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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 ...
Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of languages in general, across a period of time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics .
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 ...
Jean Aitchison's notes that discouragement stems from concerns regarding the potential negative impact on the languages involved, which could potentially lead to language erosion or decline. According to Aitchison, one possible explanation for the widespread disapproval of language variations is rooted in social-class prejudice.
A fused lect is identical to a mixed language in terms of semantics and pragmatics, but fused lects allow less variation since they are fully grammaticalized. In other words, there are grammatical structures of the fused lect that determine which source-language elements may occur. [11] A mixed language is different from a creole language.
Disguising language (i.e., "misnomers") Taboo (i.e., taboo concepts) Aesthetic-formal reasons (i.e., avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words) Communicative-formal reasons (i.e., abolition of the ambiguity of forms in context, keyword: "homonymic conflict and polysemic conflict") Wordplay/punning
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Dialect levelling has been defined as the process by which structural variation in dialects is reduced, [3] "the process of eliminating prominent stereotypical features of differences between dialects", [4] "a social process [that] consists in negotiation between speakers of different dialects aimed at setting the properties of, for example, a lexical entry", [5] "the reduction of variation ...