Language and Dialects

• national / standard ➝ regional / local ➝ individual (varieties of languages)
• language: collection of different forms that are all mutually intelligible
  • if two speakers understand each other, they’re mutually intelligible
• dialects: forms of speech with coherent, systematic properties
  • recognition of linguistic difference
• dialect continuum: when there’s a number of continuous dialects, each dialect is closely to the next
• there are political ideas of language too
  • ex: norway and danish
• dialects can be affected by region, socioeconomic status, age, ethnicity, etc.
• Dialects and Attitudes
  • there are intense subjective judgements on certain dialects
  • linguistic security: myth that you don’t speak a dialect but everyone else does
  • regional dialectology involves subjective evaluations
  • in-group / out-group
  • shibboleths: pronunciations of a single word which becomes a stereotype of a speech community
  • variation: style and register
  • everyone has a dialect (speech community) and an idiolect (personal speech style)
  • also have variation of speech styles based on linguistic context (informal v formal)
  • accommodation: speakers adopt the mode of speech of the person they’re addressing
• Sociolinguistic Variation: regional and social variation
  • regional variation is usually determined by geographical and topographical features
  • mountains, rivers, deserts, etc.
  • the more a speech community is isolated, the less it will be changed by other speech communities
  • dialect maps are created by making isoglosses of the regional extent of a dialect indicator
  • bundles of isoglosses define regional dialects

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