Languages,
Dialects, and
Varieties
Dr. Aisha Alsubhi
Varieties
— a variety of language as ‘a set of linguistic items with similar
distribution’, e.g. Canadian English, London English, the English
of football commentaries.
— a specific set of linguistic items or human speech patterns
(sounds, words, grammatical features, etc.) which we can
uniquely associate with some external factor ( a geographical area
or a social group), e.g. Standard English, Cockney, lower-class
New York City speech, Oxford English, etc.
— Variety is something greater than a single language as well as
something less.
Vernacular
— The language a person grows up with and uses in everyday
life in ordinary, commonplace, social interactions.
— Vernacular often has pejorative association when used in
public discourse.
— Speakers can give their vernacular a name, but they cannot
decide whether it is a language proper or a dialect of some
language.
Dialects
— a dialect is a language that is excluded from
polite society. It is often equivalent to
nonstandard or even substandard, when such
terms are applied to language, and can
connote various degrees of inferiority, with
that connotation of inferiority carried over to
those who speak a dialect.
Standardization
Standardization refers to the process by which a language has been codified in
some way. That process usually involves the development of such things as
grammars, spelling books, and dictionaries, and possibly a literature.
There are seven criteria that are useful in discussing different kinds of
languages :
1. Standardization
2. Vitality
3. Historicity
4. Autonomy
5. Reduction
6. Mixture
7. De facto norms
1- Standardization
• The standardization process itself performs a variety of functions .It
unifies individuals and groups within a larger community while at the
same time separating the community that results from other
communities. Therefore, it can be employed to reflect and symbolize
some kind of identity: regional, social, ethnic, or religious.
• A standardized variety can also be used to give prestige to
speakers, marking off those who employ it from those who do
not, i.e., those who continue to speak a nonstandard variety. It
can therefore serve as a kind of goal for those who have
somewhat different norms; Standard English and Standard
French are such goals for many whose norms are dialects of
these languages.
2. Vitality
Vitality refers to the existence of a living community of speakers. It is used to
distinguish languages that are alive from those that are dead. Latin is dead since no
one speaks it as a native language; it exists only in a written form frozen in time,
pronounced rather than spoken, and studied rather than used.
3. Historicity
Historicity refers to the fact that a particular group of people finds a sense of identity
through using a particular language: it belongs to them.
Social, political, religious or ethnic ties may be also important for the group, but the
language bond is the strongest tie of all.
4. Autonomy
Autonomy is one of feeling. A language must be felt by its speakers to be different from other
languages. However, this is a very subjective criterion.
Some speakers of African American English maintain that their language is not a variety of
English but is a separate language in its own right and refer to it as Ebonics.
5. Reduction
Reduction is that a particular variety may be regarded as a sub-variety rather than as an independent
entity. Cockney is a variety of English but not representative of English. Sometimes the reduction is
in the kinds of opportunities afforded to users of the variety, such as lack of a writing system.
6. Mixture
Mixture refers to feelings speakers have about the purity of the variety they speak, such as Pidgin
and Creole: they are mixed and felt as marginal of some other standard language and lack a clear
identity.
7. De facto norms
De facto norms refers to the feeling that there are both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ speakers and that the good
speakers represent the norms of proper usage. This means focusing on one particular sub-variety as
representing the best usage, e.g., Parisian French.
Standards must not only be established but must also be observed.
The issue is one of power, of who gets to say what is right and what is wrong in language.
Regional Dialects
A regional dialect, also known as a regiolect or
topolect, is a distinct form of a language spoken in
a particular geographical area.
Koine, also spelled koiné,
o r i g i n a l l y, a c o n t a c t v a r i e t y o f t h e
Greek language that was spoken throughout the
eastern Mediterranean region during the Hellenic
and Roman empires. The term comes from the Greek
koine (“common” or “shared”), although the variety
was based chiefly on the Attic Greek dialect.
Patois
Dialect is used only if there is a strong tradition of writing in the
variety .
Patois is a variety with no written form. It is usually a very
pejorative term for a variety that is less than a dialect - rural
speech –
Under this definition, about half of the world’s languages are not
languages but rather patios.
Dialect usually has a wider distribution than patios.
A variety that can be defined geographically.
Dialect continuum
Regional dialects that differ slightly
in close proximity, but differences
increase as distance increases.
Social dialects
- The term dialect can also be used to describe differences in
speech associated with various social groups or classes.
- The social categories that are important Class, religion, ethnicity,
age, sex/gender and others.
- In a city like Baghdad in a more peaceful era than at present the
Christian, Jewish, and Muslim inhabitants spoke different
varieties of Arabic.
- Christians and Jews who dealt with Muslims used two varieties:
their own at home and the Muslim variety for trade and in all
inter-group relationships.
Registers
is another complicating factor in any study of language
varieties. Registers are sets of language items associated
with discrete occupational or social groups.
- People participating in recurrent communication
situations tend to develop similar vocabularies, similar
features of intonation, and characteristic bits of syntax
and phonology that they use in these situations.
Style
Formal
Informal