Language and Social Variation Chapter 19 Language and Culture Chapter 20

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Language and Social VariationChapter 19
Language and CultureChapter 20
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Speech Community / Social Dialects

• Speech Community a group of people who share
  the same linguistic variety they share a set of
  sociolinguistic norms for language use.
• We may belong to several speech communities.
• Different speech communities may have different
  grammars, phonemes, preferences for
  words/morpheme
• What are some of your speech communities?

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Speech Style/Style-Shifting

• How do we know when to evoke formal or
  informal?
• What type of interaction (with whom) warrants
  one speech style or the other?
• Would you consider foreigner talk or
  caregiver speech as SPEECH STYLES?

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Social Variation

• Each person has his/her own individual way of
  speaking called an idiolect.
• Our idiolect will tend to sound like others
  who have similar education, socio- economic
  status as us.
• Social marker a particular linguistic feature
  that MARKS you as being part of a particular
  social group.

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Register, Jargon, and Slang

• A register contains jargon.
• Different registers are used in different
  contexts
• situational, occupational, or topical
• (p. 210-211) What are some different social
  registers of English?
• What jargon is used in those registers?
• Slang is colloquial speech. Slang varies through
  different generations.

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African American Vernacular English

• VERNACULARSOCIAL DIALECT
• Your book talks about the GRAMMAR of a common
  vernacular in the USA, AAVE (p. 213-214). Below
  are some linguistic features of AAVE.
• Give and example of each of these features.
• Why is this information about AAVE important?
• reduction of final consonant clusters
• pronunciation of initial dental consonants as
  alveolar stops
• possessive -s,3rd person singular -s, and often
  the plural -s omitted
• double-negative construction
• frequent absence of to be forms
• substitution of to be auxiliary form with
  only be or bin

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Language Culture

• Chapter 20

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CULTURE

• How do you define it?
• How does language fit into culture?

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What do you think?

• Does language determine how we think, or is it
  how we think that determines our language?
• Think about lexicalized/non-lexicalized items in
  certain cultures
• Hawaii rain
• Eskimos- snow

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Poststructuralism and Language
What do you think about this statement? If one
is not able to talk about ones experience(s),
then the experience(s) didnt happen.
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English as World Language (Lingua Franca)

• LINGUA FRANCAa language used by two people who
  are both non-native speakers of the language to
  communicate.
• Which countries use ENGLISH as a lingua franca?
• Do you think English will be the world language
  or is it already?
• Why do you think Mandarin Chinese or Hindi are
  not widely-used lingua francas, even though there
  are more speakers of those languages than English?