Definition

In sociolinguistics, the term register refers to specific lexical and grammatical choices as made by
speakers depending on the situational context, the participants of a conversation and the function of the
language in the discourse (cf. Halliday 1989, 44). According to M.A.K. Halliday, there are two main types
of variation in language, social and functional. Dialects arr characterized by social or regional variation,
whereas register concerns functional variation. However, these two notions are not entirely independent
of each other. Hudson (1993, 51) states that “one man’s dialect is another man’s register.”, i.e. linguistic
features which are part of one speaker’s dialect might belong to a specific register for another speaker.
Nevertheless, many linguists hold the view that speakers often only control one or two social varieties of
language (standard and dialect), while they use a “wide range of registers” (Barnickel 1982, 13; Biber
2000, 135; Halliday 1990, 43; Trudgill 1983).

In contrast to dialect, which Halliday (1990, 41) defines as a “variety of language according to the user”,
register focuses on the “variety according to use.” Thus, register is characterized by “differences in the
type of language selected as appropriate to different types of situation” (Halliday et. al. 1964, 87), which
means that there is a close relationship between language and context of situation. Most linguists agree
with this definition. However, two perspectives of register classification can be distinguished. The first
approach, as proposed by Halliday (1989, 44) and Hymes (1979, 244), is context-based. The second
perspective differentiates registers on the basis of text collections (Biber 1994, 20).

Context-based register categorization

M.A.K. Halliday, who was one of the first linguists to pay special attention to the concept of 'register' in
the 1960s and 1970s, interprets this notion as “a semantic concept” which “can be defined as a
configuration of meanings that are typically associated with a particular situational configuration of field,
mode, and tenor.” (Halliday 1990, 38f.) The linguistic features (specific expressions, lexico-grammatical
and phonological features) and the particular values of the three dimensions of field, mode and tenor
determine the functional variety of a language (cf. Halliday 1994, 22). These three parameters can be
used to specify the context of situation in which language is used.

Field of discourse is defined as “the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the
purposive activity of the speaker or writer; it thus includes the subject-matter as one element in it”
(Halliday 1994, 22). The field describes activities and processes that are happening at the time of speech.
The analysis of this parameter focuses on the entire situation, e.g. when a mother talks to her child.

The mode of discourse refers to “the function of the text in the event, including therefore both the
channel taken by the language – spoken or written, extempore or prepared – and its [genre], or
rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive, ‘phatic communion’ and so on” (Halliday 1994, 22).
This variable determines the role and function of language in a particular situation. When analyzing the
mode of a text, the main question is ‘What is achieved by the use of language in this context?’ For
example, a fairy tale (in written form) may have a narrative or entertaining function. A spoken
conversation can be argumentative (in a discussion) or phatic (e.g. to contact someone or to keep in
touch with someone).

Tenor of discourse (sometimes also referred to as style; cf. Esser 2009, 78) describes the people that take
part in an event as well as their relationships and statuses. “The tenor refers to the type of role
interaction, the set of relevant social relations, permanent and temporary, among the participants
involved” (Halliday 1994, 22.). There might be a specific hierarchy between the interlocutors, e.g. when
the head of a business talks to an employee, or they may have only a temporary relationship, e.g. when
a person asks an unknown pedestrian for the time.

All three variables (field, mode, tenor) taken together enable people to characterize the situational
context specifically, and, thus, to recreate part of the language that is being used (cf. Halliday 1994, 22f.).
Halliday provides the following example to explain the significance of collective information about the
three parameters:

“For instance, if we specify a field such as ‘personal interaction, at the end of the day, with the aim of
inducing contentment through recounting of familiar events’, with mode ‘spoken monologue,
imaginative narrative, extempore’ and tenor ‘intimate, mother and three-year-old child’, we can
reconstruct a great deal of this kind of bedtime story […].” (Halliday 1994, 22f.)

Halliday looks at register from the “system end" (Teich 2003, 27). This means that he infers from the
context of situation which linguistic structure and patterns are likely or unlikely to be used in a text. Field,
mode and tenor of discourse describe the context of a situation in which language is used. Register,
however, is defined as a functional variety of language according to the use in particular settings. Hence,
Halliday connected three distinct functions of language with the three dimensions of a situation
mentioned above.

“The functional components of the semantic system of a language [are] (a) ideational, subdivided into
logical and experiential; (b) interpersonal; and (c) textual. [...] the field is reflected in the experiential
meanings of the text, the tenor in the interpersonal, and the mode in the textual meanings.” (Halliday
1990, 29)

Halliday’s concept of register is rather broad and does not provide a set of clear-cut registers. According
to his definition and approach, many different kinds of register exist in language. He only distinguishes
closed and open registers from each other. Closed (or restricted) registers have a number of possible
meanings that are “fixed and finite and may be quite small” (Halliday 1990, 39). Examples for closed
registers include the 'language of the air' or 'the languages of games' (Halliday 1990, 39). Sometimes
these registers have a special language of their own. In open registers, “the range of the discourse is
much less constrained” (Halliday 1990, 39), e.g. in letters and instructions. Nevertheless, Halliday points
out that there are no registers that are entirely open. “The most open-ended kinds of register [are] the
registers of informal narrative and spontaneous conversation” (Halliday 1990, 40). It does not become
entirely clear in Halliday’s approach how many registers exist and how they can be separated from
another.

Similar to Halliday’s concept of register, Dell Hymes developed the ‘Model of interaction of language and
social setting’ (the so-called S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G model) to categorize speech situations. With the help of
eight components, speakers may characterize the context of an interaction, and, thus, make correct use
of language. Hymes’ variables of discourse are: (i) setting, (ii) participants, (iii) ends, (iv) form and
content of text, (v) key, (vi) interactional norms, (vii) medium and (viii) genre (cf. Halliday 1994, 22). This
approach, too, suggests that there are countless different language situations and, therefore, registers.
Hymes also indicates that there are still many variables and patterns that have to be discovered and
classified (Hymes 1979, 244).

Quirk et. al. (1989, 25) do not define register explicitly, but they describe varieties according to field of
discourse, medium and attitude. In fact, this conforms to Halliday’s concept of register, although they
never make use of this term. Yet, Quirk et. al. (1989, 25) present a “five-term distinction” to categorize
linguistic varieties, and, thus, they narrow down the range of registers:

very formal – FORMAL – neutral – INFORMAL – very informal

The very formal variety of language (“extremely distant, rigid or frozen”; Quirk et. al. 1989, 27) is often
found in written instructions. Very informal language, which is also called 'intimate, casual, slangy, or
hearty' (ibid.) is used between family members or close friends. However, Quirk et. al. point out that the
inner three-way distinction of formal – neutral – informal is chiefly used to designate language.

Halliday, Hymes and Quirk et. al. have similar notions of register. They focus on the context of a language
situation and they identify registers on the basis of this knowledge

DIGLOSSIA is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the
language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified
(often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of
written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by
formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector
of the community for ordinary conversation.

In sociolinguistics, diglossia is a situation in which two distinct varieties of a language are spoken within
the same speech community. Bilingual diglossia is a type of diglossia in which one language variety is
used for writing and another for speech. When people are bidialectal, they can use two dialects of the
same language, based on their surroundings or different contexts where they use one or the other
language variety. The term diglossia (from the Greek for "speaking two languages") was first used in
English by linguist Charles Ferguson in 1959.
Different Definition of Diglossia

Other definitions of diglossia don't require the social aspect to be present and just concentrate on the
plurality, the different languages for different contexts. For example, Catalan (Barcelona) and Castillian
(Spain as a whole) Spanish, don't have a social hierarchy to their usage but are regional. The versions of
Spanish have enough overlap that they can be understood by speakers of each but are different
languages. The same applies to Swiss German and standard German; they are regional

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In a bit wider definition of diglossia, it can also include social dialects, even if the languages are not
completely separate, distinct languages. In the United States, speakers of dialects such as Ebonics
(African American Vernacular English, AAVE), Chicano English (ChE), and Vietnamese English (VE) also
function in a diglossic environment. Some people argue that Ebonics has its own grammar and appears
related in lineage to Creole languages spoken by enslaved people of the Deep South (African languages
melding with English), but others disagree, saying that it's not a separate language but just a dialect.

In this wider definition of diglossia, the two languages can also borrow words from each other

Pidgins and Creoles

A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no
language in common; it evolves when they need some means of verbal communication, perhaps for
trade, but no group learns the native language of any other group for social reasons that may include
lack of trust or close contact. Usually those with less power (speakers of substrate languages) are more
accommodating and use words from the language of those with more power (the superstrate), although
the meaning, form and use of these words may be influenced by the substrate languages. When dealing
with the other groups, the superstrate speakers adopt many of these changes to make themselves more
readily understood and no longer try to speak as they do within their own group. They cooperate with
the other groups to create a make-shift language to serve their needs, simplifying by dropping
unnecessary complications such as inflections (e.g., two knives becomes two knife) and reducing the
number of different words they use, but compensating by extending their meanings or using
circumlocutions. By definition the resulting pidgin is restricted to a very limited domain such as trade,
and it is no one’s native language (e.g. Hymes 1971:15ff.).4

This description distinguishes pidgins from the imperfect speech of foreigners in other social situations,
when native speakers of the target language do not try to follow the foreigners’ imperfect version of it,
and this does not become established or stabilized. However, two further stipulations are needed4to
distinguish pidgins from other kinds of contact language. First, social distance must be maintained
between speakers of the superstrate and the other languages; otherwise, if the substrate speakers so
desired, they could eventually acquire enough information about the superstrate language to speak it in
a non-pidginized form (Valdman 1978:9–10). Secondly, it must be assumed that the languages in contact
are not closely related, in which case koineization or a kind of dialect levelling would result (1.3). Finally
it should be noted that contact languages can evolve between trading partners of approximately equal
power, such as Russenorsk (Broch and Jahr 1984). Such varieties, if they are indeed stable pidgins rather
than jargons, tend to draw their vocabulary more equally from both languages – sometimes even to
refer to the same things.5

Pidgins are basically contact languages. They evolve between people who speak different languages and
need some way of communicating with each other to carry out trade or work. Many English pidgins were
created when slaves were shipped from the west coast of Africa to the colonies in the West Indies or the
United States. Pidgins are languages stripped of all but the bare necessities (Romaine 1988: 24). In other
words, they are normally very simple from a grammatical point of view.

Several linguists say that part of the evolution of English itself is due to language contact between the
Scandinavian conquerors from Sweden, Norway and Denmark in the Midlands and North of England2
and the defeated Anglo-Saxon population. Both communities spoke different dialects of a common
Germanic ancestor language. Basically, the roots of the words were the same but the endings were
different. It has been put forward that this is the reason why English lost its case endings3 while other
languages like German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, etc. kept them.

The etymology of pidgin is uncertain, and an entire article has been devoted to it (Hancock 1979a). The
Oxford English Dictionary derives it from the English word business as pronounced in Chinese Pidgin English,
which was of course used for transacting business. Other possible sources include the Hebrew-derived pidjom
‘exchange, trade, redemption’; a Chinese pronunciation of the Portuguese word ocupação ‘business’; or a
South Seas pronunciation of English beach as beachee, from the location where the language was often used
(Mühlhäusler 1986:1). Lest we run out of alternatives, I have suggested Portuguese baixo ‘low,’ used to
distinguish pidgin Portuguese (baixo português) from standard Portuguese in Portugal’s Asian empire during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Baixo português was in fact the trade language that preceded pidgin
English on the coast of China, and there are no more phonological problems (and certainly fewer semantic
ones) in deriving pidgin from /baixu/ rather than /bzns/.5,

Creoles

A pidgin becomes a creole when it is learned as a first language of a new generation. From a linguistic
point of view, creoles are made up of a superstrate4 language such as English and one or more substrate
languages such as those of Western Africa. The creole is not limited to certain functions but takes on all
the functions needed by the speech community. Some creoles go through the same standardization
process described above for Standard English and become the vehicle for education, law and
government. This is the case of Afrikaans made up of a Dutch superstrate and English and Bantu
substrates.

In countries in which Standard English exists alongside the creole, the former might exert pressure on
the latter. The process by which a creole becomes more like the standard superstrate is called
decreolization. In Jamaica, for example, one kind of creole, the acrolect, has become more and more like
Standard English. Other varieties of creole, called basilects, are very different from Standard English5.
Between these two extremes we find the mesolects (Bickerton 1975). There is no exact division between
these types but a continuum. Such a situation, in which different varieties of a language live side by side,
is quite normal. For example, many people in Newcastle are speakers of Standard English while most of
the population speaks what can be a very different variety of English called Geordie. Some English
speakers find Geordie very hard to understand indeed. Many people in England could be described as
bilingual in that they are able to switch from their local dialect to Standard English and vice-versa
without any difficulty6 and this is also the case in Jamaica and many parts of the English-Speaking world.

The origin of the term creole is more certain. Latin creAre ‘to create’ became Portuguese criar ‘to raise
(e.g. a child)’, whence the past participle criado ‘(a person) raised; a servant born into one’s household’.
Crioulo, with a diminutive suffix, came to mean an African slave born in the New World in Brazilian
usage. The word’s meaning was then extended to include Europeans born in the New World. The word
finally came to refer to the customs and speech of Africans and Europeans born in the New World. It was
later borrowed as Spanish criollo, French créole, Dutch creools and English creole.6