H and L varieties -- Joshua Fishman expanded the definition of diglossia to include the use of unrelated languages as high and low varieties. For
example, for example, Jamaican Creole as (L) and Standard English as
(H) in Jamaica. (H) is usually the written language whereas (L) is the
spoken language. In formal situations, (H) is used; in informal
situations (L) is used.
How do you document a language situation?
- should include more than a sample of the linguistic structures of a language
- the linguistic ecology of a language is as much a part of the language as its morphosyntactic structures, phonological and phonetic structures
- information on language knowledge and use a part of documentation
- permits insight into the factors that contribute to endangerment
Sociolinguistic surveys of different types exist, their design a reflection of their purpose. They involve sampling a population in a controlled manner.
multilingual community investigations
Domain:
a grouping together of recurring situation types in such a way that one of the languages or varieties in a repertoire, as opposed to others, normally occurs in that class of situations. And members of the speech community judge that the use of that variety and not the others is appropriate to that domain.
Language Shift
Language shift takes place when members in a multilingual community gradually abandon their mother tongue.
Language Death
A language is declared dead when nobody speaks it anymore.
Language Maintenance
The phrase, language maintenance, connotes a multilingual societal situation in which members of a language community continue to use their language -- and even take institutional measures to keep it alive.*
* Dr. Clamon prefers "denote" -- but I
find connote more precise! This dillemma may result in language shift,
where I adjust language usage. It could also lead to language
maintenance, where I persist with a language choice.
Icings Lit Us
Hiding inside the word, linguistics, is the phrase: Cult Sign I Is! Another anagram of linguistics is the slightly more obtuse, but no less poetic: Icings Lit Us.
Re-arrange the letters of any word at the Internet Anagram Server. The words, Language and Society, brought back: "A Catalog Denying Use."
Variations on the Collective Pronoun, You
In the various places I have lived, I have observed that there are many different ways of expressing the concept of "you" when referring to more than one person.
In the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, it is very common to hear the collective pronoun, YOU, expressed as "youenz" or "yents." So, a Pittsburgher might say, "Where youenz going?" -- meaning "Where are the group of you going?" It would seem that 'youenz' is used to denote a group as opposed to an individual. "You are late" would be used when speaking to one person, but when referring to a couple or a group, a Pittsburgher would typically say, "Youenz are late."
In West Virginia, at least in the Morgantown area where I lived for four years, the collective YOU was typically phrased as "ya'll." It would be common to hear a restaurant waiter ask, "Ya'll ready to order?" Regardless of region, there is obviously a sense that the collective YOU should be communicated differently than the singular version. Also noticed in West Virginia was that "ya'll" is a short-cut for "you all," "you are," and "your." For instance, in Morgantown one might hear: "Ya'll silly" -- meaning "you all are silly." Another example of this short-cutting would be, "Where ya'll tickets?" -- meaning "where are your tickets?'
New Yorkers have a tendency to say "youse" or "youce" when referring to a couple or group -- as in "youse seem nervous" or "youse each had your turn."
Despite the linguistic creativity inspired by the apparently supra-regional desire to delineate the singular pronoun, YOU from the collective pronoun, YOU -- in standard English usage no such delineation is required. A stage performer would be correct in addressing a crowd and saying, "you have been a terrific audience."
Forensic Linguistics
The case of a Missouri couple and their missing baby has been in the news. The mother, Deborah Bradley, says a stranger must have kidnapped her 10-month-old, but the police seem very suspicious of the story. many people who have seen the mother speak on television have also said the woman's words do not ring true. It is not what she says that is so unconvincing, as much as it how she says it.Some have said Bradley's news reports reminds them of the news reports of Susan Smith. Smith claimed a kidnapping but later confessed to having killed her own children.
This Bradley case made me to do some research on the idea of forensic linguistics.
What is forensic linguistics?
Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics. There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts - understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes and the provision of linguistic evidence.
Q. What famous cases involve forensic linguistics?
Q. How does it apply in the Bradley case?
Northern Cities Vowel Shift
VIDEO: Bill Labov discusses the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in American English.
Having been relatively stable for decades, language use in the cities around the Great Lakes, is shifting in the pronunciation of short vowels.
Despite the influence of mass media, North Americans are growing apart from each other linguistically.
Language and Gender
Info from the website: https://webspace.utexas.edu/shettyml/fall2003/langandgender.html
Gender-Exclusive Differentiation: A situation where men and women use radically different speech varieties. If a woman or man is not normally allowed to speak the variety of the other gender, these two varieties are said to be gender-exclusive.
Gender-Preferential Differentiation: A situation where there is a difference in the relative frequency with which men and women use lexical items or linguistic features.
American English
Lexical Differences
- Women tend to use exclamations like ‘Oh, my goodness!’ more often than men do.
- Women tend to use more emotive adjectives like ‘pleasant’, ‘lovely’ and ‘fabulous’ than men do.
- Some studies have suggested that women tend to use a wider array of color terms than men do.
Discourse Differences
- Women tend to ask more questions than men do.
- Women tend to make use of positive and encouraging noises like ‘mmm hmm’ more often than men do.
- Women tend to use a wider intonational range than men do.
- Women tend to use more politeness strategies than men do.
- Women tend to be more linguistically conservative than men are.
- Men tend to interrupt more often than women do (up to 3 times as much).
- Men tend to dispute or ignore what has been said more often than women do.
- Men tend to introduce more new topics of conversation than women do.
- Men tend to make more declarations of fact or opinion than women do.
- Men tend to use more direct commands and requests than women do.
The Social Network Model
A social network locates an individual in the center of a net that connects the individual to other members of the community.
A person whose personal contacts all know each other -- belong to a closed network. An individual whose contacts tend not to know each other -- belong to an open network.
Where individuals are linked in several ways, e.g. by job, family and leisure activities, then the network is multiplex. If there is only one kind of relationship with social contacts, (e.g., friends are not neighbors or fellow students -- family members don't know friends and coworkers) the network is uniplex.
Relatively dense networks, it is claimed, function as norm-enforcement mechanisms. In the case of language, this means that a closely-knit group will have the capacity to enforce linguistic norms.
Polari
Britain's Gay Slang Language
Polari is alternatively known as Parlare, Parlary, Palare, Palarie and Palari (from Italian parlare, "to talk").
Polari is a form of "cant slang" used in Britain by actors, circus and fairground showmen, criminals, prostitutes, and by the gay subculture. It was popularized in the 1960s by the characters Julian and Sandy in the BBC radio show Round the Horne. There is some debate about Polari's origins, but it has been traced back to at least the 19th century, and possibly the 16th century. There is a longstanding connection with Punch and Judy street puppet performers who traditionally used Polari to converse.
Polari was used in London fishmarkets, the theatre, and fairgrounds and circuses. As many gay men worked in theatrical entertainment it was also used by the gay subculture, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal, to disguise homosexual activity from hostile outsiders and undercover policemen. On one hand, it would be used as a means of cover, to allow taboo subjects to be discussed aloud without being understood; on the other hand, it was also used by some as a way of asserting identity.
VIDEO: Polari spoken in a subtitled scene from Velvet Goldmine
Example of Polari
(From Parallel Lives, the memoirs of gay journalist, Peter Burton)
"As feely ommes...we would zhoosh our riah, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we would stand around with our sisters, vada the bona cartes on the butch omme ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth."
(Translation: "As young men...we would style our hair, powder our faces, climb into our fabulous new clothes, don our shoes and wander/walk off to some fabulous little bar. In the bar we would stand around with our gay companions, look at the fabulous genitals on the butch man nearby who, if we fluttered our eyelashes at him sweetly, might just wander/walk over to offer a light for the unlit cigarette clenched between our teeth.")
Polari Dictionary Site
http://www.chris-d.net/polari/
BBC Voices -- site with sound clips of Polari
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/group/nottingham-hockley.shtml
VIDEO: The English Language In 24 Accents
Video of a Brit Attempting an American Accent
English Language Timeline
from http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/04change/dates.html
1066 Norman Conquest. William defeats Harold, England comes under French rule, with French spoken in Court, English by the majority of native people, but also Latin in church and Danish in the north east.
1348 English replaces Latin in schools (but not at Oxford or CAmbridge Universities)
1362 English replaces French as the language of the law. English used for the first time in Parliament
1387 Chaucer writes Prologue to Canterbury Tales - in English in preference to Latin or French.
1389 Wyclif Bible
1476 First English book printed. Caxton sets up printing press in Westminster.
1478 Caxton prints Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
1526 Tyndale Bible
1564 - 1616 life of William Shakespeare.
1611 King James Bible published.
1702 First regular newspaper in English, The Daily Courant.
1755 Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language published.
1911 Concise Oxford Dictionary published.
1922 BBC established.
1928 Oxford English Dictionary published under James Murray.
1938 Photocopying invented.
1961 New English Bible published.
1984 Launch of the Apple Macintosh desktop computer revolutionises publishing.
1992 Oxford English Dictionary published on CD-ROM
1994 The World Wide Web revolutionizes personal global publishing and communications
The Green Sports Car
A Sentence Deconstructed
into its Component Parts
into its Component Parts
The
green sports car skidded suddenly, hit the river with a bang and disappeared.
The first word
to identify is the Head Word. This will almost invariably be a
Noun and will also be the subject of your sentence. The Head
Word in the sentence above is car.
Now we must
find the verb which explains what action the noun takes.
In this case it is skidded.
The simplest form of this sentence would be the
car skidded.
More information
about the car is given by pre-modifiers and qualifiers.
The noun together with pre-modifier and qualifier make up a noun phrase. A pre-modifier
is also known as an adjective - a word which describes a noun. The noun phrase
in this case is the
green sports car. A
noun phrase will not ordinarily have a verb. A determiner (such as the or a) is what is also known as an article.
Now with the
noun phrase and the verb we can elaborate upon the verb - how did it skid?
It skidded suddenly.
An adverb describes a verb and suddenly
describes the verb skidded.
Our sentence
is now the
green sports car skidded suddenly. This
is a sentence on its own, but there is more information to come. The
car hit the river with a bang
would also be a sentence on its own. However by linking the two parts
together with an adverb of time, the most important part
is described
as the main clause and the minor part is described as the subordinate
clause.
So,
two separate sentences joined together each become clauses and
the whole unit becomes a sentence. The clause with the head word
or the most important meaning is called the main clause and the
other is called the subordinate clause. and
disappeared
is yet another subordinate
clause.
Further clues to their being separate clauses are provided by the comma
(after suddenly)
and the conjunction and.
Notice
that the first subordinate clause contains a phrase which describes how
the car hit the river - with
a bang.
Because it describes the verb hit
we describe it as an adverbial phrase. An adverb describes
a verb. Verbs
take different tenses. In the sentence above skidded
and hit
are the simple past tense of the verbs skid and hit. "has skidded"
would be the present perfect tense and "hitting" would be the
present continuous tense.
Here is the
final annotated sentence. The main and the two subordinate clauses are
shown on separate lines because they are the most important divisions
of sentence structure.
determiner
|
|||||
The
|
|||||
verb
|
|||||
hit
|
|||||
| verb phrase | |||||
Deconstructing
a sentence need not take this long nor always be in this level of detail.
However breaking the parts into smaller pieces can show how complex a
sentence is and in turn can indicate whether a child would easily understand
it, whether it is likely to be formal or informal register, if it is written
or spoken etc.
- Bilingual education: Information is presented to the students in more than one language. Many educational systems and programs are bilingual in some sense, but the degree to which the two (or more) instructional languages are utilized and the structure of the programs differ greatly.
- Submersion: Student is placed in an English-speaking classroom with native English speakers, regardless of the student’s level of proficiency in English. The student is expected to learn the content of the material taught in English, even though he or she may still be learning the language. This is not technically ‘bilingual education’, as the material is presented in only one language (English).
- Two-way bilingual education: Fluent or native speakers of both English and another language are placed in the same classroom and instructed in both languages alternately. The goal is for both groups of speakers to become fluent in the other language. This form of education is most effective if implemented for a period of several years or more.
- English as a Second Language (ESL): Non-English speaking students are placed in English-speaking classrooms for part of the day. The other part of the day the students are in a classroom with a trained ESL instructor, where they receive individual and concentrated instruction on the learning of English. The students are held responsible for the content taught in the English-speaking courses they take.
- Immersion: Students are instructed in a foreign language for entire school day. Immersion programs differ from submersion programs in that immersion is usually designed to teach “majority language speakers” (standard English speakers, in this case) a foreign language. Most of the students who are able to participate in such a program are of higher socioeconomic status, and always participate voluntarily. Such programs tend to be very effective in fostering bilingualism in its students.
- Three language system: Students are initially educated in an official state language. A second language, an official language of the Union, is introduced after approximately two years. After another several years, a third language, "any Modern Indian Language" not already taught, is introduced academically. At the conclusion of the child's education, he or she will be proficient (if not fluent) in at least three languages. However, the system does not "provide a place for such mother tongues that are different from the Regional Languages", though more languages are represented in this program.
Political linguistics
Political linguistics seems an interesting area to peruse.
"But terming a proposed tax increase on wealthy Americans as a “sacrifice” by them is a deceptive misnomer, political linguistics at work. Taking money (increasing a tax obligation) from a person or corporation that won’t miss it is not a “sacrifice” on their part."
----------------
Corpus linguistics is a methodology that uses computer support to analyze large volumes of textual data. A corpus, in this case, refers to a “collection of machine-readable authentic texts. . . which are sampled to be representative of a particular language or language variety.” Corpus linguistics contributes to critical discourse analysis in three ways: The analyst can work with much larger data sets; researcher bias can be reduced because of the broader empirical base; and both quantitative and qualitative perspectives can be used on textual data.
.
-------------------------
Scientists Break Mysterious Copiale Cipher
Published by Fox: 27 Oct 2011
By using modern technology techniques, a team of linguists from the United States and Switzerland have cracked a code dating back to the 18th century. Called The Copiale Cipher, after one of the only words in the 105-page handwritten document not enciphered, the document has had linguists puzzled since 1866, according to a paper released by the team.
By working through some 80 languages, the team eventually decided the Roman characters found throughout the text were "nulls" – characters deliberately placed to mislead the reader. That led them to a breakthrough in which they de-coded the phrases "Ceremonies of Initiation" and "Secret Section" in German.
What do you call someone who speaks lots of languages? Answer: multilingual.
And someone who speaks two languages: bilingual. And some who speaks just one language? An American.
Euphemism
The word euphemism comes from the Greek word (euphemia), meaning "the use of words of good omen", which in turn is derived from the Greek root-words eu, "good/well" + pheme "speech/speaking".
The eupheme was originally a word or phrase used in place of a religious word or phrase that should not be spoken aloud; etymologically, the eupheme is the opposite of the blaspheme (evil-speaking).
Primary examples of taboo words requiring the use of a euphemism are names for deities, such as Persephone, Hecate, or Nemesis. The term euphemism itself was used as a euphemism by the ancient Greeks, meaning "to keep a holy silence" (speaking well by not speaking at all).
Historical linguistics has revealed traces of taboo deformations in many languages. Several are known to have occurred in Indo-European languages, including the presumed original Proto-Indo-European words for bear (*rkso), wolf (*wlkwo), and deer (originally, hart—although the word hart remained commonplace in parts of England until the 20th century as is witnessed by the widespread use of the pub sign The White Hart).
In different Indo-European languages, each of these words has a difficult etymology because of taboo deformations — a euphemism was substituted for the original, which no longer occurs in the language. An example is the Slavic root for bear — *medu-ed-, which means "honey eater".
Names in Germanic languages—including English—are derived from the color brown. Another example in English is donkey replacing the old Indo-European-derived word ass. The word dandelion (literally, tooth of lion, referring to the shape of the leaves) is another example, being a substitute for pissenlit, meaning "wet the bed", a possible reference to the fact that dandelion was used as a diuretic.
The Talmud describes the blind as having "much light" and this phrase —sagee nahor— is the Modern Hebrew for euphemism.
In some languages of the Pacific, using the name of a deceased chief is taboo. Among indigenous Australians, it is forbidden to use the name, image, or audio-visual recording of the deceased; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation now publishes a warning to indigenous Australians when using names, images or audio-visual recordings of people who have died.
Since people are often named after everyday things, this leads to the swift development of euphemisms. New names are frequently required when an old one becomes taboo. These languages have a very high rate of vocabulary change.
Video feature on the Woman Behind the Voice
The Woman Behind the Voice of Airports and Subways
She delivers words of welcome, safety advice, and sometimes even that dreaded message that your flight is delayed or canceled. And surprisingly, the message isn’t concocted in some faceless laboratory with robotic voices. Instead, Hopkins works the magic of her voiceovers from a modest office in northern Maine.
“Traveling can be such a bummer these days that people need a friendly voice,” Hopkins tells CBS. And more than 200 airports around the world, as well as the New York City subway, have adopted the 63-year-old’s voice as their official spokeswoman, proving that we all want a little comfort and consistency while traveling.
Read more here.
Darwin’s Tongues
Languages, like genes, can tell evolutionary tales
By Bruce BowerScience News -- November 19th, 2011
Talk is cheap, but scientific value lurks in all that gab. Words cascading out of countless flapping gums contain secrets about the evolution of language that a new breed of researchers plan to expose with statistical tools borrowed from genetics.
For more than a century, traditional linguists have spent much of their time doing fieldwork — listening to native speakers to pick up on words with similar sounds, such as mother in English and madre in Spanish, and comparing how various tongues arrange subjects, verbs, objects and other grammatical elements into sentences. Such information has allowed investigators to group related languages into families and reconstruct ancestral forms of talk. But linguists generally agree that their methods can revive languages from no more than 10,000 years ago. Borrowing of words and grammar by speakers of neighboring languages, the researchers say, erases evolutionary signals from before that time.
Now a small contingent of researchers, many of them evolutionary biologists who typically have nothing to do with linguistics, are looking at language from in front of their computers, using mathematical techniques imported from the study of DNA to wring scenarios of language evolution out of huge amounts of comparative speech data.
These data analyzers assume that words and other language units change systematically as they are passed from one generation to the next, much the way genes do. Charles Darwin similarly argued in 1871 that languages, like biological species, have evolved into a series of related forms.
And in the same way that geneticists use computerized statistical approaches to put together humankind’s family tree from the DNA of living people and a few long-dead individuals, these newcomers can generate family trees, called phylogenies, for languages. From existing data on numbers of speech sounds and types of grammatical structure, these phylogenies can point to ancient root languages and trace a path to today’s tongues.
The new approach is making a splash — some would say a splatter — among mainstream linguists, who haven’t exactly been anxiously waiting for advice from the fossils-and-genes crowd.
One recent study upends the traditional view that ancient languages did not evolve neatly, one into another and so on, arguing that modern tongues indeed contain telltale marks of how past languages moved across continents. Other results question the influential idea that grammar everywhere reflects innate properties of the human mind. Both investigations have appeared in high-profile science journals, drawing unprecedented publicity for explorations of speech sounds and word orders.
“Linguists spin a bit of a story with case studies of individual languages,” says evolutionary biologist Russell Gray of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, a pioneer of the phylogenetic analysis of speech. “Statistical methods can now be used to examine languages rigorously and on a global scale.”
Traditional language studies are still vital, he says, because they provide the massive amounts of speech and grammatical information needed for statistical breakdowns.
Discussion Goals
1. Know the material and respond thoughtfully
2. Respond fully, in detail and in-depth
3. Identify a specific idea or observation offered by someone during discussions
4. Explain how the course information relates to your thinking about the topic
5. Acknowledge and argue from common understandings
6. Synthesize to create original points and new understandings
7. Using evidence to support a position or presenting factual information
8. Relate and build on points made by others
9. Communicate in a manner that is organized, engaging and meaningful
10. Use new media features to make explicit the ideas being communicated
11. Respectfully question and ask for clarification from others
12. Respond openly and non-defensively to questions from others
Darwin’s Tongues
Languages, like genes, can tell evolutionary tales
By Bruce BowerScience News -- November 19th, 2011
Talk is cheap, but scientific value lurks in all that gab. Words cascading out of countless flapping gums contain secrets about the evolution of language that a new breed of researchers plan to expose with statistical tools borrowed from genetics.
For more than a century, traditional linguists have spent much of their time doing fieldwork — listening to native speakers to pick up on words with similar sounds, such as mother in English and madre in Spanish, and comparing how various tongues arrange subjects, verbs, objects and other grammatical elements into sentences. Such information has allowed investigators to group related languages into families and reconstruct ancestral forms of talk. But linguists generally agree that their methods can revive languages from no more than 10,000 years ago. Borrowing of words and grammar by speakers of neighboring languages, the researchers say, erases evolutionary signals from before that time.
Now a small contingent of researchers, many of them evolutionary biologists who typically have nothing to do with linguistics, are looking at language from in front of their computers, using mathematical techniques imported from the study of DNA to wring scenarios of language evolution out of huge amounts of comparative speech data.
These data analyzers assume that words and other language units change systematically as they are passed from one generation to the next, much the way genes do. Charles Darwin similarly argued in 1871 that languages, like biological species, have evolved into a series of related forms.
And in the same way that geneticists use computerized statistical approaches to put together humankind’s family tree from the DNA of living people and a few long-dead individuals, these newcomers can generate family trees, called phylogenies, for languages. From existing data on numbers of speech sounds and types of grammatical structure, these phylogenies can point to ancient root languages and trace a path to today’s tongues.
The new approach is making a splash — some would say a splatter — among mainstream linguists, who haven’t exactly been anxiously waiting for advice from the fossils-and-genes crowd.
One recent study upends the traditional view that ancient languages did not evolve neatly, one into another and so on, arguing that modern tongues indeed contain telltale marks of how past languages moved across continents. Other results question the influential idea that grammar everywhere reflects innate properties of the human mind. Both investigations have appeared in high-profile science journals, drawing unprecedented publicity for explorations of speech sounds and word orders.
“Linguists spin a bit of a story with case studies of individual languages,” says evolutionary biologist Russell Gray of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, a pioneer of the phylogenetic analysis of speech. “Statistical methods can now be used to examine languages rigorously and on a global scale.”
Traditional language studies are still vital, he says, because they provide the massive amounts of speech and grammatical information needed for statistical breakdowns.
Discussion Goals
1. Know the material and respond thoughtfully
2. Respond fully, in detail and in-depth
3. Identify a specific idea or observation offered by someone during discussions
4. Explain how the course information relates to your thinking about the topic
5. Acknowledge and argue from common understandings
6. Synthesize to create original points and new understandings
7. Using evidence to support a position or presenting factual information
8. Relate and build on points made by others
9. Communicate in a manner that is organized, engaging and meaningful
10. Use new media features to make explicit the ideas being communicated
11. Respectfully question and ask for clarification from others
12. Respond openly and non-defensively to questions from others
Summary of Core Understandings
Linguistic Varieties
A variety is a set of linguistic forms used under specific social circumstances, with a distinctive social distribution.
The use of language varieties has an important symbolic function. It signals a person's ethnicity.
Formality / Solidarity
Formality increases between participants (speaker and hearer) when the social distance is greater. Informality (Solidarity) increases when the social distance is little between participants.
Language Shift
Language shift happens when the language of the wider society (majority) displaces the minority mother tongue language over time in migrant communities or in communities under military occupation. Therefore when language shift occurs, it shifts most of the time towards the language of the dominant group, and the result could be the eradication of the local language.
Social Identity
The language one uses often reflects one's social identity and education.
Gender and Language
In western societies, women and men whose social roles are similar do not use forms that are completely different, but they use different quantities or frequencies of the same form.
Vernacular Language
Vernacular language generally refers to a language which has not been standardized or codified and which does not have official status. It generally refers to the most colloquial variety in a person's linguistic repertoire.
Standard Language
A standard variety is generally one which is written, and which has undergone some degree of regulation or codification (in a grammar and a dictionary).
Ethnicity and Language
Language can be an important symbol of a people's distinct ethnicity.
Many ethnic groups use a distinctive language associated with their ethnic identity. Where a choice of language is available for communication it is often possible for an individual to signal their ethnicity by the language they choose to use. Even when a complete conversation in an ethnic language is not possible, people may use short phrases, verbal fillers or linguistic tags, which signal ethnicity.
African American English
African American English is a distinct variety or dialect that was developed by African Americans as a symbolic way of differentiating themselves from the majority group.
Linguistic Relativity
Language influences perceptions, thought, and, at least potentially, behavior.
Sociolinguistic Competence
Using language appropriately involves knowing the sociolinguistic rules for speaking in a community. It means understanding the influence of social factors on speech behavior . . . The many and varied types of knowledge which people in different communities acquire when they learn to use language appropriately in their own community. The knowledge which underlies people's ability to use language appropriately is known as their sociolinguistic competence.
Sociolinguistic competence also involves knowing how to use language for different functions, such as getting things done in different contexts. . . . Acquiring sociolinguistic competence in another language may be a slow and difficult process since it involves understanding the social values that underlie the community's ways of using language.
"Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own."
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us."
-- Julia Penelope
"A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years."
-- Wendell L. Willkie
"What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same."
-- Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943
"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity."
-- Gustave Flauber
“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.”
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf
