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A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. It can also refer to a language subordinate in status to a dominant language, and is sometimes used to mean a vernacular language.
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including the reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families, and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development.
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American, is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the (North) Midland, Western New England, and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech. The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English.
African-American English is the umbrella term for English dialects spoken predominantly by Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to more standard forms of English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
Linguistic prescription is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language, including rules of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society or sector of a society perceives as a correct or proper form, or advise on effective and stylistically apt communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms. Such prescriptions may be motivated by consistency ; rhetorical effectiveness; tradition; aesthetics or personal preferences; linguistic purism or nationalism ; or to avoid causing offense.
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese.
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also known as a lect or an isolect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties as equally complex, valid, and full-fledged forms of language. Lect avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.
A standard language is any language variety that has undergone substantial codification of its grammar, lexicon, writing system, or other features and that stands out among related varieties in a community as the one with the highest status or prestige. Often, it is the prestige language variety of a whole country.
In linguistics, diglossia is where two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety, a second, highly codified lect is used in certain situations such as literature, formal education, or other specific settings, but not used normally for ordinary conversation. The H variety may have no native speakers within the community. In cases of three dialects, the term triglossia is used. When referring to two writing systems coexisting for a single language, the term digraphia is used.
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the varieties of Chinese, and parts of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families in Europe. Terms used in older literature include dialect area and L-complex.
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.
A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian. In some cases, the different standards of a pluricentric language may be elaborated to appear as separate languages, e.g. Malaysian and Indonesian, Hindi and Urdu, while Serbo-Croatian is in an earlier stage of that process.
In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige. In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical constructs, which may not be distinctive enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form among speakers of a language or languages.
Hellenic is the branch of the Indo-European language family whose principal member is Greek. In most classifications, Hellenic consists of Greek alone, but some linguists use the term Hellenic to refer to a group consisting of Greek proper and other varieties thought to be related but different enough to be separate languages, either among ancient neighboring languages or among modern varieties of Greek.
The Ijaw languages, also spelled Ịjọ, are the languages spoken by the Ijaw people in southern Nigeria.
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain. It is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire and the United States. English is the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish; it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers.
In phonology and historical linguistics, cluster reduction is the simplification of consonant clusters in certain environments or over time. Cluster reduction can happen in different languages, dialects of those languages, in world Englishes, and as a part of language acquisition.
Bajjika is an Indo-Aryan language variety spoken in parts of Bihar, India and in Nepal.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax, semantics (meaning), morphology, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics. Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics and psycholinguistics bridge many of these divisions.
Media linguistics is the linguistic study of language use in the media. It studies the functioning of language in the media sphere, or modern mass communication presented by print, audiovisual, digital, and networked media. Media linguistics investigates the relationship between language use, which is regarded as an interface between social and cognitive communication practice, and public discourse conveyed through media.
References
- ↑ Young, Lynne; Harrison, Claire (22 April 2004). Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Social Change. Continuum. p. 36. ISBN 978-1-84714-220-7 . Retrieved 29 July 2013.
- ↑ Københavns universitet. Institut for almen og anvendt sprogvidenskab; Lieth, Lars von der (1 December 1996). Copenhagen Working Papers in Linguistics. Museum Tusculanum Press. p. 108. ISBN 978-87-7289-385-3 . Retrieved 29 July 2013.
- ↑ Sani, Hauwa Mohammed. "Stylo-Semantic Analyses of Humorous Political Postproverbials in Hausa Speech Communities In Northern Nigeria." Postproverbials at Work: The Context of Radical Proverb-Making in Nigerian Languages. Proverbium Supplement 4 (2024): 203-208. pp. 222, 225
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