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Some sociolinguists study language on a national level among large populations to find out how language is used as a social institution. [8] William Labov, a Harvard and Columbia University graduate, is often regarded as the founders of variationist sociolinguistics which focuses on the quantitative analysis of variation and change within ...
O'Grady et al. define dialect: "A regional or social variety of a language characterized by its own phonological, syntactic, and lexical properties." [ 5 ] A variety spoken in a particular region is called a regional dialect (regiolect, geolect [ 6 ] ); some regional varieties are called regionalects [ 7 ] or topolects, especially to discuss ...
This special use of language by certain professions for particular activities is known in linguistics as register; in some analyses, the group of speakers of a register is known as a discourse community, while the phrase "speech community" is reserved for varieties of a language or dialect that speakers inherit by birth or adoption.
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 ...
Deviation from the regional standard was determined by density and multiplicity of the social networks into which speakers are integrated. The researchers found that a high network strength score was correlated with the use of vernacular forms, and therefore that the use of vernacular variants was strongly influenced by the level of integration ...
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. [1] An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity (an ethnolect), their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their ...
Labov's work primarily attempted to linked linguistic variants as a function of formality (a proxy for attention to speech) to specific social groups. In his study of /r/-variation in New York Department stores, he observed that those with a lower social class are less likely to pronounce postvocalic [r] in words like fourth and floor, while ...
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.