Latoya Brown
ELL 101 0609
Professor Yin
06/1/2010
Chapter 19 ( Language and social Variation) 205-215
1. Speech community; a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the
use of language.
2. Sociolinguistics; the Study of the relationship between language and society.
3. Social Dialect “sociolect”; a variety of language with features that differ according to the social
status (e.g. middle class or working class) of the speaker
4. Social variable and linguistic variable; Social variable is a factor such as working class or middle
class that is used to identify one group of speakers as different from another, while Linguistic
variable is a feature of language use that distinguishes one group of speaker from another.
5. Idiolect; the personal dialect of an individual speaker.
6. Postvocalic; used after a vowel, the researcher Labov’s went into department stores he asked
workers specific questions such as where are the women’s shoes ? , hoping to produce answer
with the Postvocalic sound /r/, he found specific patterns in the answers these patterns were
that the higher the socio-economic status of the store , the more /r/ sounds were produced and
the lower the status , the fewer /r/ sounds , this study varies in different regions of the world
however.
7. Social marker; a linguistic feature that marks the speaker as a member of a particular social
group; Examples in English; [h] –dropping which makes the words at and hat sound the same it
occurs at beginning of words sounds like I’m so ‘unrgy I could eat a ‘orse ; pronouncing ing
with [n] instead of [ ] sitting becomes sittin eating becomes eatin, both these markers indicate
lower class or lack of education.
8. Speech style and Style shifting ; Speech style refers to a way of speaking that is either formal
/careful or informal/ casual; while Style shifting is changing speech style for formal to informal
or vise versa
9. Overt prestige and Cover prestige ; Over prestige is status that is generally recognized as better
or more positively valued in a larger community ; while covert prestige is the status of speech
style or feature as having a positive value, but which is ‘hidden’ or not valued similarly in alarger
community.
10. Speech Accommodation; modifying speech style toward (convergence) or away from
(divergence) the perceived style of the person being talked to. The two types of speech
accommodations are Convergence which is adopting a speech style that attempts to reduce
social distance by using forms that are similar to those used by the person being talked to; while
the next one Divergence is adopting a speech style that emphasizes social distance by using
forms that are different from the person being talked to.
11. Register relation to jargon; Register is a conventional way of using a language that is
appropriate in a specific situation, occupation or topic, characterized by the use of a specific
Jargon ; Jargon is a special technical vocabulary associated with the specific activity or topic.
12. Slang and taboo terms; Slang is word or phrases used instead of more conventional forms by
those who are typically outside established- higher groups. ; Taboo refers to words or phrases
that are avoided in formal speech , but are used in swearing.
13. African American English (AAE) ; refers to language used by many but not all African American
and other groups (e.g. Puerto Rican in New York) fill with a number of characteristic feature that
taken together form distinct social markers; social barriers refers to things like discrimination
and segregation that separate social groups and creates marked differences between the social
dialect of the group.
14. African American Vernacular English; the causal speech style used by many African Americans as
a Vernacular; Vernacular refers to a social dialect with low prestige spoken by a lower –status
group, with marked differences from the Standard Language.