1.

Sociolinguistics: setting the stage

Sociolinguistics

setting the stage

In this introductory chapter, we delineate the study of sociolinguistics and consider some of its
important characteristics. So, how can sociolinguistics be defined?

Sociolinguistics can be defined as the field that studies the relationship between language and
society. It investigates the ways in which language is integrated with human society. The fundamental
assumption is that language is a social phenomenon and should be studied as such.

What are some of the key properties of sociolinguistics?

A variety of languages and societies

Any discussion of the relationship between language and society should begin with some attempt to
define each of these terms. The term society is defined as any group of people who are drawn
together for a certain purpose or purposes. By this definition, this term becomes a very
comprehensive concept. This comprehensive view of society is useful because of the different kinds
of societies that are dealt with in sociolinguistics. The term language can be defined as a system of
linguistic communication particular to a group; this includes spoken, written, and signed modes of
communication. In other words, a language is what the members of a society speak. This definition of
language is also an inclusive one and it is also useful because of the different languages spoken by
different societies.

What is noteworthy is that the definitions of language and society are not independent of each other:
the definition of language includes in it a reference to society. These terms are inextricably
intertwined. A society must have a language or languages in which to carry out its purposes. The
connection is both inevitable and complex. Sociolinguists attempt to tease out this complex
relationship between language and society by offering more specific ways in which to study it.

One fundamental assumption in sociolinguistics is that language has a social function, both as a
means of communication and also as a way of identifying social groups. In other words, language
characterizes speech communities of different kinds. So, what is a speech community?

Speech community is defined by Crystal (1999, p. 315) as:

A regionally or socially definable human group, identified by the use of a shared spoken language or
language variety. It can vary in size from a tiny cluster of speakers to whole nations or supranational
groups.

Description

For communication to occur in various contexts, knowledge of language is needed. Knowledge of

language can be characterized as knowledge of a code. A code can be defined as any system of
sending and receiving messages. The senders are said to encode the message and the receivers are
said to decode it. Monolingual speakers make use of a code which draws on one language;
multilingual speakers have access to two or more codes, and who for one reason or another shift
back and forth between languages in some form of multilingual discourse. The system itself (or
the grammar) is something that each speaker ‘knows’, but two very important issues for linguists are
(1) just what that knowledge comprises and (2) how we may best characterize it.

Knowledge of language may be characterized in two ways by writing either a prescriptive grammar or
a descriptive grammar. A prescriptive grammar seeks to ‘prescribe’ or lay down what is judged to be
‘correct’, outlining the standard language and how it ‘should’ be spoken or written. A descriptive
grammar, by contrast, describes, analyses, and explains how people actually speak their
languages. Sociolinguists seek to write descriptive grammars rather than prescriptive ones.

E-language

Knowledge of language has also been characterized in terms of the distinction between competence
(also called I-language) and performance (also called E-language) (initially made in the early 1960s
by the American generative linguist Noam Chomsky). Competence is the language system stored in a
speaker’s mind. Performance is the speech and writing that language users produce. For generative
linguists, like Chomsky, competence is the proper object of linguistics. He claims that the linguist’s
task is to characterize what speakers know about their language (competence), not what they do with
their language (performance).

I-language – Chomsky’s term from the mid-1980s for the knowledge of language seen as an
internalized system in the minds of speakers. The opposite is the E-language or ‘externalized
language’.

The knowledge that sociolinguists seek to describe and explain involves more than knowledge of the
grammar of the language. Speakers possess knowledge that goes beyond knowledge of grammar.
Knowing a language also means knowing how to use that language, since speakers know not only
how to form sentences but also how to use them appropriately. There is therefore another kind of
competence, communicative competence (initially distinguished by Dell Hymes in the late 1960s
from Chomky’s concept of competence).

Communicative competence can be defined as the ability to take part in interactions within a speech
community, which implies knowing more than the language (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon),
including norms of interaction, when it is appropriate to speak and to keep silent, the rules for turn
taking, how to be polite, and so on. The sociolinguist Gumperz (1972, p. 205) explains that term as
follows: ‘Whereas linguistic competence covers the speaker’s ability to produce grammatically correct
sentences, communicative competence describes his ability to select, from the totality of
grammatically correct expressions available to him, forms which appropriately reflect the social
norms governing behaviour in specific encounters.’

Linguistic variation

One central topic in sociolinguistics is linguistic variation. The language that speakers use in their
everyday interactions is remarkably varied. Speakers may use different linguistic items to express the
same meaning. For example, speakers may use different lexical items to denote the same object or
concept or use different grammatical constructions to express the same idea or proposition. Speakers
may also display noticeable differences in the way they pronounce words and utterances. So,
variation involves the lexicon, the grammar (morphology and syntax) as well as the phonology of a
language.

Linguistic variation may occur across speakers, reflecting their social class, age, gender, region, or
ethnic group. In every language, there are linguistic correlates to a whole range of parameters
including social stratification, age grading, gender, region and ethnicity.

Linguistic variation occurs also within the speech of a single speaker. A speaker does not speak the
same all the time and her/his speech may vary according to the specific social context. People
constantly exploit variation within the languages they speak for different purposes in accordance with
the social contexts they find themselves in.

Thus, one claim that is strongly made in sociolinguistics is that language exhibits considerable internal
variation. More importantly, the patterns exhibited in this variation carry social meanings, such as
signalling the relative (in)formality of the situation, indexing various relations among people (like
power and solidarity), or indicating a speaker’s social class, gender, age, ethnicity, occupation or
geographical region. Sociolinguistics is all about linguistic variation and seeks socially relevant
explanations for regular patterns of variation in language use. Another interesting aspect of linguistic
variation is its relation to language change. Variation in language allows and may even cause changes
to occur within a language over time.

Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language

Some investigators draw a distinction between sociolinguistics or micro-sociolinguistics and

the sociology of language or macro-sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is concerned with investigating
the relationship between language and society with the goal being a better understanding of the
structure of language and of how language functions in communication. The equivalent goal in the
sociology of language is trying to discover how social structure can be better understood through the
study of language. The difference between sociolinguistics and the sociology of language is very much
one of emphasis, according to whether the investigator is more interested in language or society.
There is a very large area of overlap between the two. There is no sharp dividing line between the
two but a large area of common concern. Both micro-sociolinguistics and macro-sociolinguistics are
needed to contribute to a better understanding of language as a necessary condition and product of
social life.

2. Research methods in sociolinguistics

Methodologies for sociolinguistic research

Methodology refers to the body of methods of investigation used in sociolinguistics. Methods are
usually rule-bound modes of investigation of sociolinguistic research. Sociolinguistic investigations
have a twofold concern: 1) they must ask interesting questions and 2) they must find the right kinds
of data that bear on those questions.

The Observer’s Paradox

Sociolinguists attempt to observe language as a dynamic phenomenon in its natural setting, i.e., the
natural unmonitored speech patterns that participants use among themselves.

Speech patterns regularly change when another person (especially a stranger) enters the
conversation. Given this sensitivity of speech to audience, how can a sociolinguist, who is a stranger
and an outside observer, witness and record natural speech patterns? Doesn’t the presence of the
sociolinguist kill or affect the naturalness of the speech? This methodological difficulty is what
William Labov labels the Observer’s Paradox: how can we observe people speak when they are not
being observed?

The insight of William Labov is that, when an investigator attempts to collect ‘natural’ speech from an
informant or group of informants, their presence influences the way in which the informants speak,
often leading to hypercorrection on the part of the informants. The ‘paradox’ is that an investigator
has to be present to collect speech samples, but their presence affects the samples they are trying to
collect. Labov’s rapid and anonymous surveys were an attempt to overcome this problem, as was his
practice of trying to turn interview conversations to more lively and personal topics.

Methods of inquiry

Sociolinguistics, being an empirical science, is founded on an adequate data base. This data base is
drawn from a wide variety of sources. The empirical methods used in data collection can be
either quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative methods represent data in the form of numbers and
statistics drawn from censuses, documents, and surveys using various elicitation techniques such as
questionnaires and interviews. Qualitative methods collect data by directly observing naturally
occurring speech events via participant observation or ethnographic methods.

Participant observation is a method used in the social sciences to study the lived practices of a
community in a natural environment, i.e., outside a laboratory or experimental context. Participant
observation is a form of ethnography which seeks to obtain a greater understanding of a
phenomenon through the submersion of the researcher into the lives of their research subjects. It is
the practice of spending long periods of time with speakers observing how they use language. It is a
means of gathering qualitative data rather than quantitative data. Participant observation is an
attempt to overcome the Observer’s Paradox. Researchers spend long periods of time working and/or
living with the people whose speech they are interested in, and they hope by doing this they will
eventually achieve insider status themselves.

Ethnography is a method of research that evolved out of the field of anthropology. It studies a group
from the inside. Ethnography relies on participant observation, which involves researchers immersing
themselves with a group in an attempt to gain insight into their choices and behaviour.

3. Psycholinguistics: a short introduction

Psycholinguistics

A short introduction
This introductory chapter provides an overview of psycholinguistics. The aim is to attempt to
delineate the field of psycholinguistics by specifying its object of study and delimit its main areas of
investigation.

How can psycholinguistics be defined?

Psycholinguistics goes to the heart of what humans do with language. It provides insights into how
we construct (or assemble, put together, or piece) our own speech and writing and how we
understand the speech and writing of others; it seeks to shed light on how we store and use
vocabulary; it also attempts to illuminate how we manage to acquire a language (or more languages).

While linguistics examines language itself, psycholinguistics studies the mental processes involved in
language. Psycholinguists study understanding, producing, and remembering language, and, hence
are concerned with listening, reading, speaking, writing, and memory for language. They are also
interested in how we acquire language.

Thus, psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of language and mind. In other words, it aims to
find out about the mental or cognitive structures and processes which form the basis of or underlie
humans’ ability to acquire, speak, write and understand language. Psycholinguistics is the study of
how individuals comprehend, produce, and acquire language.

The study of psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science. Cognitive science reflects the
insights of psychology, linguistics, and, to a lesser extent, fields such as artificial intelligence,
neuroscience, and philosophy.

Psycholinguistics stresses the knowledge of language and the cognitive processes involved in ordinary
language use. Ordinary use of language means such things as understanding any discourse such as a
lecture or a public speech, reading a book or an article, writing a letter or an email, or holding a
conversation, etc. Cognitive process refers to such things as perception, memory, and thinking.
Considerable cognitive processing is going on during activities such as speaking and listening.

Contemporary interest in psycholinguistics began in the 1950s. It is a field of study whose goals are to
understand how people acquire language and how they use it to speak and understand one another.
It combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics.

Although there seems to be no limit to the aspects of the subject which could be explored, three
topics seem to be of particular interest:

1. The acquisition problem: Do humans acquire language because they are born equipped with
some linguistic ability? Or are they able to learn language because they are highly intelligent
beings who are skilled at solving problems of various types? Or could it be a mixture of these
two possibilities?
 1. The link between language knowledge (competence) and language usage (performance):
What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? In other words, how does
usage link up with knowledge?

1. Comprehending and producing speech: What actually happens when a person comprehends
or produces a chunk of speech?

What are the main areas of psycholinguistics?

The three primary processes investigated in psycholinguistics are language comprehension, language
production, and language acquisition. These processes have given rise to three distinct but
interrelated areas.

Language comprehension refers to the processes involved in understanding the meaning of spoken,
written or signed language. Theories of language comprehension are an important aspect of
psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and second language acquisition. Understanding what other
people say and write (i.e., language comprehension) is more complicated than it first appears.
Comprehending language involves a variety of capacities, skills, processes, knowledge, and
disposition that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written, and signed language. Among the
different processes involved are:

Perceptual processing: Attention is focused on the oral or written text and parts of it are retained in
short-term memory. Some initial analysis of the text may begin and attention is focused on cues
which will help identify constituents or meaningful sections of the text. These cues may be pauses in
spoken text or punctuation or paragraph separation in written text.

Parsing: Words are identified and matched with representations in long-term memory creating basic
units of meaning called propositions. Knowledge of the grammatical structure of the language is used
to identify constituents and arrive at propositions.

Utilization or elaboration: Propositions are related to other information and concepts in long-term
memory and connections are formed with existing concepts.

Proposition is the basic meaning which a sentence expresses. Propositions consist of (a) something
which is named or talked about (known as the argument or topic) and (b) an assertion or predication
which is made about the argument.

Language production refers to the processes involved in creating and expressing meaning
(referential, expressive, conative, phatic, etc.) through language. Numerous theories in
psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology attempt to account for the different processes involved in
language production (i.e., from having a concept or meaning in mind to translating that meaning into
spoken, written or signed form). Among the different stages involved are:
Construction: The speaker or writer selects communicative goals and creates propositions which
express intended meanings.

Transformation or articulation: Meanings are encoded in linguistic form according to the grammar of
the target language.

Execution: the message is expressed in audible or visible form through speech, writing, or sign
language.

An important issue in theories of language production is whether the processes involved are
analogous (or comparable or similar) to those involved in language comprehension (though in reverse
order).

Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and
comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Language Acquisition usually refers to First Language Acquisition, which studies infants’ acquisition of
their native language. This is distinguished from second language acquisition, which deals with the
acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

First Language Acquisition (also, FLA)

First Language Acquisition is the process of learning a native language. First Language Acquisition has
been studied primarily by linguists, developmental psychologists, and psycholinguists. Most
explanations of how children learn to speak and understand language involve the influence of both
the linguistic input to which children are exposed in social interaction with their parents and other
caregivers and a natural aptitude for grammar that is unique to humans. However, proponents of
different positions disagree strongly on the relative importance of these factors.

Second Language Acquisition (also, SLA) is the process of acquiring a second or foreign language. In a
broad sense, a Second Language is any language learned after one has learnt one’s native language.
However, when contrasted with a Foreign Language, the term refers more narrowly to a language
that plays a major role (in government, education and science and technology) in a particular country
or region though it may not be the first language of many people who use it.

Some fundamental current research questions related to the field of language acquisition are:

1. What is it about the human mind that makes it possible to acquire language?

2. Which aspects of the language programme are biologically programmed or determined?

3. What underlies apparent differences between language acquisition in children and adults?

4. Is there a “critical period” for language acquisition that critically distinguishes first and second
language acquisition?

5. Are there universal specific stages in the acquisition of sounds and structures of language.
4. Subject-matter and data

Psycholinguistics:

Subject-matter and data

This chapter builds on the previous one and delimits further the subject-matter of psycholinguistics in
addition to considering the nature of its data.

Linguistic competence vs. linguistic performance

When people know a language, they know its grammar (i.e., a set of rules said to be internalized by
members of a speech community). This underlying knowledge is called linguistic competence. It is
knowledge of language that is in a person’s mind. Linguistic performance, in contrast, is the use of
such knowledge in the actual processing of sentences, by which we mean their production and
comprehension.

Typically, linguists are concerned with describing linguistic competence and psycholinguists are
concerned with describing linguistic performance. Psycholinguists are concerned with the actual use
of language. The description of how language is actually used is called pragmatics. It is important to
distinguish between the grammatical and pragmatic aspects of a particular linguistic event. Let us
consider two cases and see how they are dealt with in linguistics and psycholinguistics.

Case one: structural ambiguity

A structurally or grammatically ambiguous sentence has two or more meanings because it can have
two distinct syntactic structures. For example,

I like good food and tea.

Where ‘good’ might bear a syntactic relation to both ‘food’ and ‘tea’ (‘good food and good tea’) or to
‘food’ alone (‘good food and any tea’). Each meaning is described by a different structural
representation. These two structures are made available by the linguist’s grammar and conform to a
number of syntactic rules. In this case, linguistic analysis is made use of in order to disambiguate an
ambiguous sentence by providing two separate structural representations, each corresponding to a
distinct interpretation. This process is referred to as disambiguation.

Disambiguation is the use of linguistic analysis to show the different structures of an ambiguous
sentence.
Many linguists will talk of ambiguity only when they see it as a property of sentences as explained by
the language system (competence).

However, if the above sentence is actually used by a speaker and understood by a hearer, only one of
the two meanings will be the one intended by the speaker and only one of the two meanings will be
recovered by the hearer. Which meaning is intended or recovered will be a purely pragmatic issue,
determined by the situation, the participants in the conversation, the function of the communicative
exchange, and so on. The grammar is completely indifferent to the speaker’s intent or to the hearer’s
recovery of the message. The grammar simply provides structures that are available for the encoding
of meaning in sentences. The actual use of those sentences in conversation is a function of encoding
and decoding processes and pragmatics (i.e., performance). Usually, additional information either
from the speaker or writer or from the situation indicates which meaning is intended.

Case two: Speech errors (also called slips of the tongue)

Speech errors are accidental faults which are made by speakers during the production of sounds,
words, and sentences. Both native speakers and non-native speakers of a language make unintended
mistakes when speaking. Some of the commonest speech errors include ‘spoonerisms’ such as ‘Drive
into the par cark’ instead of ‘Drive into the car park’ and ‘malapropisms’ such as ‘What are you
incinerating?’ for ‘What are you insinuating?’

Speech errors like these have been important for psycholinguists as a source of evidence for mental
processes involved in speech production. They have been studied by psycholinguists in order to find
out how people store language items in long-term memory and how they select items from memory
when speaking. A great deal of what is known about the levels of production planning comes from
analyses of speech errors. This research draws on speech error corpora collected by investigators. The
objective of such work is to examine how fluent speech is produced, and what conditions cause
fluent speech to break down. Slips of the tongue tell us more about the way a person plans and
produces speech.

In contrast to psycholinguists, linguists approach speech errors differently. In the quest to build a
model that represents linguistic competence, which is considered as the proper object of
investigation, speech errors are discarded. This is usually done as a result of what is referred to
as idealization.

Idealization

Idealization is the degree to which linguists ignore certain aspects of the variability in their raw data,
in order to arrive at an analysis that is as generally applicable as possible. Idealization is a major
assumption of generative linguistics, as it underlies the notion of competence. A main aim of
linguistics, in this view, is to account for the language of an ideal (or idealized) speaker-hearer in an
ideal (i.e., homogeneous) speech community, who knows the language perfectly, and is unaffected by
memory limitations, distractions, errors, etc., in actually using the language.
Speech data may be idealized compared with ordinary speech by removing any errors, hesitations, or
self-corrections; the data is decontextualized, i.e., the sentences are separated out from any specific
context in which they might be used.

So, idealization is the process by which the elements and rules of a language are established as a
system underlying the phenomena of speech. Errors are not considered as significant and would,
thus, be eliminated from the data. So, a competence account attempts to establish the rules that
make up the system of a language and would discard speech errors from the data.

What counts as data in psycholinguistics?

Psycholinguists examine the above questions by considering four types of evidence:

1. Animal communication

2. Child language

3. The language of normal adults

4. The speech of aphasics (people with speech disturbances)

Animal communication

The diverse methods (e.g., movement, sound, touch, smell) used as communication within the
different species, such as the ‘dancing’ of bees, the whistle patterns of dolphins, and cries and calls of
various primates.

Child language

The type of language spoken by young children who are still learning their mother tongue.

Child language is different from adult language in many ways. For example:

1. different sentence structures, e.g. Why not coming you? Instead of Why aren’t you coming?

2. different word forms, e.g., goed instead of went, mouses instead of mice.

Differences like these show that children have their own set of rules, and do not learn language by
simply imitating adults.

Aphasia (Also, dysphasia)

Loss of the ability to use and understand language, usually caused by damage to the brain. The loss
may be total or partial and may affect spoken and/or written language ability.
There are different types of aphasia: agraphia is difficulty in writing; alexia is difficulty in
reading; anomia is difficulty in using proper nouns; and agrammatism is difficulty in using
grammatical words like prepositions, articles, etc.

5. Language, dialect, and variety

Language, dialect and variety

We have seen that sociolinguists seek out linguistic variation and attempt to describe and explain it. A
language, such as English, exhibits internal variation. This means it takes on many different forms or
varieties; it varies geographically in the way it is spoken in different countries such as the UK, the USA,
and Australia. People who come from different English-speaking countries around the world, or from
different geographical regions within those countries, not only pronounce words differently, but also
display regular lexical, phonological and syntactic differences from Standard English. Similarly, people
belonging to different social classes, age groups, genders, and ethnicities within those countries show
similar systematic differences. Each language has got its own regional and social dialects as well as
style, register, and genre.

Linguistic variety

The fact that a language exhibits internal variation means that it exists in a number of varieties and it
is the sum of those varieties. In sociolinguistics, the term variety is used as a general and neutral term
to denote a way of speaking or any form of a language (pronunciation, grammar, vocabular) that is
seen as systematically distinct from others. It can include the standard and the vernacular, a dialect of
a specific region or a social dialect, as well as functionally distinctive language such as legalese (or
legal English), or situationally defined speech such as cocktail party talk.

A variety is a set of linguistic items (sounds, words, grammatical features) whose use is governed by
regional, social, situational or occupational variables. Varieties of English include (among others)
British English, American English, Welsh English, Cockney English, formal English, colloquial English,
scientific English, religious English, legal English, lower-class New York city English, etc.

Language and dialect

One distinction that is often made both by lay people and by sociolinguists is the one between a
language and a dialect. A language can be defined as a system composed of arbitrary agreed-upon
elements that a particular society (that is, any group of people who are drawn together for a certain
purpose or purposes) uses for communication. A dialect can be defined as a language variety in
which the use of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation identifies the regional or social background
of the user.

The question is: How can a dialect be differentiated from a language?

Size

There are several points of judgment or criteria that may be considered. First, in terms of their
sheer size, a language is bigger than a dialect. This could mean that geographically speaking, a
language is spoken over a larger area than a dialect. Alternatively, it could mean that more people
speak a language in comparison to those who speak a dialect. So, in terms of population of native
speakers, a language is spoken by a larger population of people than a dialect. Dialects are often
considered subsets of a language. In other words, a language contains many dialects.

This can also mean that a language contains more items than one dialect (more lexical items,
grammatical constructions, phonological features). For example, English is spoken in various dialects.
There is a difference of size, because a language is larger than a dialect. A language contains more
items than any of its dialects. This is the sense in which English is considered a language. A language
contains the sum total of all the terms in all its dialects. Therefore, we can say that in terms of size, a
dialect is a subordinate variety of a language.

Prestige

Another way in which the requirement of subordination is met is through the criterion of prestige (a
necessary property of languages). So, the other contrast between a language and a dialect is a
question of prestige. A language has prestige which a dialect lacks. Whether some variety is called a
language or a dialect depends on how much prestige one thinks it has, and for most people this is a
clear-cut matter, which depends on whether it is used in formal writing. Accordingly, people refer to
languages which are unwritten as dialects, or ‘mere dialects.’

A related idea is that a language is usually understood to be the standard form of a given language
and a dialect is usually understood to be a nonstandard form or substandard form.

The standard language

The standard language is actually an idealized variety, because it is not associated with any specific
geographical region. It is the variety which is learned and accepted as correct across a community or
set of communities. It is the variety associated with administrative, governmental, commercial and
educational circles, regardless of region. Standard English, for example, is the variety of English used
as a standard throughout the English-speaking countries. It is the version that is widely used in the
mass media and is taught in schools. It is the variety taught to learners of English as a second or
foreign language. It is clearly associated with education and broadcasting in public contexts and is
more easily described in terms of the written language (i.e., vocabulary, spelling, grammar) than the
spoken language.

If we are thinking of that general variety used in public broadcasting in the USA, we refer more
specifically to Standard American English or, in the UK, to Standard British English. In other parts of
the world, we can talk about other recognized varieties such as Standard Australian English, or
Standard Canadian English.

The standard language, in which prescriptive grammar guides usage in formal contexts, is a fact of life
in modern society. Since business and professional communities ascribe to the ideal, most people
would be well advised to become consciously aware of the differences between the colloquial version
of English acquired naturally by children and the standardized form of the language that help
someone communicate effectively in various formal contexts as well as enhance one’s employability.

So, the standard is the prestige variety of language used within a speech community, providing the
norm for such purposes as the media and language teaching. Linguistic forms or dialects that do not
conform to this norm are often called substandard or nonstandard. Standardization is the natural
development of a standard language in a speech community, or an attempt by a community to
impose one dialect as a standard.

In this way, a language may be regarded as the correct form of given speech while a dialect is
somehow inferior or less correct from a prescriptive point of view.

While there is a need to be aware of the natural variation that occurs in English across time, social
situation, and social group, we need also to recognize the importance of Standard English and the
need for mastering it. Standard English is the variety of English that many people in the economic
mainstream and predominant social culture of the English-speaking world speak and write. Standard
English is the variety of English that grammar books describe. It is standard not in the sense that it is
better than other varieties but in the sense that it is a widely recognized and codified version of
English. Standard English is also sometimes referred to as the Language of Wider Communication.

Mutual intelligibility

Another frequently used criterion is that of Mutual Intelligibility (a necessary property of dialects). It
refers to the ability of people to understand one another. If two varieties of speech are mutually
intelligible, they are strictly dialects of the same language; if they are mutually unintelligible, they are
different languages. In other words, if one person can understand another, they must be speaking
dialects of the same language while if one person does not understand the other person, they must
be speaking different languages. Therefore, dialects are often regarded to have mutual intelligibility.

Dialect and accent

Whether people think they speak a standard variety of English or not, they all speak with an accent. It
is not accurate to say that some speakers have accents while others do not. We might feel that some
speakers have very distinct or easily recognized types of accent while others may have more subtle
accents or less noticeable accents, but every language user speaks with an accent.

Technically, the term accent is restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify
where an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially. It is different from the term dialect, which
is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as aspects of pronunciation. So, the
term “dialect” should not be confused with the term “accent”. While “accent” refers to pronunciation
only, “dialect” refers to every aspect of language including pronunciation.

Standard English is spoken in a variety of accents, with clear regional associations. We may speak of
the American accent as against the British accent, the Canadian accent, the Indian accent or the Irish
accent. Within the UK, we may speak of the southern British accent as against the northern British
accent, of the West Midlands accent or the Black Country accent. In the USA, there are accents
associated with the Greater New York City, New England and North Central US, South-eastern US, and
Western US.
One aspect of pronunciation that sets these English accents apart is whether they are rhotic or non-
rhotic or R-dropping. In Rhotic accents of English, /r/ is pronounced following a vowel, in such words
as car, bird, early. A geographical area in which this sound is used (such as much of south-west
England, Scotland and Ireland) is called a rhotic area to be distinguished from non-rhotic areas (most
of England, Wales, Australia and New Zealand). American English is generally spoken with a rhotic
accent, despite the fact that we can hear some non-rhotic accents in New England and north-central
United States.

Thus, we can say that many people who live in such places speak Standard English (because they
show remarkable uniformity in vocabulary and grammar) and the differences are merely those of
accent. So, they do not speak different dialects but one variety (Standard English) with different
accents.

Received Pronunciation

One English accent which has received a certain eminence is the accent known as Received
Pronunciation (or RP). This accent is used by a small number of people in England. This accent is
usually associated with a higher social or educational background, with the BBC, and is taught to
students learning English as a second language. Other names for this accent are the Queen’s English,
Oxford English, and BBC English. The small number of speakers who use RP do not identify
themselves as coming from any particular geographical region. RP is a non-localized accent.

It is impossible to speak English without an accent. RP is an accent, a social rather than a regional
one.

Regional dialects

Regional dialects are varieties of a language spoken in distinct geographical areas or regions. One of
the most noticeable ways in which we observe variety in language is regional variation in the way a
language is spoken. Regional variation is based on geography.

As we travel throughout a wide geographical area in which a language is spoken, we are almost
certain to notice differences in pronunciation, in the choices and forms of words, and in syntax; such
distinctive varieties are usually called regional dialects of a language.

As we have seen above, one of the criteria used in the study of dialects is mutual intelligibility;
dialects typically display mutual intelligibility. Despite occasional difficulties, there is a general
impression of mutual intelligibility among many speakers of different dialects of English. This criterion
is used to distinguish between different dialects of the same language (whose speakers can usually
understand each other) and two different languages (whose speakers cannot understand each other).
It is important to recognize, from a linguistic point of view, that none of the varieties of a language is
inherently “better” than any other. They are simply different.

Regional dialects may be arranged in a dialect continuum, a range of dialects distributed

geographically across a territory, such that adjacent varieties are mutually intelligible but those at the
extremes are not. In other words, while dialects at either end of a country may not be mutually
intelligible, those that are geographically contiguous will be, thus providing a continuum of mutual
intelligibility across dialects of a language. The term dialect chain is used similarly. One such
continuum is said to stretch from Amsterdam in the Netherlands through Germany to Vienna in
Austria, and another from Paris in France to the south of Italy.

Speakers who move back and forth across border areas (such as between Holland, Germany and
Austria or France and Italy), using different dialects with some ease, may be described
as bidialectal (i.e., speaking two dialects). Most of us grow up with some form of bidialectalism,
speaking one dialect “in the street” among family and friends, and having to learn another dialect “in
school.” However, in some places, there are different languages used in the street and in school.
When we talk about people knowing two distinct languages, we describe them as bilingual.

Dialectology

Dialectology (also known as dialect geography) is the systematic study of geographical dialects: e.g.,
in the preparation of a dialect atlas, or of dialect grammars or dialect dictionaries of specific varieties.
Within dialectology, the existence of different regional dialects is widely recognized. Dialectologists
have been involved in the serious investigation of regional dialects and have devoted a lot of research
to the identification of consistent features of speech found in one geographical area compared to
another.

6. Language and social variation

Language and social variation

Social dialects

Whereas the traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate on the speech of people in
rural areas, the study of social dialects has been mainly concerned with speakers in towns and cities.
The term ‘dialect’ can also be used to describe differences in speech associated with various social
groups or classes. Regional dialects are geographically based while social dialects originate among
social groups and are related to a variety of factors which include social class, ethnicity, gender, and
age. Like regional dialects, social dialects comprise regular differences in vocabulary, grammar and
pronunciation.

Social dialects are investigated within what is called social dialectology. Social dialectology examines
how ways of speaking are linked to social differences within a particular area or country by
considering such factors as socio-economic class, ethnicity, gender, and age. Thus, social
differentiation can take different forms based on these variables. One particular type of social
differentiation is based on social stratification. Social stratification is a term used to refer to any
hierarchical ordering of groups within a society. In the industrialized societies of the West, this takes
the form of stratification into social classes and gives rise linguistically to social-class
dialects (or sociolects).

Language and social class

In the social study of dialects, it is social class that is mainly used to define groups of speakers as
having something in common. Social class may be defined primarily by wealth, circumstances of
birth, occupation, or education (or by all these criteria).

Two main groups are generally distinguished and they are identified as middle class - those who have
more years of education and perform non-manual work, and working class - those who have fewer
years of education and perform manual work of some kind. The speech of a given social class is
reflected in the social dialect that its members speak. So, when we refer to “working-class speech,”
we are talking about a social dialect. The terms “upper” and “lower” are used to further subdivide
the groups, mainly on an economic basis, making “upper-middle-class speech” another type of social
dialect or sociolect. The social dialect one speaks reveals one’s social status.

The role of education

Although the unique circumstances of every individual’s life result in each of us having an individual
way of speaking, a personal dialect or idiolect, we generally tend to sound like others with whom we
share similar educational backgrounds and/or occupations.

Among those who leave the educational system at an early age, there is a general pattern of using
certain forms that are relatively infrequent in the speech of those who pursue and complete their
high studies at the university. For example, in English, the grammatical feature of double negation, in
which more than one negative word is used within the same clause (e.g., I didn’t give him nothing.), is
generally associated with speakers who have spent less time in education. Similarly, -s
dropping (dropping the third-person singular -s morpheme in the present simple) (e.g., He play
football. instead of He plays football.) indicates a low educational level.

Those who spend more time in the educational system tend to have more features in their spoken
language that derive from a lot of time spent with written language and the standard variety. In the
English-speaking world (the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa), members
of the upper class, thanks to the many years spent in education, end up developing a social dialect
which is very close to the standard variety. This resulting social dialect clearly sets them apart from
the working-class group.

As adults, the outcome of time in the educational system is usually reflected in one’s occupation and
socio-economic status. This is, in turn, reflected in the social dialect that one uses. For example, the
way professionals (such as bank executives, physicians, or engineers), as opposed to blue-collar
workers (such as window cleaners, construction workers, or handymen), talk to each other usually
provides linguistic evidence for the significance of these social dialects.

Social markers

The presence or absence of features such -s dropping or double negation in one’s speech marks the
speaker as a member of a particular social group, whether one realizes it or not. Features like these
are referred to as social markers. A social marker can be defined as any feature of a person’s speech
seen as reflecting and indicating her or his status in a society.

One feature that seems to be a fairly stable indication of lower class and less education, throughout
the English-speaking world, is the final pronunciation of -ing with [n] rather than [Ƞ] at the end of
words such as sitting and drinking. Pronunciations represented by [sɪtɪn] and [drɪnkɪn] are typically
associated with working-class speech.
Another social marker is called “[h]-dropping,” which makes the words ‘at’ and ‘hat’ sound the same.
It occurs at the beginning of words and can result in utterances that sound like I’m so ‘ungry I could
eat an ‘orse (‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse’). In contemporary English, this feature is associated
with lower class and less education.

Language and ethnicity: Ethnic dialects

Ethnicity is generally understood in the social sciences to mean common, or shared, characteristics
attributed to common descent. As the term ‘ethnicity’ encompasses a distinct culture, a seemingly
natural correlation is often assumed between genetic lineage and cultural identity. Culture is
conceived of in the anthropological sense as involving a total way of life. The total way of life includes
not only a set of distinct everyday customs, values, norms and attitudes, but also a unique historical
group experience. A distinct culture is a manifestation of a group’s distinct historical experience.

A multi-ethnic speech community (such as the US or the UK) may pattern in several different ways
with respect to language use: (1) subgroups in the community may use only their minority ethnic
language(s); (2) minority group members may be bilingual in their ethnic language(s) and the
dominant language; or (3) minority group members may be monolingual in the dominant group. In
conditions (2) and (3), members of minority groups who identify themselves as such often speak a
distinctive variety of the dominant language. This distinctive variety is what is referred to as an ethnic
dialect. It is usually interpreted simply as arising from the influence of the ethnic language(s).
Indeed, linguistic features may be maintained and cultivated (consciously or unconsciously) as ethnic
markers of ethnic identity. These markers of ethnicity may occur at levels of phonology, vocabulary
and morphosyntax.

African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also known as Black English Vernacular or Ebonics, is a
variety used by (not all) African Americans in different regions in the USA. It has a number of
characteristic features that, taken together, form a distinct set of ethnic markers.

The term vernacular has been used to characterize any non-standard spoken version of a language
used by lower status groups. So, the vernacular is a general expression for a kind of social dialect,
typically spoken by a lower-status group, which is treated as “non-standard” because of marked
differences from the “standard” language.

Some features of African American Vernacular English

What linguistic features are specific to AAVE?

On the phonological level, consonant clusters are reduced; words such as taste, best, bask, pint etc.
may be pronounced without their final consonants. Another feature is: /ai/ monophthongization: the
diphthong /ai/ becomes a monophthong (e.g., I’ll do it is pronounced /al du it/ and I’ve been busy. as
/av bin bizi/). On the morphological level, verbal -s marking is absent (-s dropping) (e.g., He hate
cheese instead of He hates cheese.) Syntactically, AAVE is characterized by the double negation, as
in he don’t know nothin or I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. Another salient feature is the zero copula.,
i.e. be is often deleted (e.g. He tall instead of He is tall, She workin now instead of She is working
now). Still another feature of AAVE is called habitual be or ‘invariant’ be: the copula be is not
conjugated but used in its base form for all subjects (e.g. I be nice; she be nice; they be nice). It is
called habitual’ because it marks an action which is done repeatedly. For example, in the
utterance They be watching a movie every evening means that they get together every evening and
watch a movie. The “invariant be” of AAVE is generally recognized as an ethnic marker.

As the vernacular language of African Americans, AAVE shares a number of features with other non-
standard varieties, such as “Chicano English”, spoken in some Hispanic American communities in the
USA.

Individual speakers born into the ethnic group – or the entire group membership – can generally
succeed in eliminating all ethnic markers in their speech if they desire to fully assimilate to the
dominant group, or they can develop both marked and unmarked varieties and shift between them
depending on desired group identification in specific situations.

Language and gender

Another type of variation in language use that is systematically studied in sociolinguistics is the one
related to gender. Gender may be defined as a social category or identity that is based on a person’s
sex either as a biological trait or as a socially constructed category. The term genderlect is used to
refer to the speech of women and men.

In many speech communities, women and men have been observed to speak differently. This is
gender-related variation in language use. Many researchers have observed that women prefer more
the standard forms (the overtly prestigious forms) and men usually use vernacular forms. Across all
social groups in Western societies, women generally use more standard grammatical forms than men
and men tend to use more vernacular forms than women. For instance, multiple negation (e.g., I
don’t know nothing about it), a vernacular feature of speech, is more frequent in men’s speech than
in women’s speech. This pattern has been found in western speech communities all over the world.
So, why does female and male speech differ in this way? What is the explanation for it? Why do
women use more standard forms than men?

Different (though not mutually exclusive) explanations have been suggested. Some linguists have
suggested that women use more standard speech forms than men because they are more status-
conscious than men. They claim that women are more aware of the fact that the way they speak
signals their social class background or social status in the community. Standard speech forms are
generally associated with high social status, and so, according to this explanation, women use more
standard speech forms as a way of claiming such status. A second explanation for the fact that
women use more standard forms than men is related to social expectations and norms. Society tends
to expect ‘better’ behaviour from women than from men and this is reflected in women adopting the
prestigious forms. A third explanation of the question ‘why don’t men use more standard forms?’ is
that men prefer vernacular forms because they carry macho connotations of masculinity and
toughness. If this is true, it would also explain why many women might not want to use such forms.

Language and age: age-graded variation

There are features of people’s speech which vary at different ages. This kind of variation is called age-
graded variation in speech. In other words, age-graded features of speech habits within a community
are associated with age. Age-grading occurs when individuals change their linguistic behaviour
throughout their lifetimes. Age-grading can be studied in the way that children, adolescents, young
adults, and the elderly speak. Age-graded changes recur at a particular age in successive generations
and are regular and predictable changes. These changes are thought to mark
developmental/maturational stages in the individual’s life. Thus, age-grading may be defined as the
idea that some aspects of language use change over time within the speech of individuals; that is,
they may use a particular feature when younger and then not use this feature when they reach
adulthood.

When children are first exposed to language, their model in this process is their mother and/or
primary caretakers. When they grow older, they adopt a different norm in the preadolescent and
adolescent years. Adolescents tend to increase their use of vernacular forms to differentiate
themselves from the adult population.

Not only pitch, but vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar can differentiate age groups. There are
patterns which are appropriate for adolescents which disappear as they grow older. These are age-
graded patterns. For example, one feature which characterizes adolescents’ language use is the
extensive use of swear word vocabulary. This feature is likely to change over time. The frequency
with which they use such words tends to diminish as they grow older. Slang is another area of
vocabulary which reflects a person’s age. Current slang is the linguistic prerogative of young people.
Linguistic features that are age-graded are typically stigmatized. These features generally sound odd
in the mouth of an older person. They signal membership of a particular group – the young.

How can age-graded variation in speech be explained?

Non-prestigious age-graded linguistic features tend to peak during adolescence when peer group
pressure not to conform to society’s norms is greatest. The use of standard or prestige forms peaks
between the ages of 30 and 55. When people reach middle age, they tend to follow societal norms
because that is when the societal pressure to conform is greatest. At this stage of life, people become
more conservative and use the fewest vernacular forms. Non-prestigious forms may resurface in old
age when people are out of the workforce and societal pressures are reduced.

Adults have been shown to be more conservative in their use of linguistic items. This has been
attributed to the desired use of standard language which is used in the workplace. Adolescents tend
to use more slang and swear words, but these features recede as they become adults. Although
middle-aged adults have conservative speech, older adults tend to have less formal speech. Older
men and women who are past the age of retirement and no longer in the workforce also have less
formal speech because of reduced social pressure to conform.

7. Speech style, registers, and genres

Speech styles, registers, and genres

Speech styles
The study of language variation is further complicated by the fact that speakers can adopt different
styles of speaking in different situations. Speech style refers to a distinctive way of communication
which consists in making certain choices of lexical items, features of grammar and pronunciation.
Each set of these choices can form a distinct speech style.

At times, speakers are more careful and at times they are more relaxed. They can speak very formally
or very informally. The choice is determined by the relative formality of the occasion. Ceremonial
occasions require very formal speech, public lectures somewhat less formal, casual conversations
quite informal, and conversations between intimates on matters of little importance may be
extremely informal and casual. Variation in speech can be described on a scale from the maximally
formal to the maximally colloquial. These various levels of style form a natural continuum from the
highly formal to the extremely informal.

Compare choice of words, features of grammar and pronunciation in the following

situations: sermon, a public speech, a task group meeting to come up with a solution to a problem, a
family gathering over the dinner table, a naturally occurring conversation between two friends,
and talk between two significant others. We are likely to notice differences in the use of words,
grammar, and pronunciation in these different situations.

Stylistic variation can be defined as differences in the speech or writing of a person or group of
people according to the relative formality of the situation. Stylistic variation can be observed in
pronunciation, the use of different words or expressions, or different sentence structures.

The most basic distinction in speech style is between formal uses and informal uses. Formal style is
when we pay more careful attention to how we are speaking and informal style is when we pay less
attention. They are sometimes described as careful style and casual style. A change from one style to
the other by an individual is called style-shifting.

There are two possible accounts for the consistency of style-shifting across individuals in a speech
community. The first is the suggestion that people pay more or less attention to their speech when
they are engaged in different kinds of verbal tasks. Style-shifting is explained by reference to the
dimension of formality. The more formal the situation, the more attention is paid to language and to
the standard and prestigious norms associated with education and literacy. The more informal the
situation, the less attention is paid to language and to the prestigious norms.

Audience design

Another idea that has been put forth to account for style-shifting is that speakers have an audience in
mind, and they design their speech to suit that audience (Bell, 1984). Audience design can be
defined as the behaviour of speakers in adjusting their style of speaking to the nature of whoever
they may be addressing. A speaker who can control more than one variety chooses a level of speech
according to the audience the speaker is addressing. This concept can be illustrated by two specific
cases.

Case 1: Child-directed speech

One case which illustrates this idea of audience design is when adults design their language to fit the
level of young children. The resulting language is referred to as Child-directed Speech or Care-giver
language (also called Motherese, Parentese, Baby Talk, Caretaker speech). Child-directed speech can
be defined as a form of speech used especially by caregivers (including parents, siblings, and others)
in talking to very young children. It is the language spoken to young children by the people who look
after them.

In general, such language is spoken slowly and clearly. Adults talk in a simplified way to young
children, taking care to make their speech easily recognizable. The topics of sentences tend to focus
on the ‘here and now’ and the use of phonologically simplified, made-up ‘baby words (e.g., ‘gee-gee’
for a horse ‘moo’ for a cow, ‘baa’ for a sheep). The utterances are short.

Case 2: Elder-directed speech

Another case of audience design is illustrated by Elder-directed speech (or Elderspeak). Elderspeak is
a speech style used in many different contexts by young people when talking to elder adults. Both
volunteers and professional caregivers engage in elderspeak when interacting with the elderly.
Elderspeak is characterized by simpler vocabulary and sentence structure, shorter sentences, over-
endearing terms (such as sweetheart, dearie, or honey), using the collective “we” (in place of you,
e.g., How are today?), repetition, and speaking more slowly and more loudly.

Elderspeak stems from the stereotype that older people have reduced cognitive abilities in language
comprehension and production and suffer from memory problems, hearing problems, or energy
problems. Its use may be a result of ageism. Although some aspects of elderspeak may be beneficial
to some recipients, it may be considered as expressing a condescending attitude towards the elderly.
It is generally seen as inappropriate and a hindrance to intergeneration communication.

Speech accommodation

A related concept is the notion of speech accommodation (first proposed by Howard Giles in the
1970s). Speech accommodation can be defined as a speakers’ ability to modify their speech style to
become similar to or different from the perceived style of the person(s) they’re talking to. We may
adapt to the style of our interlocutor, i.e., adjust our speech to be more like that of our interlocutor;
we can adopt a speech style that attempts to reduce social distance and use forms that are similar to
those used by the person we’re talking to. This is described as convergence. In contrast, a speech
style may be used to emphasize social distance between speakers. We may wish to dissociate from a
conversational partner by adopting a speech style which is different from that of our interlocutor. We
can make our speech style diverge from another’s by using forms that are distinctly different. This is
called divergence.

Convergence serves to express approval and even liking of an interlocutor; it may also serve to
achieve solidarity. Divergence serves to express disapproval and dissociation from an interlocutor.
This perspective highlights the importance of language in establishing social relations and in
representing a speaker’s sense of identity.
For example, an American English speaker and a British English speaker may adopt features of each
other’s speech (i.e., converge) or they may exaggerate the features of their respective regional
dialects (i.e., diverge). Similarly, in England, an upper middle-class speaker may use features of the
low working-class social dialect when interacting with a member of that class. This is an example of
convergence.

Registers: varieties associated with activity domain

We have seen that the term ‘dialect’ concerns variations that are located regionally or socially. The
term ‘style’ refers to differences in degree of formality. The term ‘register’ concerns varieties
associated with a profession, occupation or other interests. It is an in-group variety. Included in this
category are varieties of language which serve the wide-ranging purposes of groups that are
organized along lines of occupation, skills or training, and interests, and which are used in the
conduct of their affairs. These activity domains are very diverse. They include occupations of various
sorts, hobbies and special interests, and secret societies. Each of these has its own register.

One of the defining features of a register is the use of a jargon, which is a special technical vocabulary
associated with a specific area of work or interest. People who work at a particular trade or
occupation develop new terms for new concepts. For example, surgeons, airline pilots, bankers,
lawyers, engineers, biologists, etc. employ different registers. These special terms seem to facilitate
easy and speedy communication among the members.

A specialized jargon serves not just to label new and needed concepts, but to establish bonds
between members of the in-group and enforce boundaries for outsiders. In social terms, a jargon
helps to create and maintain connections among the members and to exclude others who do not
belong to the group. This exclusive effect can be clearly seen in the medical jargon (e.g., Zanoxyn is a
nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug for arthritis, bursitis and tendonitis).

Register is closely connected with the concept of Community of practice.

Community of practice can be defined as a group of people who share a concern or a passion for
something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. This concept is very broad.
It applies to a group of engineers who learn how to design better devices or a group of civil servants
who seek to improve service to citizens or a street gang whose members learn how to survive in a
hostile world. Let us consider two examples of register in English: the legal register and the medical
register.

Some Features of the legal register (or legalese) in English

*Legal English employs a great deal of technical terminology which is unfamiliar to the layman
(e.g., waiver, restraint of trade, restrictive covenant, etc.). This makes legal English difficult to
understand. These technical terms may include ordinary words used with special meanings. For
example, the familiar word consideration refers, in legal English, to contracts and means. Other
examples include construction, prefer, redemption, furnish, hold and find.

*Another characteristic of legalese is the use of binomials: two or three words that are put together
to convey what is usually a single meaning (e.g., null and void, fit and proper, due care and
attention, terms and conditions, dispute, controversy or claim, and promise, agree and covenant).
*The length and complexity of sentences are the most obvious syntactic features. Sentences include a
great deal of information, repetitiveness, long noun phrases with plenty of modification,
prepositional phrases, as well as coordinate and subordinate clauses.

*The passive voice is inherent in legal language.

*Nominalization: nouns derived from verbs are often used instead of verbs, such as the use of the
noun consideration instead of to consider, to be in opposition rather than to oppose, to be in
agreement rather than to agree.

*Foreign phrases are sometimes used instead of English phrases (e.g., inter alia instead of among
others).

Some features of the medical register

• Medical jargon: medical technical terms that cannot be understood by lay people.

• Long and complicated sentences: unnecessary words leading to redundancy and superfluous
ornamentation of medical statements which obscure the key message. Hence, it will be
difficult for readers to comprehend what is written.

• Overuse of the passive voice

*Nominalization: tendency to turn verbs into nouns. There is the tendency to use nouns derived from
verbs instead of the verb itself (e.g., examination, analysis, investigation, study and performance).

Genre

Register is a language variety which is associated with a specific activity domain. Genre focuses more
on the text type. The term genre has been used for many years to refer to different types of literary
text such as lyric, narrative, or dramatic genres. A literary genre is a recognizable category of written
work with its established conventions. It highlights the fact that different types of texts can be
identified by their overall shape or generic structure.

Recently, the term has been adapted by functional linguists to refer to different types of text
(whether literary or not) such as sermons, political speeches or media texts (such as advertisements
or news reporting).

An established genre has a number of established conventions:

1. Each genre has a widely acknowledged purpose, addressing some particular need or question
in target audiences.

2. A genre tends to have a standard structure, or lay-out, with predefined components

appearing in a certain order.

3. A genre tends to dictate a style by convention.

Compare, e.g., a news article, an advertisement, and a novel.

You should have noticed that these texts belong to different genres. A news article’s purpose is to
inform; it has an established structure or lay-out and it has a certain style (e.g., containing facts,
avoiding repetition and presenting information in a clear way). An advertisement belongs to a
different genre. Its purpose is to persuade a target audience to follow a certain course of action,
namely, to buy a certain product or service. It has a different lay-out and makes use of a different
style (e.g., not necessarily containing facts, using a lot of repetition, and a heavy use of commands). A
novel belongs to yet a different genre. Unlike a news article and an advertisement, it is fictitious; it
has a different lay-out and uses a different style (e.g., making use of adjectives and adverbs in order
to depict vivid pictures and it appeals to the five senses).

Ways of speaking (such as dialects and registers) require a certain socialization into a particular social
group or occupational group. Genre, by contrast, requires an acquired familiarity with certain norms
of language used in particular contexts and for specific functions.

8. Stages of First Language Acquisition

Stages of First Language Acquisition

As we have seen, one of the fundamental tasks of psycholinguistics is to explain language acquisition,
i.e., the learning and development of a person’s language. The learning of a native first language is
called First Language Acquisition (FLA), and of a second or foreign language, Second Language
Acquisition (SLA). Language acquisition applies to the process or result of learning a first language by
children (FLA) and to the learning of further languages (SLA).

FLA is the process of acquiring a first language. A first language is the language first acquired by a
child. It is acquired naturally during childhood, usually because it is the primary language of a child’s
family or household. A child who grows up in a multilingual setting may have more than one “first”
language. A first language is also called native language, mother tongue, or L1. In order to gain a
broad understanding of FLA, we consider one of its major aspects: its stages.

Stages of FLA

Several stages in the early acquisition process have been identified. Let us go through these stages.
The term ‘stages’ refers to recognizable periods in the process of first language acquisition. At every
stage of development, child language exhibits specific linguistic patterns which are uniform. All
normal children develop language at roughly the same time, along much the same schedule. The
stages of first language acquisition can be divided into prelinguistic stages and linguistic stages.

Crying and cooing (from birth to 6 months)

At birth, the first stage of language acquisition is referred to as crying and cooing. This stage extends
from birth to six months. The period from 0 to 3 months is characterized by crying. During the first
three months, the child develops a range of crying styles, with different patterns for different needs
(such as need for food and care).

By 3 months, the child is able to bring back the tongue into regular contact with the back of the
palate (or velum) and this allows the infant to create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k] and
[g] and gradually becomes capable of producing sequences of vowel-like sounds, particularly high
vowel sounds similar to [i] and [u], hence the common description as “cooing” or “gooing” for this
type of production.

Most scholars agree that the earliest cries and cooing noises of the newly born infant cannot be
considered early language. Such noises are completely stimulus controlled: they are the child’s
involuntary responses to hunger, discomfort, the desire to be cuddled, or the feeling of well-being. A
major property of human language is its creativity, in the sense of being free from either external or
internal stimuli. During the earliest period, the noises produced by infants in all language
communities SOUND THE SAME. This clearly shows that these noises are not language.

Babbling (from 6 months to 12 months)

The babbling stage covers the period extending from six months to one year. The child is sitting up
and producing a number of different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ‘ba-ba-
ba’, ‘da-da-da’ and ‘ga-ga-ga’ (apart from the continuing stimulus-controlled cries). This type of sound
production is described as babbling. Nasal sounds also become more common. Certain syllable
sequences such as ‘ma-ma-ma’ and ‘da-da-da’ are interpreted by parents as versions of “mama” and
“dada” and repeated back to the child. This use of sound provides the child with some experience of
the social role of speech because adults tend to react to babbling as if it is actually the child’s
contribution to social interaction.

Babbling is the earliest stage in FLA. Babbling is not prelinguistic. One view suggests that it is during
this period that children are learning to distinguish between the sounds of their language and the
sounds which are not part of the language. During the babbling period, children learn to maintain the
“right” sounds and suppress the “wrong” ones. Besides, the babbling stage allows children to train
their speech organs.

Single words: the one-word stage (from 12 to 15 months)

After one year, children begin to use the same sequence of sounds repeatedly to “mean” the same
thing. They have learned that sounds are related to meaning, and they are producing their first
words. Most children seem to go through “the one-word = one sentence” stage. The one-word
“sentences” are called holophrastic sentences. At this stage, the child uses only one word to express
concepts or predications that will later be expressed by phrases and sentences.
A holophrase is a single word which represents a whole phrase or sentence in early child language, as
in “No” meaning “I don’t want to go to bed”; “nana” to mean “I want a banana”; “mine” to mean
“That’s my shoe”.

During this early one-word stage, the twin phenomena of under-extension and over-extension are
features of children’s word use. Under-extension is a case in which the child acquires a word for a
particular thing and fails to extend it to other objects in the same category. For example, if a child
uses the word ‘dog’ to refer only to the family pet and not to the neighbour’s dog and all dogs, this
would be an instance of under-extension. Over-extension is more common. Over-extension is when
the child extends a word incorrectly to other similar things. For example, a child might call all four-
legged animals ‘doggie’, or everything that is bright ‘light’.

More examples of over-extensions:

‘Moon’ to refer to cakes, round marks on windows, letter ‘O’

‘Ball’ to refer to anything round like apples, grapes, eggs

‘Stick’ to refer to all stick-like objects such as cane, umbrella, ruler

‘Horse’ to refer to all four-legged animals such as cows and pigs

Two-word utterances: the two-word stage (from 18 months to 2 years)

Around 18 months, and as children leave the one-word stage, their vocabulary development speeds
up and they begin to combine words to form small sentences. Children begin to produce two-word
utterances. During this stage, there are no syntactic or morphological markers – that is, no inflections
for number, person, tense and so on. The child starts to produce utterances exhibiting rudimentary
combinations of words, e.g., “mummy ball” to mean “mummy has got the ball” or “mummy, bring me
the ball”, “mummy, I want that ball, “mummy, where is my ball?”

There does not seem to be any “three-word” sentence stage. When a child starts putting more than
two words together, the utterances may be two, three, four or five words longer.

The first utterances of children larger than two words have a special characteristic. “Function” words
(such as ‘to’, ‘the’ ‘can’, ‘is’) are missing; only the words that carry the main message – the “content”
words – occur. Such utterances are sometimes called telegraphic speech (e.g., “Cathy build house”).
Apart from lacking grammatical morphemes, such utterances appear to be “sentence-like”.

Function words and inflections (from 2 to 3 years)

The multi-word utterances are syntactically complete and express complete semantic units and
trigger appropriate responses from adults without much difficulty. Many researchers consider the
multi-word stage crucial for the development of child language as a whole. It is at this stage that
children start to create their own sentences in the sense that they often come up with sentences of
their own.
Throughout the third year of life, as children produce sentences that more and more approximate the
adult grammar, they begin to use grammatical function words and also the inflectional morphemes of
the language. For example, they add the 3rd person singular -S morpheme (e.g., He wants an apple.),
the past tense -ED morpheme (e.g., I helped mummy.), the progressive -ING inflection (e.g., I am
singing.) and the articles A and THE (e.g., He is a doctor.)

Questions and negatives (from 3 to 5 years)

As auxiliaries and copula BE enter the child’s speech, so do modals and negative modals, such as
‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’. Children at this stage rarely produce passive sentences but can form adult-type-
questions and adult-type negative sentences. By the age of four, most children can ask questions, use
correct word order and grammatical markers, and give commands. In fact, it is generally accepted
that by age four, children have acquired the basic structures of the language or languages spoken to
them in these early years. They continue to learn vocabulary at the rate of several words a day.

Rare or complex constructions (from 5 to 10 years)

At around the age of five, children begin to acquire less frequent and more complex linguistic
structures such as passives and relative clauses. This is a very important linguistic development
because it means that the child has developed the capacity of syntax – to create complex sentences
out of simple ones. As children grow older, they develop much more proficiency with language. Their
processing capacity increases and their ability to produce and interpret longer and more syntactically
complex sentences improves. By eight years, the child can use compound sentences with words like
‘and’ or ‘but’ to join sentences together. Vocabulary learning continues at a rapid rate.

Mature speech (from 10 years to puberty)

The discrepancies between children’s speech and that of the adults around them gradually
disappears over the next few years. By the age of about eleven, children exhibit a command of the
structure of their language comparable to that of adults. At the age of puberty, children’s language
development is essentially complete, apart from vocabulary. Children would continue to accumulate
lexical items throughout their life.

All children seem to pass through a series of similar stages or phases as they acquire their first
language. The milestones are normally reached in the same order and they give us an idea of a child’s
likely progress.

9. Theories of First Language Acquisition

Theories of First Language Acquisition

Several theories have been put forth to explain the process by which children learn to understand
and speak a first language. It is important to bear in mind that these theories should not be seen as
replacing one another, conflicting or contradicting one another. Rather, they should be recognized as
complementing one another. Each theory has added to our overall understanding of First Language
Acquisition, placing emphasis on different aspects of the process. This chapter reviews three major
theories: behaviourism, innateness, and interactionism. Let us consider each theory in turn and see
what it offers.

Behaviourism

Behaviourism is a theory of psychology which was predominant prior to the 1950s. It states that
human and animal behaviour can and should be studied only in terms of physical processes, without
reference to mind. Behaviourism was used by psychologists like B. F. Skinner to explain first language
learning. Language was considered just another behaviour that can be learned by general laws of
behaviour, such as imitation and reinforcement. Imitation and reinforcement were proposed as
mechanisms by which children could learn language. In other words, behaviourism suggested that
children acquire language by imitating the language of their parents or caregivers.

The role of imitation: Do children learn a first language by imitation?

Imitation is involved to some extent, of course. Imitation of adult speech (and that of other children)
plays an important role in acquiring aspects of pronunciation (such as accent and intonation).
However, although children imitate aspects of adult language, it is clear that imitation CANNOT BY
ITSELF be a driving force of language development, and particularly of syntactic development. An
analysis of the sentences produced by children shows that they cannot be imitating adults. Children
make mistakes that adults do not. The sentences produced by children show that they are not simply
imitating adult speech. In other words, children do not just imitate adults when they acquire
language. This is clear from utterances produced by children such as “Mummy comed” and “Me
taked a bissy”, which could not have been copied from adults.

Another point is that there seems to be a great deal of individual variation when it comes to imitation
during language acquisition. It turns out that not all children imitate, and those who do imitate do
not do it most of the time. Moreover, there is no evidence that imitators acquire language any faster
than non-imitators, nor is there evidence that the children of adults who regularly encourage
imitation acquire language any faster than other children.

The role of reinforcement: Do children learn an L1 by reinforcement?

Another behaviourist proposal highlights the role of reward and reinforcement in First Language
Acquisition. It suggests that children learn to produce “correct” sentences because they are positively
reinforced when they say a correct utterance and negatively reinforced when they say an incorrect
utterance. The idea of reward and reinforcement can be understood as approval or disapproval by
parents and caregivers. One might suppose that a parent smiles and says “Yes dear, that’s right” when
a child makes a correct utterance. Successful attempts by the child are rewarded because an adult
who recognizes a word spoken by a child will praise the child and/or give the child what it is asking
for. Successful utterances are therefore reinforced while unsuccessful ones are forgotten.
This view assumes that children are being constantly corrected for using “bad grammar” and
rewarded when they use “good grammar”. Various researchers report from their studies that
reinforcement seldom occurs. In addition, attempts to “correct” a child’s language seems to be
doomed to failure. Children do not know what they are doing wrong and are unable to make
corrections even when they are pointed out. Explicit correction of inappropriate utterances DOES
NOT play any significant role in FLA.

Innateness

The prominent American linguist Noam Chomsky published a criticism of the behaviourist theory in
1957. According to him, children have an inborn faculty for language acquisition. This is referred to
as the Innateness Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, First Language Acquisition is grammar
construction. Children are guided in this complex process of grammar construction by an innate
natural capacity. The human brain is specially equipped from birth for acquisition of human language
grammars. The genetic makeup for language consists of abstract universal principles or what is
called Universal Grammar (UG) (formerly called Language Acquisition Device). Every child is born
with knowledge of a set of principles which apply to all languages.

Therefore, the process of FLA is biologically determined – the human species has evolved a brain
which contains linguistic information at birth. The newly born infant’s natural predisposition to learn
language is triggered by hearing speech around her/him and his/her brain is able to interpret what it
hears according to the underlying principles or structures it already contains.

Children form rules and construct a grammar. Children appear to form the simplest and most general
rules they can from the language input they receive and they use the rules whenever they can. They
progress from those simple rules to more complex ones. Children show regular changes in their
grammar in the acquisition of various constructions (such as negation and questions).

Language acquisition is a creative process. Children are not given explicit information about the rules,
by either instruction or correction. They must somehow extract the rules of the grammar from the
language they hear around them, and their linguistic environment does not need to be special in any
way for them to do this. Observations of children acquiring different languages under different
cultural and social circumstances reveal that the development stages are similar, possibly universal.
These factors have led many linguists to believe that children are equipped with an innate template
or blueprint for language – Universal Grammar (UG) – and this blueprint aids the child in the task of
constructing a grammar for her/his language. It hardly needs saying that the process is unconscious.
We cannot envisage the small child working out grammatical rules consciously.

Is there any evidence for the innateness hypothesis?

First, the innateness hypothesis receives its strongest support from the observation that the grammar
a person ends up with is vastly underdetermined by linguistic experience. In other words, we end up
knowing far more about language than is exemplified in the language we hear around us. This
argument for the innateness of UG is called the poverty of the stimulus.

Poverty-of-the stimulus is the argument that because language input to children is impoverished
(deprived of richness and elaboration) and they still acquire an L1, there must be an innate capacity
for L1 acquisition. Although children hear many utterances, the language they hear is INCOMPLETE,
NOISY, and UNSTRUCTURED. The utterances they hear include slips of the tongue, false starts,
ungrammatical and incomplete sentences, and no information as to which utterances are well
formed. In this sense, the data they are exposed to is IMPOVERISHED. It is less than what is necessary
to account for the richness and complexity of the grammar they attain.

Second, the innateness hypothesis provides an answer to the logical problem of language
acquisition posed by Chomsky in the 1980s: what accounts for the ease, rapidity, and uniformity of
language acquisition in the face of impoverished data? The answer is that children acquire a complex
grammar quickly and easily without any particular help beyond exposure to the language because
they do not start from scratch. UG helps them to extract the rules of their language and to avoid
many grammatical errors. Because the child constructs his grammar according to an innate blueprint,
all children proceed through similar developmental stages.

Interactionism

Chomsky’s theory relies on children being exposed to language but takes no account of the
interaction between children and their caregivers. In contrast to the work of Chomsky, more recent
theories have stressed the importance of the language input children receive from their caregivers.
Language exists for the purpose of communication and can only be learned in the context of
interaction with people. It seems likely that a child will learn more quickly and progress fast in FLA
with frequent interaction. Interactionists, such as the American psychologist Jerome Bruner, suggest
that the language behaviour of adults when talking to children (known by several names but most
easily referred to as Child-Directed Speech or CDS) is specially adapted to support the acquisition
process. This support is often described as scaffolding for the child’s language learning. Bruner’s
scaffolding theory states that children need support and active help from their parents and caregivers
if they are going to become independent learners as they mature. Children are more dependent on
people who have more knowledge than they do.

Scaffolding is the support provided to children in their language learning. Children may be unable to
produce certain structures within a single utterance but may build them through interaction with
another speaker. Scaffolding is thought to be one way in which learners acquire new linguistic
structures. One form that scaffolding takes is Child-Directed Speech (CDS). So, what is CDS and does it
contribute to FLA?

Adults, such as parents, grandparents, and caregivers, tend not to address the newly born infant
before them as if they are involved in normal adult-to-adult interaction. Rather, they tend to address
them with a characteristically simplified speech style. This style is called Child-Directed
Speech or Caregiver Speech or Language. (It is also called Motherese or Parentese.)

What are the salient features of CDS?

In general, such language is spoken slowly and clearly. Adults usually talk in a simplified way to
children, taking care to make their speech easily recognizable. Salient features of this type of speech
also include the frequent use of questions, often using exaggerated intonation, extra loudness and a
slower tempo with longer pauses. In the early stages of FLA, this type of speech also uses
phonologically simplified, made-up ‘baby-words’, i.e., a lot of forms associated with BABY TALK. These
are either simplified words (e.g., `tummy`, `nana`) or alternative forms, with repeated simple sounds
and syllables, for things in the child’s environment (e.g., ‘choo-choo’, ‘poo-poo’, ‘pee-pee’, ‘wa-wa’,
‘gee-gee’). Caregiver speech is also characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of
repetition. The topics of sentences tend to focus on the ‘here and now’.
Moreover, it has generally been observed that the speech of those regularly interacting with very
young children changes and becomes more elaborate as the child begins using more and more
language. Child-directed speech gradually fades away as the child gets older.

However, there is some controversy about the difference CDS makes to development. Do children
require a syntactically and phonologically simplified input in order to be able to acquire language?

There is no conclusive evidence that suggests that it is necessary for children’s language
development. First, although its use is widespread, it is NOT UNIVERSAL across all cultures. This
shows that CDS might not be necessary for language development, although it is possible that CDS
has an effect on linguistic development at an early age, at just one year.

However, it has already been noted that children in all cultures pass through the same stages in
acquiring language. We have also seen that there are cultures in which adults do not adopt special
ways of talking to children. So, CDS may be useful but seems not to be essential.

As stated earlier, the various theories, behaviourism, innateness, and interactionism, should not be
seen simply as alternatives to one another or as attempts to contradict one another. Rather, each one
of them offers a partial explanation of the process of FLA.

10. Language choice in multilingual communities

Language choice in multilingual communities

Multilingualism refers to a language situation where a speech community makes use of several
languages, as in Switzerland, Belgium, or Morocco. It also describes the competence of an individual
who masters several languages. Bilingualism refers to a speech situation where an individual or
community controls two languages. In simultaneous bilingualism, the two languages are learned at
the same time in early childhood; in sequential bilingualism, the second is acquired after the first has
been established. The majority of the world’s speakers are bilingual – a point which tends to surprise
Britons and Americans, for whom monolingualism - knowledge and use of a single language - is
traditionally the norm.

At the societal or national level, two types of multilingualism are distinguished: official and de
facto multilingualism. Switzerland is an officially multilingual nation in that it has been declared as
such in the Swiss constitution as such making of French, German, and Italian official languages.
Canada is officially a bilingual nation because English and French are enshrined in the Canadian
constitution as the official languages. Moreover, there are many other languages used in Canada
today – over a hundred heritage languages brought to Canada by immigrant groups, some of them
maintained for several generations. So, Canada, while officially a bilingual nation, is a de facto
multilingual one.

Societal multilingualism may be promoted or created by factors such as population flow all over the
world especially international migration (as in the US), colonialism and conquest (e.g., Morocco), and
the spread of international languages (such as English). In these situations, there is likely to be one
language which has social dominance, and in this situation language shift may occur, that is speakers
shift to speaking the dominant language and abandon their heritage language. In situations of
immigration, commonly within three generations, members of the minority group shift to the
dominant language. In some situations, we have what is called language maintenance, that is, both
languages continue to be spoken.

One can differentiate between symmetrical multilingualism, where all the languages have equal
status, and asymmetrical multilingualism, where at least one of the languages has more status than
the others.

Language use in multilingual communities is usually influenced by the range of languages and
varieties mastered (completely or partially) by an individual. This is referred to as linguistic
repertoire. Linguistic repertoire refers to the languages and language varieties that a person knows
and uses within his or her speech community in everyday communication. A particular group of
speakers may use not just one language or language variety to communicate with one another but
several, each appropriate for certain areas of everyday activity. The linguistic repertoire of a French
Canadian in Montreal could include Standard Canadian French, Colloquial Canadian French and
English (perhaps more than one variety).

Most people who are multilingual do not necessarily have exactly the same abilities in all the
languages (or varieties) that make up their repertoires. This means that multilingualism involving
native-like command of the languages in the repertoire is rather uncommon. Typically, multilinguals
have varying degrees of command of the different languages in their repertoires. The differences in
competence in the various languages might range from command of a few rudimentary
conversational skills all the way to excellent command of the grammar and vocabulary and specialized
registers and styles.

The study of multilingualism embraces many aspects, but two have received special attention from
researchers: (1) language choice and the functions of the languages in a multilingual society and (2)
the linguistic consequences of multilingualism.

Language choice and domains of language use

In order to understand language choice in multilingual communities, the concept of domain is used.
Many multilingual societies observe a functional distribution between several languages or distinct
language varieties. ‘Domain’ determines multilinguals’ choice of languages. ‘Domain’ may be defined
as a distinct area of human activity. Examples of domains include the family domain, the work
domain, the education domain, the religion domain, the business domain, the leisure domain, and
the friendship domain. In bilingual and multilingual communities, one language may be used in some
domains and another language in other domains. For example, Puerto Ricans in the USA may use
Spanish in the family domain and English in the work domain. Another example is provided by
Paraguay, where both Guarani and Spanish are used. The following table shows which language is
used in which domain.

Domains of language use in Paraguay

Domain Language

Family Guarani
Friendship Guarani

Religion Spanish

Education Spanish

Administration Spanish

Domains of language use and diglossia

The concept of ‘domain’ can also be used to describe and understand not only multilingual settings
but also language situations which are characterized by the phenomenon of diglossia. The term
‘diglossia’ describes a specific language situation which has three main characteristics:

1. Two distinct varieties of the same language are used in the community, with one regarded as
a high (H) variety and the other a low (L) variety.

2. Each variety is used for quite distinct functions; the high and low varieties complement each
other.

3. No one uses the high variety in everyday conversation.

Diglossia is a language situation where distinct varieties of a language are used in distinct domains.
We speak of diglossia when two distinct varieties of the same language exist side by side in a
community and each one is used for different purposes. Usually, one is a more standard variety (the
high variety), which is used in government and administration, the media, education, and for religious
services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety (the low variety), which is used, for example,
in the family, with friends, or when shopping. This language situation is found in a number of
communities. Arabic-speaking countries use classical Arabic or Standard Arabic as their H variety and
regional colloquial varieties as L varieties. Another example of diglossia can be found in the German
speaking part of Switzerland, where the H-variety is a form of standard German and the L-variety is a
range of regional Swiss dialects. Greece is also an instance of this situation.

In contrast to bilingual or multilingual situations, in diglossic situations, the high and low varieties
are linguistically related. However, there are marked differences between the two varieties. The
pronunciation of H and L varies. The H variety may contain certain sounds not found in the L variety
and vice versa. The grammar of the two linguistically related varieties differs too. The grammar of H is
morphologically more complicated. For example, Standard Arabic (the H variety) uses more case
markers and markers of number on nouns and tense inflections on verbs than colloquial Arabic (the L
variety). There are also differences in the vocabulary of H and L. Since it is used in more formal
domains, the H vocabulary includes many formal and technical terms while the L variety has words
for everyday objects.

No one uses H for everyday interaction. In Arabic-speaking countries, for instance, classical Arabic is
limited to the religious domain. It is taught in school and used for very formal interactions and in
writing. But in most everyday conversations, people use the everyday colloquial variety. This is shown
in the following table.

High variety Low variety

Religion: prayers and sermons ✔

Literature ✔

Newspapers and magazines ✔

Broadcasting: TV ✔

Broadcasting: radio ✔

Education (written material, ✔

lectures)

Education (lesson discussion) ✔

Shopping and gossiping ✔

(conversation)

Linguistic consequences of multilingualism: code-switching and borrowing

One common aspect of bilingual and multilingual discourse in bilingual and multilingual communities
is code-switching. Code-switching may be defined as changing from one language to the other within
the same stretch of SPEECH. A person may start speaking one language and then change to another
one in the middle of their speech, or sometimes even in the middle of a sentence. For example, an
English-French bilingual may switch between the two languages in this way:

I think j’ai plus peur des serpents.

Ils ont pas mal de la misère, I guess.

Nous etions une quarantaine, I suppose, une quarantaine.

Code-switching is usually distinguished from borrowing. Borrowing is the introduction of a word or

expression or some other linguistic feature from one LANGUAGE into another LANGUAGE in order to
fill a lexical gap. Vocabulary borrowings are usually called loan words. A large proportion of English
vocabulary is made up of loan words. For example, English has taken words and expressions such
as restaurant, chic, coup d’etat, faux pas and deja vu from French, tsunami from
Japanese, paparazzi from Italian, mecca and magazine from Arabic.

Sometimes, speakers try to pronounce borrowings as they are pronounced in the original language.
However, if a borrowed word or phrase is widely used, most speakers will pronounce it according to
the sound system of their own language. The meaning is borrowed but the form is nativized, such as
when restaurant is given a totally English pronunciation. Sometimes, an expression is introduced into
one language by translating it from another language. This is referred to as Calque. Calque is a type of
borrowing where the parts (morphemes) of the borrowed word are translated item by item into
equivalent parts (morphemes) in the other language; it is a word-for-word translation from one
language to another; it is also called a loan translation. For example, Adam’s apple is a calque of the
French pomme d’Adam, flea market (a place selling second-hand goods) is a calque from
French marche aux puces. In both cases, the English phrases came from a direct, literal translation of
the original French expressions. Superman is a calque of the German Ubermensch; the French grate-
ciel is a calque from English skyscraper.