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This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. [2] 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 ...
Dialects can be defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible." [1] English speakers from different countries and regions use a variety of different accents (systems of pronunciation) as well as various localized words and grammatical constructions.
The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. [21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested [22] [23] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are ...
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 ...
Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages.Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of, or subsumed by, sociolinguistics. [1]
Hence, the full standardization of a language is impractical, because a standardized dialect cannot fully function as a real entity, but does function as set of linguistic norms observed to varying degrees in the course of usus – of how people actually speak and write the language. [32] [33] In practice, the language varieties identified as ...
Languages are grouped by diachronic relatedness into language families. [2] In other words, languages are grouped based on how they were developed and evolved throughout history, with languages which descended from a common ancestor being grouped into the same language family.
While the European Union (EU) allows member states to designate any of the national languages as an official language of the Union, in practice English is the main working language of EU organisations. [142] Although in most countries English is not an official language, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language.