Diversity Within English

Diversity Within English

In order to understand how language variation descriptors are used, we first must understand what language variation is. We can say that the U.S. is linguistically diverse because of the multitude of languages spoken here, but we can also find diversity within these languages. All languages have both dialectical variations and registral variations. These variations, or dialects, can differ in lexicon, phonology, and/or syntax from the Standard Language that we often think of as Œcorrect' Language, although they are not necessarily less proper than, say, Standard English. It depends on where, by whom, and in what situation the dialect is used as to whether or not it is appropriate.

Most people are familiar with regional dialects, such as Boston,

Brooklyn, or Southern. These types of variations usually occur because of immigration and settlement patterns. People tend to seek out others like themselves. Regional variations tend to become more pronounced as the speech community is more isolated by physical geography, i.e. mountain ranges, rivers.

Linguists have done extensive studies on regional dialects, producing detailed

Linguistic Atlases. Many linguists can tell where a person is from just by knowing whether a person carries groceries home from the supermarket in a paper bag or from the grocery store in a paper sack (Yule 184). And the person who comes home from the supermarket with a paper sack serves to remind us that language variation is not a discrete, but rather a continuous variable.

Characteristics of the dialect are more pronounced in the center of the speech community and tend to be less discernible at the outer boundaries, where they often overlap other regional dialects.

Within, and between, these regional variations we find the social dialects. The primary social factors that influence dialects are class, education, occupation, ethnicity, sex, and age (Ferguson 52, Yule 191). And social dialects can vary on any or all three descriptor levels; syntax or grammar, lexicon or vocabulary, and phonetics or pronunciation. Social dialects are also where the described differences are often defined as stigmatized or nonstigmatized (Ferguson 52). Stigmatized items include use of the double negative (grammar), substituting the d sound for t...

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...frequency. Using in' for ing, as in goin' is universal across status groups, but it is found almost twice as often in the lower working class than in the lower middle class, and almost four times more than in the upper middle class (Ferguson 61).

With all these different variables that intersect and overlap with the different dialect variations is is a wonder that any sense can be made of

American English at all. But there two other important point to remember.

Language universals such as displacement, arbitrariness, productivity, cultural transmission, discreteness and duality are unique to human language (Yule 22) and provides a base or norm for measuring variations. Implicational relationships provide a way of measuring relative distance between the different variations and also serve as a means to predict changes in individual dialects

(Ferguson 66).

Works Consulted

Ferguson, Charles A., and Shirley Brice Heath, eds. Language in the USA.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Piatt, Bill. Only English? Law and Language Policy in the United States.

Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1990.

Yule, George. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.