LESSON 4

Varieties and Register of Spoken

and Written Language
WHAT TO EXPECT?

 Apply the varieties and registers of spoken and written language in the
proper context.

PRE – DISCUSSION
The students will be tasked to present a role playing following the given guide
below:
- How do you greet your best friend? Your mother? Your teacher? Your
school dean?
- Do your ways of greeting these people vary?

LESSON OUTLINE
For us, speech is well-worth careful study because we depend on it so heavily for
our communications with others. The development of human civilization owes it to a
great extent to man’s ability to share experiences, to exchange ideas, and to transmit
knowledge from one generation to another.
The spoken mode is often associated with everyday registers while the written
mode is strongly associated with academic registers. However, this is not always true.
For instance, in everyday communication, face-to-face conversations are usually
supplemented by text messaging.
In academic contexts, significant forms of oral communication are used along
with written communication. Significantly, both every day and academic
communications are characterized by multi-modality or the use of multiple modes of
communication, including spoken, written modes and images, music, videos, gestures,
etc.
Varieties of Spoken and Written Language
Lin (2016) presents the following nature of language variation as prescribed by
most linguists based on the ideas of Mahboob (2014).
1. Language varies when communicating with people within (local) and
outside (global) our community.
2. Language varies in speaking and in writing.
3. Language varies in everyday and specialized discourses.

Mahboob and Dutcher (2014) identified eight different domains in which

language varies depending on the combinations of different values on the three
dimensions (field, tenor and mode) of the context of communication.
The first four domains include language variations that reflect local usage done in
one local language or multiple local languages depending on the context. They vary in
the following ways:
1. Local everyday written. This may include instances of local usage found in the
neighborhood posters (e.g. a poster looking for transients/bed spacers).
2. Local everyday oral. This may occur in local communication among neighbors
in everyday, informal and local varieties of languages.
3. Local specialized written. An example of local specialized written usage can
be found in the publications and web sites of local societies such as the
Baguio Midland Courier.
4. Local specialized oral. It involves specialized discourses. For example, in a
computer shop in the neighborhood, specialized local usage can be found
(e.g. specialized computer game-related vocabulary is used).

On the other hand, the other four domains involve global usage. These four
domains of language usage differ from the first four domains since they refer to contexts
of language usage where participants need to communicate with people not sharing
their local ways of using language.
They are as follows:
 1. Global everyday written avoids local colloquialisms to make the text
accessible to wider communities of readers. This can be found in
international editions of newspapers and magazines.
2. Global everyday oral may occur in interactions between people coming
from different parts of the world when they talk about everyday casual
topics.
3. Global specialized written expands to as many readers internationally,
hence the non-usage of local colloquial expressions (e.g. international
research journal articles).
4. Global specialized oral occurs when people from different parts of the
world discuss specialized topics in spoken form (e.g. paper presentation
sessions in an international academic conference).

SUMMARY
The kind of register to be used affects the way one speaks and writes. Language
has formal and informal registers. These registers have form which defines the social
situation.