Language Variation
Language Variation Introduction Everyone speaks at least one language, no one talks exactly the same way at all times: You are unlikely to speak to your boss in the style (or vocabulary) that youd use in talking to the idiot who just rammed your car from behind. That is, no language is fixed, uniform, or unvarying: they show internal variation. Actual usage varies from group to group, and speaker to speaker, in terms of the pronunciation of a language, the choice of words and the meaning of those words and even the use of syntactic construction. One of major topics in sociolinguistics is the study of language variation. But what is language variation? What are its styles, and what cause language variation? Language definition A linguistic variable is a linguistic item which has identifiable variants. Variation in language 1) Phonologically Traditionally, linguistics has a term "pronunciation" that includes accent and intonation. ... From all of these, there is no doubt that we can say that pronunciation does vary within the language. ... These examples are typical of the sort of dialectal variation found in the vocabulary of British and American English. From them, we can see, the lexical difference is the different word in varieties of the same language. 3) Syntactic level In discussions of British English and American English, we can see the language variation from syntactic level. ... Variation in Speech The following parts will focus on four aspect to show language vary. 1) Regional variation The study of regional variation is probably the best-known and longest-established form of the study of variety, and most of us have a stereotyped picture of the earnest dialect researcher roaming through the countryside to seek out ancient rustic characters and elicit information about vocabulary and pronunciation. ... Regional variation can arise from many causes. ... Historically speaking, we can see that separate varieties were most likely to emerge when there were barriers and frontiers between the areas in which a language was spoken. 2) Social variation To consider the complex ways in which social factors affect variation would take us into the domain of sociolinguistics and beyond the scope of the present book. But for our purposes we can broadly distinguish between three different kinds of variation.