Ethnolect

11 Key excerpts on "Ethnolect"

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  Discovering Sociolinguistics

  From Theory to Practice

  • Dick Smakman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The term can be used generically to avoid unwanted distinctions between less codified and more codified lan-guages (‘dialects’ and ‘standard languages’ are all ‘varieties’, and so are, for instance, occupational varieties involving jargon). Some of the terms include the syllable ‘lect’, which refers to a set of linguis-tic phenomena that can be recognised as an entity. A ‘sociolect’ is a variety defined on the basis of social grounds and is associated with a group of people who share certain qualities. For instance, in a Tamil-speaking region in India there are two sociolects, namely Mudaliyar and Iyengar. Mudaliyar is spoken by a lower caste than Iyengar, as the latter caste is associated with scholarli-ness. This is a social (rather than a regional) difference between the groups. There are also internationally known sociolects, like so-called ‘Valley speak’, or ‘Valspeak’, as well as ‘Surfer talk’, which are typical of younger speakers in Southern California in the United States (Macías et al. 2018 ). ‘Hyperlect’ is a name sometimes used for a certain sociolect, namely posh speech (Honey 1985 ). Poshness refers to a sociolect that is characterised by distinctive word choices and ways to pronounce certain sounds and certain words. A ‘regiolect’, which often has a name, is defined on the basis of geographical criteria. Latgalian, as spoken in Eastern Latvia, is a regiolect. An individual’s unique language sys-tem, i.e., one’s personalised variety, is often referred to as an ‘idiolect’. The term ‘idiolect’ is closely related to the word ‘vernacular’, which refers to the language used for everyday communication, i.e., a spontaneous language that comes naturally. The latter term is often also used to refer to a group’s indigenous language, especially if that deviates from a wider language norm. ‘African American Vernacular English’, an urban vernacular from the United States, fits that particular meaning of the term.

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  Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics & Historical linguistics

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter- 4 Ethnolinguistics & Sociolinguistics Ethnolinguistics Ethnolinguistics is a field of linguistic anthropology which studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups perceive the world. It is the combination between ethnology and linguistics. The former refers to the way of life of an entire community i.e. all the characteristics which distinguish one community from the other. Those characteristics make the cultural aspects of a community or a society. A well-known (but controversial) ethnolinguistic subject is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states that perception is limited by what can be described in one's own language. Ethnolinguists study the way perception and conceptualization influences language, and show how this is linked to different cultures and societies. An example is the way spatial orientation is expressed in various cultures (Bernd Heine 1997, Yi-Fu Tuan 1974). In many societies, words for the cardinal directions East and West are derived from terms for sunrise/sunset. The nomenclature for cardinal directions of Eskimo speakers of Greenland, however, is based on geographical landmarks such as the river system and one's position on the coast. Similarly, the Yurok lack the idea of cardinal directions; they orient themselves with respect to their principal geographic feature, the Klamath River. Sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a co-nsiderable degree with pragmatics.

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  Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts

  Truth, Love, Hate and War

  • James W. Underhill(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  He quoted as examples, speaking to stones in Ojibwa culture, Indian concepts of time, black street talk, ritual language, wailing, and forms of performance and poetic activities which Hymes himself studied in Chinookan narratives. More recently, and closer to home, Carmen Fought has defended an ethnic approach to linguistics in her Language and Ethnicity (2006), in which she gives accounts of ‘ebonics’, African American Vernacular English, French creoles, and Latino dialects of Spanish. Joshua A. Fishman’s Handbook of Language & Ethnic Identity (1999) covers a vast array of ethnolinguistic ques- tions, from linguistic diversity in Canada to European linguistic policy, the development of Swedish in Finland, ethnic identity in the Maghreb and the Near East and the linguistic modes expression of migrant workers. Indeed, lin- guistic anthropology is increasingly becoming a discipline with defenders such as Alessandro Duranti (1997), Foley (1997), Salzmann (1999), Marcel Danesi (2004), Ottenheimer (2006) and Riley (2007). Nonetheless, this impressive list of thought-provoking scholarship might lull us into a false sense of security, and lead us into believing that the study of language and culture is central to linguistics. If this were the case, how are we to explain the fact that ethnolinguistics finds so few entries in introductions to linguistics and linguistic encyclopaedias? R. L. Trask, in his Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics (1999) attributes only a brief entry to ‘anthropo- logical linguistics’ and has no entry for ‘ethnolinguistics’. Jean Aitchison finds space for neither term in her Glossary of Language and Mind (2003). Among the more established references, Kristen Malmkjær’s The Linguistics Encyclopedia (1991) lists neither ethnolinguistics nor anthropological linguis- tics. David Crystal in his Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (1997) is one of the few linguists to list the term ethnolinguistics in his index.

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  The History of English in a Social Context

  A Contribution to Historical Sociolinguistics

  • Dieter Kastovsky, Arthur Mettinger, Dieter Kastovsky, Arthur Mettinger(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In sum, this dictionary adheres to theoretically sound and strictly applied criteria, which guarantee reliability. 2.3. Ethnolinguistic groups Next to describing the language's history, this brief overview of the development of South African English should have had a second effect, namely to illustrate that the South African social history is deeply marked by century-old social divisions. For the last 200 years at least, South Africans were born and raised in a society whose main structuring principle was race. Since racial differences should be understood as physical variations singled out by the members of a community or society as socially significant (Giddens 1997: 212), it does not come unexpectedly that this fairly rigid compartmentali-sation of society has gone hand-in-hand with an equally distinct differentiation of ethnic groups. Ethnicity, here, refers to the cultural practices and outlooks of a given community of people that set them apart from others. Members of ethnic groups see themselves as culturally distinct from other groups in a society, and are seen by those other groups to be so in return. Different characteristics may serve to distinguish ethnic groups from one another, but the most usual are language, history or ancestry (real or imagined), religion and styles of dress or adornment (Giddens 1997: 210). In other words, your ethnic group does not only define who you are or where you stand in comparison with your compatriots, but it also pre-selects and -determines your beliefs, attitudes and actions. To put it in a nutshell, it plays a major role in what people identify with - it marks their social identity. Language, as indicated in Giddens's definition, is very often seen as a distinctive characteristic of an ethnic group; in South Africa, however, it was installed as the major defining characteristic next to skin colour.

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  Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change

  Insights from the Global North and South

  • Paul Kerswill, Heike Wiese, Paul Kerswill, Heike Wiese(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Cheshire and Fox 2009 ). On the whole, however, a good deal of the earlier research on multiEthnolects compares the speech of the local (White) population with that of a bundle of non-local immigrant ethnicities (e.g. ‘Non-Anglo’ in the MLE research), rather than teasing ethnic identity apart.

  What the research presented in this volume and elsewhere shows is that ‘inter-ethnic’ fused dialects emerge when their speakers routinely interact, share strong, dense, close-knit social network ties and belong to the same communities of practice. Central to the emergence and focusing of the ‘multiEthnolect’ then is social network membership and not ethnicity per se. Some members of an ethnic group may not be part of that network (and so may adopt features from the multiEthnolect late or not at all). Some networks might form, which, because of neighbourhood demographics, housing policy, migration history and so on, bring people together with a varied but nevertheless restricted set of ethnic backgrounds. Important to tease apart, then, is the extent to which ethnicity is the central determinant of the emergence of the multiEthnolect, or actually the structure of social network ties in certain communities which happen to be multiethnic.

  6 Are multiEthnolects special?

  The sociolinguistics of ethnicity has been at the forefront of our empirical and theoretical attention in sociolinguistics over the past two decades. The 21st century has brought a range of studies of Ethnolects of different kinds as we have seen – of the fused multiEthnolects of Northern and Western European cities as well as of those of individual migrant communities in North America, Australasia and beyond. Much of the retheorisation of dialect as a repertoire of linguistic resources from which speakers draw in light of the particular indexical meanings attached to them stems from research with ethnicity as its focus (Benor 2010; Sharma 2011

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  Dialect and Language Variation

  • Michael D. Linn(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  ETHNICITY AND DIALECTS Although there can be a correlation between ethnicity and dialects, it does not necessarily exist. Because people identify with those around them, both the region in which they live and the social class to which they belong influence their speech. But because not everyone identifies himself or herself as a member of a particular ethnic group, not everyone speaks an ethnic dialect. Ethnic dialects are spoken only by those whose self-identity is primarily with their ethnic group. For these people, linguistic characteristics may be the most important defining criteria for group membership. When social and economic barriers exist, ethnic dialects are more easily maintained and some times even used to increase social distance. When social mobility and assimila-tion with the majority group are possible, ethnic dialects tend to atrophy and may even disappear. Of course, not every member of any ethnic group is dis-tinguishable as a member of that group by his speech. Thus the speech of many Italian Americans, German Americans, Black Americans and Irish Americans does not identify them as members of their respective groups. While not all members of any ethnic group speak the ethnic dialect and some non-ethnic members do speak it, the vast majority of those who do speak it do belong to that ethnic group. For example, not all American Blacks speak Black English Vernacular (BEV), but most people who do speak it are Black. When you hear someone speaking BEV on the telephone, you most likely assume that he or she is Black. Here it should be mentioned that there is no inherent or necessary link between the spoken language and the ethnicity of the group. Ethnic dialects persist, not because of physical, psychological, or mental characteristics, but because speech pat-terns are used to signal ethnic and group membership.

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  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

  • Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Languages, Communities, and Contexts Part I An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Eighth Edition. Ronald Wardhaugh and Janet M. Fuller. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/wardhaugh8e 2 We stated in the introductory chapter that the concept of language is considered by many sociolinguists to be an ideological construct. Further, we noted that all languages exhibit internal variation, that is, each language exists in a number of varieties and is in one sense the sum of those varieties. We use the term variety as a general term for a way of speaking; this may be something as broad as Standard English, or a variety defined in terms of loca- tion and social class (e.g., ‘working-class New York City speech’), or something defined by its function or where it is used, such as ‘legalese.’ In the following sections, we will explore these different ways of specifying language varieties and how we define the terms ‘lan- guage’ and ‘dialect’ (regional and social). We will also address how the associations between language and social meaning develop and are used in communicating in different speech contexts. What is a Language? What do we mean when we refer to a language or, even more important, the idea of mixing languages? As we will discuss further in chapters 8 and 9, recent research has coined many new terms to describe what has traditionally been called multilingualism – ‘(trans)lan- guaging,’ ‘metrolingualism,’ ‘heteroglossia.’ These terms reflect the idea that languages are ideological constructs; while we (usually) have names for different ways of speaking and can describe their features, in practice linguistic boundaries may be fluid.

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  Interlinguistics

  Aspects of the Science of Planned Languages

  • Klaus Schubert(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  ALEKSANDR DMITRffiVIÖ DULIÖENKO Ethnic language and planned language On the particulars of the structural-genetic and the functional aspect The linguistic distinction in the title is a special case of the broad, or, more precisely, global opposition between ethnic and non-ethnic languages. The poles of this global opposition are not equal in status: The ethnic languages are the original basis of the linguistic existence of mankind, whereas non-ethnic languages are phenomena of later periods. Both in size and number the latter have a very modest, although by far not unimportant, place in human history. This distinction, once it had emerged, nevertheless became an objective fact of the world's linguistic reality. In the 20th century this has become obvious. Let us investigate the poles of the distinction with regard to its content and terminology. Ethnic languages should be considered the languages of nations, nationalities, and tribes. A primary and most essential feature is their territorial diversity, which has a hierarchic structure. If the assertion holds that there are no languages without dialects, then this structure can very generally be pictured as in Figure 1. (The bracketed categories exist in fewer situations than the bracketless ones.) The elements of the hierarchy in Figure 1 are organically interrelated, and moreover, they have a common basic linguistic substance. The difference among them shows only at the level of a few specific features which as a rule can be easily enumerated. In the last few centuries, a few hundred ethnic languages have developed a special form, a literary language which, by contrast with the territorial dialects, has a universal validity for the speakers of such languages and is characterized by social prestige and a series of other features.

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  Basic Aspects of Language in Human Relations

  Toward a General Theoretical Framework

  • Harald Haarmann(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Consequently, all basic experience of the environment among human beings, all kinds of behavior -verbal or non-verbal -, and the profile of people's ways of thinking (including atti-tudes and mentality) are not simply anthropocentric, but at the same time - and more precisely - ethnocentric. The relationship between language and identity may be specified by singling out individual features (e.g. as in Crystal 1987: 18 ff.). One speaks of physical identity (e.g. language and age, sex, physical type), psychological identity (e.g. language and personality, intelligence), geographical identity (e.g. language and the regional background of a speaker, accents, dialects), national identity (e.g. lan-guage and nationalism, political status), social identity (e.g. language and social stratification, status, role, solidarity and distance), contextual identity (e.g. situa-tionally determined varieties of speech and writing), stylistic identity (e.g. identifi-cation with style levels). The most basic form of identity which underlies the indi-vidual features is ethnic since any facet of language- and non-language related identification is linked to a specific community and its profile of individualizing ethnic patterns. Given the basic nature of ethnic identification, it is reasonable to assign to a theory of identity the key role in the formation of methodological foun-dations in the humanities. Consequently, the theory of identity has to be regarded as the basic theory of all the humanities, on which the more specialized ethnologi-cal and other anthropological disciplines (...) would have to be based and elaborat-ed (Müller 1987: 391).

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  Language Regard

  Methods, Variation and Change

  • Betsy E. Evans, Erica J. Benson, James N. Stanford(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Specifically, folk linguistics (Hoenigswald 1966; Niedzielski & Preston 2000), a research area within the study of language regard, or more specifically, perceptual dialectology, a branch of folk lin- guistics that examines how nonlinguists view their dialect landscapes, 2 Early theorizing in this wave includes Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) treatise on the study of lan- guage and identity and Eckert’s (2008) presentation of variation and the indexical field. Jennifer Cramer 66 66 necessitates an inclusion of both emic and etic approaches to perceptions about language and their connections to linguistic production, thus present- ing a framework for linguistic analysis that can provide the most compre- hensive picture of variation. 3.3 Finding Insider and Outsider Perspectives in Perceptual Dialectology We can begin to investigate how perceptual dialectology incorporates both emic and etic approaches to linguistic variation by first briefly describing the five pillars of perceptual dialectology methodology (for a more thorough dis- cussion of these methods, their histories, and their uses, see Montgomery & Cramer 2016): 1. Draw-a-map task (also called mental mapping task) – given a map of some location, participants draw where they believe dialect boundaries to exist. 2. Degree-of-difference task – given some set of category labels (historically, in the American tradition, state or city names), participants rate how differ- ent that variety is from their own. 3. Pleasantness and correctness evaluations – given some set of category labels (typically the same as in the degree-of-difference task), participants rate how pleasant or correct that variety is. 4. Voice-placing tasks – given a voice sample, participants locate the voice in the dialect landscape based on their perception of its origin.

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  Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik. Volume 1

  • Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  78. The Ethnography of Speaking 663 and give information, how to request, how to offer or decline assistance or cooperation, how to excercise power, how to enforce disci-pline, and the like — in short, everything involving the use of language and other com-municative dimensions (including the ar-rangement of space) in particular social set-tings (cf. art. 34). Understanding what speakers' frames are (see Gumperz 1977; Tannen 1979), what pro-cesses they are using to relate these expecta-tions to the production and interpretation of language, how they create meaningful events and interpret them hermeneutically through language, and how schemata and interaction processes relate to their shared cultural ex-periences, is a major goal in analysis. Since the focus of the ethnography of speaking is on the speech community, and on the way communication is patterned and organized within that unit, clearly its defini-tion is also of central concern (cf. art. 32). Depending on the questions and issues to be addressed and the level of abstraction that is desired, social units for investigation may be selected at different levels; virtually any com-munity in a complex society might be consid-ered part of another larger one, or subdivided into smaller groups. While research on the ethnography of speaking has often focused on a single school, a neighborhood, a factory, or a limited segment of a population, an integrated ethnographic approach would re-quire relating such subgroups to the social and cultural whole, with its full complement of roles. General, topic-focused, and hypothe-sis-testing research in the ethnography of speaking is each important, but each type is in many respects dependent on the one before (Hymes 1978).

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