Idiolect
Idiolect refers to the unique linguistic patterns and characteristics of an individual's speech. It encompasses the distinct vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and intonation that a person uses to communicate. Idiolect is shaped by a person's background, experiences, and social environment, making it a highly personalized aspect of language.
5 Key excerpts on "Idiolect"
eBook - ePubLanguage, Society, and New Media
Sociolinguistics Today
- Marcel Danesi(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 Language, Personality, and Identity Language varies not only along geographical and social axes, but also according to individual speaker characteristics. The particular type of style that individuals use (and which identifies them) is called an Idiolect, defined as a form of parole shaped by the categories of the specific language used, the personality of the speaker, and the sense of identity that the speaker brings to a verbal interaction. The study of Idiolectal speech constitutes a broad area of sociolinguistic research today, especially since identity construction in social media venues offers significant insights into the traditional relations among personality, identity, and language. Identity is the awareness of one’s distinctiveness, psychologically and socially. Some psychologists see the sense of identity as a psycho-biological endowment, a fixed quality of Selfhood and character that is nevertheless susceptible to adaptation according to situation. Others argue that it is largely constructed by individuals throughout life in response to the experiences they undergo. James Baldwin (1985: 23) encapsulates the latter perspective succinctly as follows: “An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his/her experience.” The ongoing research in sociolinguistics suggests that the language one acquires in childhood is a major factor in shaping one’s sense of identity, but that it changes throughout the stages of life, as mirrored in the style that characterizes an individual’s speech during these stages. This chapter looks at this important area of sociolinguistic research. Needless to say, there is more to personality and identity than the specific grammatical and lexical categories of the language acquired in a rearing context. These are shaped as well by cultural, religious, and other influences on a person’s life...
eBook - ePubLanguage, Culture, and Society
An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
- James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Almost all speakers make use of several Idiolects, depending on the circumstances of communication. For example, when family members talk to each other, their speech habits typically differ from those any one of them would use in, say, an interview with a prospective employer. The concept of Idiolect therefore refers to a very specific phenomenon—the speech variety used by a particular individual. DIALECTS Often, people who live in the same geographic area, have similar occupations, or have the same education or economic status speak relatively similar Idiolects compared to those from other groups. These shared characteristics may entail similarities in vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammatical features. When all the Idiolects of a group of speakers have enough in common to appear at least superficially alike, we say they belong to the same dialect. The term dialect, then, is an abstraction: It refers to a form of language or speech used by members of a regional, ethnic, or social group. Dialects that are mutually intelligible belong to the same language. All languages spoken by more than one small homogeneous community are found to consist of two or more dialects. Mutual intelligibility, of course, can vary in degree. In the early 1950s, a number of men and women from eight reservations in New York and Ontario were tested in an experiment designed to determine which of their local dialects were mutually intelligible and therefore dialects of one language, and which were not and therefore could be classified as individual languages of the Iroquoian language family. Even though the investigators arrived at percentages of intelligibility between any two of the Iroquoian speech communities, the question of where the boundaries lay between intelligibility and unintelligibility remained unresolved...
eBook - ePub- Gerard Van Herk(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Although dialects usually include distinct accent features, dialect and accent boundaries don’t have to match. For example, many people speak Standard English (in terms of grammar and lexicon), but with an accent reflecting their social or regional background – think of Martin Luther King, Jr., BBC regional newsreaders, or CBC editorialist Rex Murphy. The reverse situation (standard accent, non-standard grammatical features) is much less common, and often sounds strange to us. This was used to comedic effect a few years back in a popular online video, which featured a Standard English-accented Gilbert and Sullivan version of “Baby Got Back.” Many sociolinguists avoid the naming problem by using the value-neutral term variety for any subset of a language. They’ll talk about the standard variety, as well as regional, class, or ethnic varieties. Others reclaim the term dialect, and speak of the standard dialect, as well as regional dialects, sociolects, or ethnolects. They’ll often say, “Everybody has a dialect.” Another way that sociolinguists differ from linguists (and many normal people) is that we think of language as existing at the level of the group. Sure, we understand that each human learns language individually and stores it in an individual brain, but we stress that our language gets its meaning through interaction with others, as we negotiate understanding, decide how to present ourselves to others, and express belonging (or not-belonging!). In its strongest form, some sociolinguists lay out our theoretical viewpoint by saying that, linguistically, there’s no such thing as the individual – the way we talk comes from our membership in a group or groups...
eBook - ePubLanguage Learning
A Lifelong Process
- Joseph Foley, Linda Thompson(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In this sense the self is not stable. It is an evolving, dynamic, created through engagement in processes. Giddens suggests that the reflexive project of the self, consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives. This socially situated self is central to our view of learning language. Our description of language learning begins with a focus on the individual, the locus of language. There is ample evidence to support the view that each person’s life is unique. Bookshops are full of volumes of autobiographical accounts of varying degrees of interest. Hence the notion of each person having a life story or biography is a well-established social and intellectual concept. But can this individual uniqueness extend to the language(s) a person knows, a person’s linguistic repertoire? The next section will examine aspects of the linguistic repertoire and describe the ways in which it can be regarded as developing unique qualities and characteristics. 11.1 Aspects of a person’s linguistic repertoire Let us begin with the qualities of the human voice. We are familiar with the scenario of being able to recognize the ways people speak and can recognize regional accents even when we cannot name or identify each one. While some may be easier than others to recognize, the notion of particular groups having distinctive ways of speaking is not novel or revolutionary, although it may infer different social connotations particularly in Britain. Can this notion of diversity be extended to suggest that each individual person has their own unique way of speaking? Consider the following scenario: you go to the telephone, dial a number, do not connect with a person, only an answering machine. So you decide to leave a message that may begin something like this, ‘Hi, (it’s only me), can you call me?’ For some people, in some parts of the world, this is an everyday event...
eBook - ePub- Urszula Clark(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...He writes: At any given moment in its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strictest sense of the word, according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic, but also – and this is the essential point – into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth. (1981: 259) What Bakhtin is arguing here has been a central theme of this book, namely that how we use language is determined as much by social, cultural, historical and ideological concepts within which it functions as by its physical manifestations of phonetics, lexis and morphosyntax. Historical and Sociopolitical Contexts of Englishes Chapters 2 and 3 have given an overview of a sociolinguistic history of English, to explain the reasons why we have so many different varieties of Englishes in the world today. They have also shown how ‘English’ has come to have so many varieties both within English-speaking countries and around the world, to account for how variational uses of different Englishes are viewed or perceived within and across the wider national and increasingly global contexts, as well as within local communities within which they are situated. As such, they provide an overview of the wider historical and sociopolitical contexts within which language happens, which includes consideration of the sets of beliefs, values and assumptions that underpin them. By and large, these chapters show that the factors affecting linguistic change are politically and economically driven. Historical and contemporary factors such as invasion, colonisation and the demands of social order based upon law, education, economics and politics intertwine, at any moment in time, with the linguistic and communicative practices of the social groups most affected. Depending upon the prevalent social order, different groups will be affected in different ways...
