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Dialectology :earth_americas: - Coggle Diagram
Dialectology :earth_americas:
language ideology and standardization
:check:
Language ideology is the way society thinks about language standards :bulb:
Standardization
is the process a given variety has to go through in order to become a recognised and teachable standard dialect :necktie:
The idea of a
standard language
also emerged through
accepted usage
, standard varieties were already spoken way before their formal codification :notebook:
Compulsory schooling in the UK led to the birth of a
standard
accent, which is the RP pronunciation :flag-gb:
Accommodation and divergence
: the tendency to change our speech in order to reduce the distance with our interlocutors :speaking_head_in_silhouette:
standard english
:guardsman::skin-tone-2:
It is spoken by 12-15% of the British population and it is used throughout all of the British Isles :desert_island:
Linguistically speaking, no standard form is better than any other variety, therefore other English varieties do not come from RP, but have their own history :bookmark:
It's an indicator of prestige, it has no associated accent, it is a social dialect (not part of any geographical continuum) :crown:
main varieties
the
standard british english
is spoken in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa
The
general american english
is considered to be a conservaive, prestigious, devoid of marked regional features, and a reference model veriety :flag-us:
functional varieties
:construction_worker::skin-tone-4:
Register
refers to the choice of words in a specific situation. For example, we can have registers in medicine, journalism, law, crime, politics and sport :soccer:
Style
refers to the
level of formality
, it's not a black or white matter, but should instead be perceived as a continuum.
It can rely on both vocabulary and on the frequency of some syntactic structure (eg. passive form of verbs) :school:
social variation
:loudspeaker:
Some studies focused on the
relationship between the geographical and social variation
showed how British speakers who belong to a higher class are more likely to use RP while regional variations are more pervasive among speakers of the lower classes :small_red_triangle:
It relies on both
social barriers
(gender, age, ethnicity, socio-economic status,...) and
social distance
(between old and young speakers on between lower and higher class). Another factor that should be considered is
language attitudes
:no_entry:
All of these slow down the spreading of linguistic innovation as much as geographical distance does :turtle:
Labov studies in the US
:pen:
According to Labov's New York study on
rhoticity
, the pronunciation of /r/ is strictly correlated with social status: by interviewing different people in department stores, he noticed
the /r/ to be pronounced by people belonging higher social classes
:department_store:
The most important part of his work was using
methodological innovations
to avoid the
observer's paradox
and
obtain natural speech
:bulb:
Ethnic varieties - AAVE
:information_desk_person::skin-tone-5:
Other sociolinguistic studies concern
AAVE
(also known as BE or AAE) an US ethnic variety with its own grammatical features some of which differ from the Standard American Dialect :pencil2: