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Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...
The notion of speech community is most generally used as a tool to define a unit of analysis within which to analyse language variation and change. Stylistic features differ among speech communities based on factors such as the group's ethnicity and social status, common interests and the level of formality expected within the group and by its ...
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary.It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing.
In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal ...
For scholars who view language from the perspective of linguistic competence, essentially the knowledge of language and grammar that exists in the mind of an individual language user, the idiolect, is a way of referring to the specific knowledge. For scholars who regard language as a shared social practice, the idiolect is more like a dialect ...
Style-shifting is a manifestation of intraspeaker (within-speaker) variation, in contrast with interspeaker (between-speakers) variation. It is a voluntary act which an individual effects in order to respond to or initiate changes in sociolinguistic situation (e.g., interlocutor-related, setting-related, topic-related).
By some classifications, nearly 7000 languages exist worldwide, with a great amount of variation thought to have evolved through cultural differentiation. There are four factors that are thought to be the reason as to why language variation exists between cultures: founder effects, drift, hybridization and adaptation. With the vast amounts of ...
The speaker in this example switches from Standard Italian to the local language, marking the new situation with a different language. In the medical field situational code-switching occurs when patients do not speak the standard language spoken within a hospital and the staff then need to code switch in order to be able to communicate with them.