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Variety (linguistics)
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called an isolect or lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety.Meecham, Marjorie and Janie Rees-Miller. (2001) "Language in social contexts." In W. O'Grady, J. Archibald, M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller (eds) ''Contemporary Linguistics''. pp. 537-590. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. The use of the word "variety" to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term ''language'', which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term ''dialect'', which is often associated with non-standard varieties thought of as less prestigious or "correct" than the standard.Schilling-Estes, Natalies. (2006) "Dialect variation." In R.W. Fasold and J. Connor-Linton (eds) ''An Introduction to Language and Linguistics''. pp. 311-341. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linguists speak of both standard and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) and/or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethnolect
An ethnolect is generally defined as a language variety that mark speakers as members of ethnic groups who originally used another language or distinctive variety. According to another definition, an ethnolect is any speech variety (language, dialect, subdialect) associated with a specific ethnic group. It may be a distinguishing mark of social identity, both within the group and for outsiders. The term combines the concepts of an ethnic group and dialect. The term was first used to describe the monolingual English of descendants of European immigrants in Buffalo, New York. The term ''ethnolect'' in North American sociolinguistics has traditionally been used to describe the English of ethnic immigrant groups from non-English speaking locales. Linguistically, the ethnolect is marked by substrate influence from the L1, a result of the transition from bilingualism to English monolingualism. Overview The idea of an ethnolect relates to linguistic variation and to ethnic identity. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Usage (language)
The usage of a language is the ways in which its written and spoken variations are routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to idealized models of how a language works or (should work) in the abstract. For instance, Fowler characterized usage as "the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used" and as the "points of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice of words." In the descriptive tradition of language analysis, by way of contrast, "correct" tends to mean functionally adequate for the purposes of the speaker or writer using it, and adequately idiomatic to be accepted by the listener or reader; usage is also, however, a concern for the prescriptive tradition, for which "correctness" is a matter of arbitrating style. Common usage may be used as one of the criteria of laying out prescriptive norms for codified standard language usage. Modern dictionaries are not gene ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arbitrariness
Arbitrariness is the quality of being "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle". It is also used to refer to a choice made without any specific criterion or restraint. Arbitrary decisions are not necessarily the same as random decisions. For example, during the 1973 oil crisis, Americans were allowed to purchase gasoline only on odd-numbered days if their license plate was odd, and on even-numbered days if their license plate was even. The system was well-defined and not random in its restrictions; however, since license plate numbers are completely unrelated to a person's fitness to purchase gasoline, it was still an arbitrary division of people. Similarly, schoolchildren are often organized by their surname in alphabetical order, a non-random yet an arbitrary method—at least in cases where surnames are irrelevant. Philosophy Arbitrary actions are closely related to teleology, the study of purpose. Actions lacking a ''telos'', a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistic Prescription
Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices often suggest that some usages are incorrect, inconsistent, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value, even in cases where such usage is more common than the prescribed usage. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society or sector of a society perceives as a correct or proper form, or advise on effective and stylistically felicitous communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms. Prescriptive approaches to language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pronunciation
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language. Contested or widely mispronounced words are typically verified by the sources from which they originate, such as names of cities and towns or the word GIF. A word can be spoken in different ways by various individuals or groups, depending on many factors, such as: the duration of the cultural exposure of their childhood, the location of their current residence, speech or voice disorders, their ethnic group, their social class, or their education. Linguistic terminology Syllables are counted as units of sound (phones) that they use in their language. The branch of linguistics which studies these units of sound is phonetics. Phones which play the same role are grouped together into classes cal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Accent (sociolinguistics)
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity (an ethnolect), their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their first language (a foreign accent). Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation and distinction of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word "accent" may refer specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word "dialect" encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. "Accent" is often a subset of "dialect". History As human beings spread out into isolated communities, stresses and peculiarities develop. Over time, they can develop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sally McConnell-Ginet
Sally McConnell-Ginet (born 1938) is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Cornell University. She is known for her work on the language of gender and sexuality. Education and career McConnell-Ginet earned degrees in philosophy and mathematics before turning to linguistics, receiving a PhD from the University of Rochester in 1973. She joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1973, with a dual appointment in women's studies and philosophy. She went on to serve as director of Women's Studies and founding co-director of Cognitive Studies, and chair of Modern Languages and Linguistics, as well as the later Department of Linguistics. McConnell-Ginet has served as president of the International Gender and Language Association and of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 2008, she was elected a fellow of the LSA and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Personal life McConnell-Ginet is an avid swimmer. She swam across Lake Cayuga Cayuga Lake (,,) is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penelope Eckert
Penelope "Penny" Eckert (born 1942) is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018. Biography Eckert received her PhD in linguistics in 1978 from Columbia University, where she was a student of William Labov. She is the author or co-author of three books on sociolinguistics, the co-editor of three collections, and author of numerous scholarly papers in the field. She attended Oberlin College in 1963 as an undergraduate. Eckert served as the president of the International Gender and Language Association from 2000–2003. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. In 2012, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, where she had previously served on a number of committees, including the ethics, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Community Of Practice
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book ''Situated Learning'' . Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book ''Communities of Practice'' . A CoP can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created deliberately with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop personally and professionally . CoPs can exist in physical settings, for example, a lunchroom at work, a field setting, a factory floor, or elsewhere in the environment, but members of CoPs do not have to be co-located. They form ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Pawley
Andrew Kenneth Pawley (born 1941 in Sydney), FRSNZ, FAHA, is Emeritus Professor at the School of Culture, History & Language of the ''College of Asia & the Pacific'' at the Australian National University. Career Pawley was born in Sydney but moved to New Zealand at the age of 12. He was educated at the University of Auckland, gaining a PhD in anthropology in 1966. His doctoral thesis, ''The structure of Karam: a grammar of a New Guinea Highlands language'', was dedicated to Kalam, a Papuan ( Trans–New Guinea) language of Papua New Guinea. He taught linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland from 1965 to 1989, with periods at the University of Papua New Guinea (1969) and the University of Hawaii (1973 to 1978). He moved to the Australian National University in 1990. He has taught at the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute in 1977 and 1985. Pawley took sabbaticals at Berkeley (1983), Frankfurt (1994) and Max Planck Institute for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speech Community
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. Exactly how to define ''speech community'' is debated in the literature. Definitions of speech community tend to involve varying degrees of emphasis on the following: * Shared community membership * Shared linguistic communication A typical speech community can be a small town, but sociolinguists such as William Labov claim that a large metropolitan area, for example New York City, can also be considered one single speech community. Early definitions have tended to see speech communities as bounded and localized groups of people who live together and come to share the same linguistic norms because they belong to the same local community. It has also been assumed that within a community a homogeneous set of norms should exist. These assumptions have been challenged by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
