Variants and Dialects of English
standart English (Great Britain)
American English
canadian English
Australian English etc
standart English (FEATURES)
a variety of English with standardized pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and spelling that have no local base;
used as the norm of communication by the government, law courts, and media;
taught to native speakers in school and to learners of English as a foreign language;
a canon of literature and translations;
SE carries the most prestige within a country;
most widely understood but only a minority of people within a country actually use it
English is used as a lingua franca
- among airline pilots;
- for international diplomacy;
- for school / university instruction, etc.
Standard American English includes:
➢General American accent (comes from Pennsylvania, Upstate New York and other rural areas of the Northeast);
➢standardized vocabulary and conventions of use; ➢standardized spelling;
➢standardized grammar.
American Dialect Areas
➢Northern
➢Midland
• North Midland • South Midland
➢Southern
Canadian English Unique features:
➢the use of “eh?” either as a tag question or as an element in a narrative sentence
➢borrowings from Native American languages: igloo, kayak, kerosene, mukluk “Inuit boot”, parka, and skookum “strong”;
➢ terms reflecting Canadian culture
➢ items to do with ice hockey, fur trading, lumbering, mining, and local fauna and flora.
A pidgin Features:
✓limited vocabulary;
✓a reduced grammar structure;
✓a narrow range of functions, compared to the languages from which they derived;
✓they are the native languages of no one.
English-based Pidgins and Creoles Three main areas:
➢the Caribbean (Jamaican Creole, Gullah, etc.);
➢West Africa (Gambian Creole, Togolese Pidgin, etc.);
➢the West Pacific (Hawaiian Creole, etc.)
Indian English Some distinguishing features:
✓the use of the present continuous tense and extra prepositions
✓the use of isn't it as a ubiquitous question tag
✓omission of a preposition or object altogether
✓while double possessive pronouns - 'our these prices' (instead of the British English 'these prices of ours')
South Africa English
the affirmative no
the all-purpose response is it
lexicon
stylistically neutral
stylistically marked
basic vocabulaty
formal
informal
bookish words
archaic and obsolete
terminology
colloquialisms
slang
dialect words
Dictionary In traditional lexicography: a reference book or software that gives a list of words with their
✓definitions in the same or another language; ✓pronunciations (optional)
✓grammar codes (optional)
✓derivatives (optional)
✓usage (optional) ✓origins (optional)
types of Dictionaries
linguistic
non - linguistic
general
special
unilingual
bilingual
multilingual
synchronic
deachronic
Problems in Lexicography
➢a) selection of headwords; Issues
➢b) structure and contents of the vocabulary entry; ➢c) principles of sense definitions issues
➢c) principles of sense definitions issues
➢how, if at all, to admit the historical element;
➢how to select among scientific and technical terms;
➢whether to include neologisms, nonce -words, and slang. Clue: frequency of the words to be considered;
➢a special entry for words in groups (syntagmatic issue) and identical word-forms in different word classes (paradigmatic issue);
➢how to differentiate between polysemy and homonymy:
➢whether to apply a synchronic or diachronic approach; ➢how to treat regularly formed derivatives;
➢how to organize senses of polysemantic words in a single entry (whether each sense is main or derived, direct or figurative, primary or secondary);
➢how to determine stylistic markers (colloquial, poetical, rhetorical, archaic, familiar, derogatory, vulgar or slang)
how to definite lexemes clearly excluding difficult words and avoiding a vicious circle of synonymic references;
➢what type of definition to apply:
▪linguistic (lexical and grammatical properties of
words, their components, their stylistic features);
▪encyclopaedic (more information about facts and things referred to);
▪contextual (explained by examples)