Regional variation
Do you speak American?
Review
• What is discourse?
• What is a schema? Script?
Standard English
• Is English the standard language in America?
• Does America have a standard variety of
English?
• How would you categorize it?
• Can you teach it?
Standard English
• So far, we have been discussing an “idealized”
form of English. This form may not truly exist.
• The closest measure of standard English can
be found in grammar books and on news
broadcasts.
Accent vs. Dialect
Accent – the variation of sounds among
different regions and groups of people.
“People from New York talk funny.”
“People from the South sound stupid.”
Everyone has an accent.
Dialect
• The variations in grammar and vocabulary
among different groups of people.
• Often, dialect and accent go hand in hand.
Pop – midwest
Soda – Florida
Coke – Georgia
Youse – Irish
Y’all – the South
You guys – the North
Final Note on Dialects
Dialects can be a cause of stereotyping.
Examples?
Dialects can be a source of social identity.
When languages meet
• When two speakers of different languages are forced to
interact (trade, colonization, etc), they must communicate.
• The language that is developed from their interaction is called
a
pidgin.
• Pidgins – no grammatical morphology and relatively limited
vocabulary. There are no inflectional morphemes, only
functional morphemes.
Creoles
• Creoles are evolved pidgins, blended from two
languages.
• Children grow up speaking a pidgin and it eventually
becomes a creole. Children create grammar
structures and rules.
• Ex: Jamaica = English creole, Haiti = French creole.
Diglossia
• A situation where two distinct languages are common in one
country. Ex: English & French in Canada
Any other examples?
• Usually one is considered low (for everyday conversation) and
one is high (for more important things: gov., business, etc).
• Do any diglossias exist in America?
Let’s talk about America
• Do you consider America a bilingual or monolingual country?
• Approximately 2,000 languages are spoken in Florida.
• English is the main language of 215 million people (82.1%)
• Spanish is the main language of 28 million people (10.17%)
• In the world, Chinese (2 million+), French (1.6 million),
German (1.4 million)
• What does that mean to teachers?
What does this mean to you?
• Worldwide, there are 450 million native
English speakers (2006)
BUT..
• There are over 1 billion ESL speakers (mostly
in China and India).
• There are more ESL speakers in India than the
entire population of the UK.
Let’s debate
English is not the official language of the U.S.,
but some insist that it should be.
• What are the arguments for and against the
‘English-Only Movement’?
• What does ‘English-Only’ mean for education?