LANGUAGE

VARIATION: FOCUS
ON USER

Pilipus F. Sarumaha, S.Pd., M.S

philipsbrightly@gmail.com
 Regional and Social Dialects
• People often use a language to signal their membership of
particular groups and to construct different aspects of their
social identity.
• Social status, gender, age, ethnicity and the kinds of social
networks that people belong to turn out to be important
dimensions of identity in many communities.
• Most listeners can identify that the caller is a child without
any problem. When the caller is an adult, it is usually easy to
tell whether a speaker is female or male.
• If the person has a distinctive regional accent, then their
regional origins will be evident even from a short utterance.
And it may also be possible to make a reasonable guess about
the person’s socio-economic or educational background
• No two people speak exactly the same.
• Some features of speech, however, are shared by groups, and
become important because they differentiate one group from
another.
• Just as different languages often serve a unifying and
separating function for their speakers, so do speech
characteristics within languages.
• The pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of Scottish
speakers of English is in some respects quite distinct from that
of people from England, for example.
• Though there is variation within Scotland, there are also some
features which perform an overall unifying function.
• The letter r in words like girl and star is pronounced in a
number of English-speaking areas, and Scotland is certainly
one of them. And a Scot is far more likely to say I’ll not do it
than I won’t do it .
1. Regional Variation
 International Variaties
• To British ears, a New Zealander’s dad sounds like an English
person’s dead , bad sounds like bed and six sounds like
sucks.
• Americans and Australians, as well as New Zealanders, tell of
British visitors who were given pens instead of pins and
pans instead of pens .
• On the other hand, an American’s god sounds like an English
person’s guard , and an American’s ladder is pronounced
identically with latter.
• There are vocabulary differences in the varieties spoken in
different regions too. Australians talk of sole parents , for
example, while people in England call them single parents ,
and New Zealanders call them solo parents. South Africans
use the term robot for British traffic-light .
• Pronunciation and vocabulary differences are probably the
differences people are most aware of between different
dialects of English, but there are grammatical differences too.
• Speakers of US English tend to prefer do you have , though
this can now also be heard in Britain alongside the traditional
British English have you got. Americans say gotten where
people in England use got. Many Americans use dove while
most British English speakers prefer dived.
• Americans ask did you eat ? while the English ask have you
eaten?
• Speakers of Spanish can hear differences of pronunciation,
vocabulary and grammar in the varieties of Spanish spoken in
Mexico, Spain, Argentina and Paraguay, for example.
• Native speakers of French can distinguish the French used in
Montreal from Parisian and Haitian French.
Intra-national or intra-continental variation
• Regional variation takes time to develop. British and
US English, for instance, provide much more
evidence of regional variation than New Zealand or
Australian English.
• Dialectologists can distinguish regional varieties for
almost every English county, e.g. Yorkshire,
Lancashire, Northumberland, Somerset, Cornwall
and so on, and for many towns too.
• Some British dialects, such as Scouse (heard in
Liverpool), Cockney and Geordie, even have distinct
names showing how significant they are in
distinguishing groups from one another.
• In the USA, too, dialectologists can identify distinguishing
features of the speech of people from different regions.
• Northern, Midland and Southern are the main divisions, and
within those three areas a number of further divisions can be
made.
• Different towns and even parts of towns can be distinguished.
Within the Midland area, for example, the Eastern States can
be distinguished; and within those the Boston dialect is
different from that of New York City; and within New York City,
Brooklynese is quite distinctive.
• Speakers of US English tend to prefer do you have, though this
can now also be heard in Britain alongside the traditional
British English have you got. Americans say gotten where
people in England use got. Many Americans use dove while
most British English speakers prefer dived. Americans ask did
you eat? while the English ask have you eaten?
 Cross-continental variation: dialect chains
• The varieties of French spoken in the border towns and villages
of Italy, Spain and Switzerland have more in common with the
language of the next village than the language of Paris.
• From one village and town to the next there is a chain or
continuum.
• Dialect chains are very common across the whole of Europe.
One chain links all the dialects of German, Dutch and Flemish
from Switzerland through Austria and Germany, to the
Netherlands and Belgium, and there is another which links
dialects of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian.
• The same kind of dialect chains are found throughout India and
China. They illustrate very clearly the arbitrariness of the
distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’.
• Languages are not purely linguistic entities. They serve social
functions. In order to define a language, it is important to look
to its social and political functions, as well as its linguistic
features.
• So a language can be thought of as a collection of dialects
that are usually linguistically similar, used by different social
groups who choose to say that they are speakers of one.
• language which functions to unite and represent them to
other groups.
• This definition is a sociolinguistic rather than a linguistic one:
it includes all the linguistically very different Chinese dialects,
which the Chinese define as one language, while separating
the languages of Scandinavia which are linguistically very
similar, but politically quite distinct varieties.
2. SOCIAL VARIATION
 RP : A Social Accent
• In earlier centuries, you could tell where an English lord or
lady came from by their regional form of English.
• But by the early twentieth century, a person who spoke with a
regional accent in England was most unlikely to belong to the
upper class.
• Upper-class people had an upper-class education, and that
generally meant a public (i.e. private!) school where they
learned to speak RP.
• RP stands not for ‘Real Posh’ (as suggested to me by a young
friend), but rather for Received Pronunciation – the accent of
the best educated and most prestigious members of English
society.
3. Social Dialect

• Dialects are linguistic varieties which are

distinguishable by their vocabulary, grammar and
pronunciation; the speech of people from different
social, as well as regional, groups may differ in these
ways.
• Just as RP is a social accent, so standard English is a
social dialect.
• It is the dialect used by well-educated English
speakers throughout the world. It is the variety used
for national news broadcasts and in print, and it is
the variety generally taught in English-medium
schools.
 Standard English
• Standard English is more accommodating than RP and allows
for some variation within its boundaries.
• Highest Class ---------- Standar English
• Lowest Class ----------- Most localised Non Standar English
 Caste dialects
• In these countries, there are caste systems determined by
birth, and strict social rules govern the kind of behaviour
appropriate to each group.
• The rules cover such matters as the kind of job people can
have, who they can marry, how they should dress, what they
should eat, and how they should behave in a range of social
situations. Not surprisingly, these social distinctions have
corresponding speech differences. A person’s dialect is an
indication of their social background.