'worse' linguistically; they reflect social and political histories and contexts.
Isoglosses and dialect continua illustrate how language features spread and blend across geography, with some features extending far beyond their point of origin.
Language planning shows how governments attempt to stabilize and standardize varieties for education, administration, and national identity, balancing prestige with practical needs for multilingual societies.
Pidgin vs Creole dynamics illustrate how contact languages develop: pidgins simplify grammar and lack native speakers; creoles emerge when a pidgin becomes a native language for a community, often carrying rich cultural and social functions.
Register, mode, field, and tenor provide a practical framework for analyzing how language adapts to different social contexts and purposes; successful communication depends on aligning linguistic choices with context, audience, and purpose.
estimated pidgin speakers
estimated creole speakers