This document provides an overview of the topics to be covered in a university course on language and society. The first session will introduce key concepts like linguistic variation, variables, the difference between language and dialect, and regional versus social dialects. It will also discuss challenges in defining the term "language." The second session will examine regional dialects, social dialects, and learning outcomes. Examples are provided to illustrate linguistic variation and the difference between accents and dialects.

1. LIN1340 Language
in Society
Monday: 08.30-10.00
Thursday: 10.00-11.30
RM 257 ARTS
STEPHEN LEVEY
Office: Friday 12:00-14:00
slevey@uottawa.ca

2. 2
Overview of the session 1
 Language and Society: What does it
mean?
 Variation in language
 What is a variable?
 Problems with defining the term
‘language’
 Language versus dialect
 What is the difference between an
accent and a dialect?

3. 3
Overview of the session 2
 Regional dialects
 Social dialects
 Learning outcomes
************************************************

4. 4
Language and Society: What does it
all mean?
 As the name suggests, the study of
language and society examines some of
the complex inter-relationships between
language and society
 These relationships take many forms
 Sociolinguists (i.e. linguists who
specialise in the study of language and
society) focus on the co-variation of
linguistic and social phenomena

5. 5
Language and Society: What does it
all mean?
 Language →
 Language →
 Language →
 Language →
 Language →
 Age
 Sex/Gender
 Social class
 Ethnicity
 Education

6. 6
Language and Society: What does it
all mean?
 At the heart of the study of language and
society is the notion that all languages vary
 As Wardhaugh (2006) points out, ‘each
language exists in a number of varieties and is
the sum of those varieties’
 Thus, when talk about ‘Canadian French’,
‘American English’, ‘Brazilian Portuguese’ we
need to recognise that these labels are an
abstraction: they give the impression that
languages are ‘discrete, self-contained entities
that are relatively uniform or homogenous’
(Trudgill 2000: 5), when in reality they are not.

7. 7
Language and Society: What does it
all mean?
 In actual fact, however, all languages
subsume a considerable amount of
social and regional variation.
 Consider the following examples.
 Are they English? Are they French? Are
they invented examples? If they’re
genuine, where might they be spoken?
Who might use them?

8. 8
Variation in language
 dem get wan uman we get
gyal pikni
 orait na draiva i repotim
dispela bagarap long
plisman
 tab la m te aste a
 been I to park the have
 Guyanese Creole
English (The
Caribbean)
 Tok Pisin Creole
English (Papua
New Guinea)
 Haitian Creole
French (Haiti)
 INVENTED
EXAMPLE!!

9. 9
Variation in language
 Let’s deal with the last example first.
Although you probably managed to
decode it, it clearly isn’t a native variety
of English
 This underscores an important point:
human languages vary, but they do not
vary in a limitless way because they are
subject to constraints imposed by the
human language faculty

10. 10
Variation in language
 Another valuable point
to emerge from
examples 1-3 is that
variation is RULE-
GOVERNED
 As the famous
American sociolinguist,
William Labov, has
shown, language
exhibits
STRUCTURED
HETEROGENEITY
WILLIAM LABOV

11. 11
Variation in language
 STRUCTURED HETEROGENEITY- What is that??!
 Structured heterogeneity (Weinreich et al. 1968: 100-1) is
central to the study of language variation.
 It means that language variation is NOT RANDOM but is
systematically patterned.
 Furthermore, aspects of linguistic variation (linguistic
variables) have been found to correlate in interesting ways
with aspects of a person’s social identity (age, gender,
ethnicity, etc).
 Correlations between aspect of linguistic variation and
social categories are referred to as SOCIOLINGUISTIC
PATTERNS

12. 12
What is a variable ?
 Simply put, a variable
is alternative ways of
saying the ‘same’ thing
 Variables can be:
(i) Vocabulary (lexical)
(ii) Sounds (phonology)
(iii) Grammatical (syntax)
LORRY TRUCK

13. 13
What is a variable?
 The first diagram shows the relationship between a
variable and its variants
 The second diagram gives an example, and illustrates
two VARIANTS of negation: a standard VARIANT and a
non-standard VARIANT
VARIABLE
VARIANT VARIANT
NEGATION
I haven’t got
any
I haven’t got
none

14. 14
Problems with defining the term
‘language’
 Let’s now return to the examples we saw
earlier (Guyanese Creole, Tok Pisin, and
Haitian Creole)
 In the case of Guyanese Creole and Tok Pisin,
some of you might have disagreed that these
are ‘varieties of English’. Aren’t they just
separate languages?
 It may seem surprising, but defining the term
‘language’ is far from straightforward.

15. 15
Language versus dialect
 Can we decide on purely LINGUISTIC
grounds what the difference is between a
language and a dialect? After all, English
is clearly a different language from
Russian.
 There are many problematic cases,
however. Let’s first take a look at
Scandinavia.

16. 16
Language versus dialect
 Danish: Hun sidder i vinduet og ser ud over
gaden
 Norwegian: Hun sitter i vinduet og ser ut over
gatan
 Swedish: Hon sitter i fönstret och ser ut över
gatan (source: Romaine 2000: 11)
What do you notice?

17. 17
Language versus dialect
 Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are
conventionally distinguished from one another.
In other words, they are seen as separate
languages.
 Danes and Swedes claim to understand
Danish well. To complicate matters, however,
Danes claim to understand Norwegians much
better than Norwegians claim to understand
Danes
 Nevertheless, we can see from the examples
cited that there are minimal LINGUISTIC
differences between these varieties.

18. 18
Language versus dialect
 Now consider the case of Javanese
spoken in Indonesia. Javanese reveals
a number of socially-sensitive levels of
speech which correlate with the social
status of the addressee.
 We can distinguish three different levels:
HIGH
MIDDLE
LOW

19. 19
Language versus dialect
Javanese speech registers
Menapa pandjenengan badé dahar sekul kalijan kaspé?
Napa sampéjan adjeng neda sekul lan kaspé?
Apa kowé arep mangan sega lan kaspé?
Are you going to eat rice and cassava?
(source: Romaine 2000: 21)

20. 20
Language versus dialect
 If we compare the Javanese examples to the
Scandinavian ones, we can see that the
differences between speech levels in
Javanese can be greater than the differences
that exist between languages such as Danish,
Swedish and Norwegian (Romaine 2000: 21)
 As Trudgill (2000: 3) points out, neither
language nor dialect ‘represents a particularly
clear-cut or watertight concept.’
 Romaine (2000: 1) observes that notions such
as ‘language’ or ‘dialect’ are not LINGUISTIC
but essentially SOCIAL matters

21. 21
Language versus dialect
 To refine our understanding of the
notions ‘language’ and ‘dialect’, we need
to invoke two very useful terms:
AUTONOMY and HETERONOMY
 To illustrate these terms, let’s consider
the linguistic situation along the border of
Germany and the Netherlands

22. 22
Language versus dialect
 Both German and Dutch exist as national
standardized varieties. However, along the
border between the two countries, the dialects
on either side are very similar (Trudgill 2000)
and MUTUALLY INTELLIGIBLE. The
geographical boundaries between the dialects
do not correspond with sharp breaks between
the border dialects, rather we can talk of a
DIALECT CONTINUUM in social and
geographical space (Romaine 2000).

23. 23
Language versus dialect
 In the case of German and Dutch dialects, we
can say that although the standard national
varieties of these language are
AUTONOMOUS (i.e. independent) because
they are codified in dictionaries, grammar
books and are disseminated through the
respective educations systems, the dialects
are HETERONOMOUS (i.e. dependent). Thus
speakers in the Netherlands look to standard
Dutch as their reference point, whereas
speakers of German look to standard German
(Hochdeutsch) as theirs.

24. 24
Dialect versus accent
 Just as the term ‘language’ can be
problematic, so can the term ‘dialect’
 In everyday usage, people often use the term
‘dialect’ and ‘accent’ interchangeably, to mean
one and the same thing
 However, there are important differences
between these two concepts. An accent refers
to PHONOLOGICAL/PHONETIC differences
(i.e. pronunciation). Thus there are distinct
accents associated with Newfoundland,
Liverpool English (Scouse), Texan English,
Tyneside English (Geordie).

25. 25
Dialect versus accent
 A dialect, however, refers to differences
on at least TWO additional levels of
linguistic organization: LEXIS
(vocabulary) and SYNTAX (grammar, or
the arrangement of words in sentences)

26. 26
Dialect versus accent illustrated
 SCOTS
PRONUNCIATION
 /r/ pronounced in
bird
VOCABULARY
 bairn kirk
GRAMMAR
 She isnae at home
 SOUTHERN
BRITISH ENGLISH
PRONUNCIATION
 /r/ not pronounced
in bird
VOCABULARY
 child church
GRAMMAR
 She isn’t at home
ACCENT DIALECT

27. 27
Regional dialects
 Dialects vary regionally. Dialects tend to differ
from one another the more geographically
distant they are from each other.
CANADIAN ENGLISH
VANCOUVER TORONTO St. John’s, NF

28. 28
Regional differences
Maps are
sometimes
drawn to show
the regional
boundaries
between dialect
forms. These
boundaries are
known as
ISOGLOSSES.
ISOGLOSSES
for regional
forms of YOU
Trudgill 1990

29. 29
Social dialects
 Finally, the boundaries between different social
groups or classes mark differences in the
social dialects spoken by these groups.
Another word for a social dialect is a
SOCIOLECT.
 In order to see how different social groups use
language, let’s consider the case of g-
dropping. Many people, at least in casual
speech, pronounce words such as singing as
singin’, and laughing as laughin’. There are
important QUANTITATIVE DIFFERENCES in
g-dropping between social groups too.

30. 30
Social dialects: G-dropping in Norwich (after
Trudgill 1974). What’s going on here?

31. 31
The use of dropped g-forms (i.e. talkin’, laughin’, cursin’ in
Norwich, UK [source: Trudgill 1974])
0
20
40
60
80
100
MMC LMC UWC MWC LWC
social class
% [n]
females males

32. 32
Learning Outcomes
 I can give some examples of what the study of
language and society encompasses
 I can explain the term ‘orderly heterogeneity’
 I can explain what a sociolinguistic variable is
 I understand the term ‘sociolinguistic pattern’
and I shall read more about this in Romaine
2000
 I can explain some of the problems associated
with defining the term ‘language’

33. 33
Learning outcomes
 I shall read find out more about these
problems in Romaine (2000), Chapter 1
 I understand the terms AUTONOMY and
HETERONOMY
 I shall research the terms AUSBAU and
ABSTAND
 I know the difference between an
ACCENT and a DIALECT, and can
explain this clearly with examples

34. 34
Learning Outcomes
 I understand how language varies
REGIONALLY and SOCIALLY and can
exemplify this.
 I’ll read the Milroy article about ‘Bad
Grammar’ in the reading pack in
preparation for the next class