VARIATIONS AND USE OF ENGLISH IN MODERN LANGUAGES

English is the most varied language, determined by:

- The identity of the speaker;

- Where they live;

- The ethnicity;

- The social class (upper class speaker uses a di erent dialect in comparison of a middle class
speaker);

- The gender of the speaker (women speak di erently from men);

- The personality.

All these features di er in:

• Pronunciation;

• Spelling;

• Grammar;

• Lexicon.

1) Sociolinguistics: describes how social identities are established and maintained in language
use, and examines the languages used by various groups, based on age, class, ethnicity, region
or gender.

2) Social variable:

• Geography;

• Gender;

• Age;

• Class;

• Occupation;

• Race;

• Ethnicity.

3) Linguistic variable:

• Accent;

• Register;

• Style;

• Dialect;

• Syntactic pattern;

• Word or phrase (locuzione/espressione NO FRASE).

The linguistic code covers di erent varieties of language:

I. Dialect;

II. Register;

III. Style;

IV. Accent.

4) Di erent uses of di erent codes are tied to di erent situations or domains, that is to:

- the choice of the code is determined by the domain (situation or emotion) in which the speaker
perceives himself to be.

- Multi-linguals: those countries where two languages are commonly spoken by most people,
and those multilingual communities include: Spanish-American English in the USA; italo-
americans etc…

- Compound bilinguals: Many people learn another language later in life

- Co-ordinate bilinguals: Some people grow in families where two or more language are uently
spoken at home and develop them equally.

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 - We-code: associated with in group activities and used in informal interactions to refer to their
socio cultural background heritage

- They code: the language used in more formal features.

5) 3 di erent types of codeswitching:

• turn-speci c codeswitching: switching occurs between the turn of di erent speakers in the
conversation (someone speaks English and someone else replies in another language);

• Intersential codeswithching: between sentences within a single turn (two languages in the
same sentence: two sentences in a same long sentence)

• Intra-sentential codeswitching: within the same sentence, a single word or a phrase, not a full
sentence.

- Hinglish: a blend of words hindi and English which is a hybrid of hindi and English languages,
within conversations, individual sentences and even words. That is caused by the phenomenon
of code-switching. Spoken mainly by young middle class people in urban areas of india.

6) How can we decide if a linguistic code is prestigious or not?

We must consider:

- Standardisation: if the variety has been approved by institutions and codi ed in dictionaries or
grammar

- Vitality: if there’s an active community of speaker who use this code, or if the language is dead
or dying

- Historicity: if the speakers have a sense of the longevity of their code

- Autonomy: if the speakers consider their side to be di erent from others

- Reduction: the code to be a sub variety or a full code

- Mixture: whether speakers consider their language pure or a mixture of other languages

- Uno cial forms: if the speakers have a sense of good or bad varieties of the code
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