Dialect and Language Variation

Dialect and Language Variation PDF

Author:

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2014-06-28

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 1483294765

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This anthology emphasizes dialects of American English and language variation in America. The editors present original essays by today's leading investigators, including articles by some of Europe's best dialectologists, obtained expressly for this work. Important topics featured in Dialect and Language Variation include:**Dialect theories: linguistic geography, structural and generative dialectology, and language variation.**The nature of social dialects and language variation, with attention to women's speech.**Overview of regional dialects and area studies.**The nature and study of the relationship between ethnicity and dialects, including Black, Italian, Irish, Chicano, and Jewish ethnic groups.**The application of dialect studies to education.**Of special interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, and English language educators and specialists, this work provides original insight into**a general background and history of dialect theory**an overview of regional geography and area studies**the principles of social dialects and language variation from several perspectives**an exploration of the relationship between ethnicity and dialects o explanations of the relationship between historical and language change**a section on how dialects and language variation can contribute to effective language instruction.

American English

American English PDF

Author: Walt Wolfram

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-12-21

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1118390229

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The new edition of this classic text chronicles recent breakthrough developments in the field of American English, covering regional, ethnic, and gender-based differences. Now accompanied by a companion website with an extensive array of sound files, video clips, and other online materials to enhance and illustrate discussions in the text Features brand new chapters that cover the very latest topics, such as Levels of Dialect, Regional Varieties of English, Gender and Language Variation, The Application of Dialect Study, and Dialect Awareness: Extending Application, as well as new exercises with online answers Updated to contain dialect samples from a wider array of US regions Written for students taking courses in dialect studies, variationist sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, and requires no pre-knowledge of linguistics Includes a glossary and extensive appendix of the pronunciation, grammatical, and lexical features of American English dialects

Do You Speak American?

Do You Speak American? PDF

Author: Robert Macneil

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0307423573

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Is American English in decline? Are regional dialects dying out? Is there a difference between men and women in how they adapt to linguistic variations? These questions, and more, about our language catapulted Robert MacNeil and William Cran—the authors (with Robert McCrum) of the language classic The Story of English—across the country in search of the answers. Do You Speak American? is the tale of their discoveries, which provocatively show how the standard for American English—if a standard exists—is changing quickly and dramatically. On a journey that takes them from the Northeast, through Appalachia and the Deep South, and west to California, the authors observe everyday verbal interactions and in a host of interviews with native speakers glean the linguistic quirks and traditions characteristic of each area. While examining the histories and controversies surrounding both written and spoken American English, they address anxieties and assumptions that, when explored, are highly emotional, such as the growing influence of Spanish as a threat to American English and the special treatment of African-American vernacular English. And, challenging the purists who think grammatical standards are in serious deterioration and that media saturation of our culture is homogenizing our speech, they surprise us with unpredictable responses. With insight and wit, MacNeil and Cran bring us a compelling book that is at once a celebration and a potent study of our singular language. Each wave of immigration has brought new words to enrich the American language. Do you recognize the origin of 1. blunderbuss, sleigh, stoop, coleslaw, boss, waffle? Or 2. dumb, ouch, shyster, check, kaput, scram, bummer? Or 3. phooey, pastrami, glitch, kibbitz, schnozzle? Or 4. broccoli, espresso, pizza, pasta, macaroni, radio? Or 5. smithereens, lollapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan? Or 6. vamoose, chaps, stampede, mustang, ranch, corral? 1. Dutch 2. German 3. Yiddish 4. Italian 5. Irish 6. Spanish

Toward a Social History of American English

Toward a Social History of American English PDF

Author: Joey L. Dillard

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-11-27

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 311088500X

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CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

American English

American English PDF

Author: Katrin Appenzeller

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2009-04-15

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 3640311477

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Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Englische Sprachwissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: Language, Meaning and Use, language: English, abstract: The USA is one of the largest western countries. Its population amount to approximately 250 million people. Thus, American English is spoken by an immense number of people in the world. It is estimated that nearly 2/3 of all native English speakers use any dialect of American English. American English, as an independent variety, differs from British English and even weakens its hegemony. More and more, American language, culture, and business become an integral part of European society. Therefore, it is very interesting to investigate the significant characteristics of this language. To give the reader some background information there is a brief overview of the history of the English language in the USA at the beginning of the study. After that the term American English is explained and analyzed. Further, different linguistic features, among them pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, are described and compared to British English. In addition, sociolinguistic characteristics, such as regional and social dialects, are illustrated. As a result a conclusion follows.

The future of dialects

The future of dialects PDF

Author: Marie-Hélène Côté

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 3946234186

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Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.