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Brandeis LING 100A - Lecture on Sociolinguistics

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Malamud Intro to LinguisticsLecture on Sociolinguistic sR o ad m a p: 0. Introduction; 1. Regional dialects; 2. Social dialects; 3. Languages in contact (4…)0. L an gu a ge and s o cial attitude sValue judgments about language should be recognized as socially based: isolate the social aspects from the purely linguistic ones. (similar to prescriptivism vs. descriptivism).Social factors play a very important role in how people actually speak. We examine these factors to understand how they underly linguistic variation. Reminder: clas sifying "correctnes s":1. Established criteria of educated written language 2. Issues on which educated people differ (different usage in different genres, also different opinions) 3. Changes in the spoken language that some people resist4. Pure inventions of self-appointed grammarians with no basis in linguistic structure or historical usageLanguage varieties:dialect any language variety shared by a community of speakers, has unique phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, usage, and vocabulary accent regional phonological or phonetic distinction (sound in a dialect) idiolect the unique characteristics of an individual speaker slang informal lexicon (words/expressions) that have not gained widespread acceptability jargon specialized vocabulary associated with a trade, profession, sport, etc. Dialect variation and its evaluationLanguage has a deep social function of defining group identity. How?____________________________________________________________ George Bernard Shaw (1916 preface to his play Pygmalion): "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." In Shaw's England, to "spot" someone is a (usually negative or even hostile) evaluation.1Rememb er: shibboleth People have been killed based on linguistic markers of regional or ethnic dialect: e.g., the Bible, in Judges 12: Jephthah and the Gileadites against Ephraimites: 6 …If he said, "Sibboleth," because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.Also: in the Dominican Republic in 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians were massacred on the basis of whether or not they could roll the /r/ in perejil, the Spanish word for "parsley."American regional and class-based accents are also subject to sometimes harsh evaluation.S o cial pattern s in lan gu a geThe study of variation in speech that depends on geography, identity, social and economic status is the domain of sociolinguistics -- variation in the form of language, especially as the result of social categories. Sociolingui stic judgmentsWhen you hear a speaker of American English (or any other language you know well), you might often ask yourself what kind of person is talking:what sex? what age? from what part of the country? what social class? what race or ethnicity? Most people are very good at guessing sex and age and individual identity, and fair at guessing geographic region. We're sensitive to social class markers in dialect areas we are familiar with.1. Regional dialectsDialect differences – often increase in proportion to communicative isolation (e.g. America, England)Dialect leveling – movement towards greater uniformity. Ease of travel & mass media don’t seem to cause dialect leveling (e.g. in UK and US there is an increase in dialects in urban areas, while only a few major dialects are spoken on TV and radio)1.1 Some features that distinguish regional dialect s of American EnglishWilliam Labov and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have used telephone survey techniques to construct a detailed Phonological Atlas of North America.Here are a couple of simple ways in which dialects of American English vary regarding particular distinctions of pronunciation, taken from the Atlas.21. Many speakers -- especially those in the northern and western parts of the country -- don't distinguish the vowels of cot / caught. 2. On the other hand, many southern speakers don't distinguish the vowel in words such as pin / pen or him / hem: these two lax vowels are merged before a nasal consonant (but not in other contexts, such as pit / pet). "M at ched guise" experiments (listeners hear the same material spoken with different accents) show: evaluations of traits such as intelligence can be strongly influenced by social stereotypes associated with speech pattern. Similarly, African-American or Latino speech markers can make the difference between being shown a house/apartment & being told, it is no longer availableLexical distinction s between dialectsAspects of language besides pronunciation ("accent") set speakers apart. Vocabulary: e.g. 1950s England (S. C. Ross) U and non-U vocab. – arbitrariness of most sociolinguistic markersAlso: words for carbonated beverage in the U.S. http://popvssoda.com:2998/images/bigdrawn.gifSynta ctic difference sOzark, MO John will eat and Mary. Appalachian English He might could do it. You might should go home.Dialect 1 (SAE): between you and I. Won’t he let you and I swim? Won’t he let me swim?Dialect 2 (SAE): between you and me. Won’t he let you and me swim? Won’t he let me swim?British English: I could have done it. I could have done. SAE. I could have done it. *I could have done. 2. Social dialect s.2.1 Prestige dialect s"Grammatical" aspects of language use are common in discussions of "good" & "bad" language.How do arbitrary prescriptive rules arise? – use of language as a social gatekeeper. 2.2 S o ci al diale ct: g-droppin g in En gli shThere are systematic analogical relationships among different social and registral dimensions. E.g., social class and formality: case study: g-dropping in English.What is g-dropping?The term comes from the orthography: ng for the velar nasal [ŋ] ; n for the alveolar nasal [n], e.g. she's opening/openin' the door. In fact, there is no [g] sound involved at all . Thus in "g-dropping" nothing is ever really dropped What words are candidates for g-dropping ?English speakers do not have a general alternation between final velar and coronal nasals, 3e.g. boomerang does not become boomeran', and


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Brandeis LING 100A - Lecture on Sociolinguistics

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