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A commonly studied source of variation is regional dialects. Dialectology studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Sociolinguists concerned with grammatical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas are often called dialectologists.
The move away from traditional methods of language study, however, caused linguists to become more concerned with social factors. Dialectologists, therefore, began to study social, as well as regional variation. The Linguistic Atlas of the United States (the 1930s) was amongst the first dialect studies to take social factors into account.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 sup
In this sense, unlike in the first usage, the national language would not itself be considered a "dialect", as it is the dominant language in a particular state, be it in terms of linguistic prestige, social or political (e.g. official) status, predominance or prevalence, or all of the above.
Language attitudes are "social in origin, but that they may have important effects on language behavior, being involved in acts of identity, and on linguistic change." [9]: 73 Linguistic variable is "a linguistic unit...initially developed...in order to be able to handle linguistics variation. Variables may be lexical and grammatical, but are ...