Seminar 2

SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Language Variation and Language Varieties

1. External language variation vs internal language variation. Register

2. Sources of language variation

• Geography
• Age
• Gender
• Social status
• Education
• Ethnicity

3. Linguistic variable

4. Kinds of language variation

 Phonetic variation
 Morphological variation
 Lexico-semantic variation

5. Language and dialect. Dialect continuum

6. Dialect and accent

7. Vernacular

8. Speech community

9. Sociolect and idiolect

10.Social stratification.

Literature:

1. Wardhaugh Ronald. Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2010

2. Olikova Maria. Sociolinguistics, 1999.

3. Journal of Sociolinguistics. – Mode of Access:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.2015.19.issue-1/issuetoc
Practical Assignments:

Activity 1. What differences (variant pronunciations) are there in the pronunciation

of the following words in English: but, butter, calm, farm, bad, bed, path, pass,
Mary, merry, caught, court, hotel, hospital, fest, first?

Activity 2. What differences are you aware of in your and your groupmates’
pronunciation? Give the examples. Try to describe what you believe to be the
characteristics of different varieties of English. How do you know that someone is
from the USA? From England? From London?

Activity 3.
Find the markers of sociolinguistic variation (linguistic variables) in the
following sentences / fragments. Decide what are varieties of languages
presented in them:

 George Gissing, about Miss Yule, in his New Grub Street (1891, ch. 7):
‘Mrs. Yule’s speech was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not
flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with
hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety
of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people’

 Mrs. Waddy, about Harry Richmond’s father, in George Meredith’s The

Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871, ch.3)
‘More than his eating and his drinking, that child’s father worries about his
learning to speak the language of a British gentleman… Before that child your
‘h’s” must be like the panting of an engine – to please his father … and I’m to
repeat what I said, to make sure the child hasn’t heard anything
ungrammatical…”

 ‘Where on Earth did Aunt Em learn to drop her g’s?’

 ‘Father told me once that she was at a school where an undropped ‘g’ was
worse than a dropped ‘h’. They were bringin’ in a country fashion then,
huntin’ people, you know’
This conversation between Clare and Dinny Cherrel, in John Galsworthy’
‘Maid in Waiting’ (1931, ch.31), illustrates a famous linguistic signal of social
class in Britain – the two pronunciations of final ‘ng’ in such words as
‘running’, [n] and [ng]. But it also brings home very well the arbitrary way in
which linguistic class markers work.
The [n] variant is typical of much working-class speech today, but a century
ago this pronunciation was a desirable feature of speech in the upper middle
class and above – and may still occasionally be heard. The change to [ng]
came about under the influence of the written form: there was ‘g’ in the
spelling, and it was felt that it was more ‘correct’ to pronounce it. As a result,
‘dropping the ‘g’ became stigmatized. This is how languages change, and we
shall discuss this problem in more detail later in the course.