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Hello
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Howdy
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Hey
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How YOU doin'?
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AYO
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Wassup brah?
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Hi, everyone! Welcome! Thanks for joining me.
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In this video, I will be discussing sociolinguistics, which is the study of the relationship between language and society.
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In this video, I'll be discussing the concepts of differentiating between languages and dialects,
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the concept of a dialect continuum, isoglosses, dialect boundaries, the notion of an accent, and slang. Let's get started!
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There are an estimated 5000 to 7000 languages in use today--that includes spoken and signed languages.
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Now, you might wonder, "why such a broad range? Why can't we pinpoint the exact number of languages by counting them?",
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and the answer is that the distinction between a language and a dialect is not always clear.
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So one language may have multiple dialects, and each dialect may enjoy different levels of prestige,
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so depending on who's doing the counting, a specific dialect or language may not even be counted at all.
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Now, of course, we as linguists approach the study of language descriptively, not prescriptively,
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so we recognize that no language or dialect is inherently better than another language or dialect.
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However, in the real world, the fact of the matter is that some dialects and languages are more stigmatized than others.
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So, for example, Received Pronunciation, a dialect of British English, enjoys higher prestige compared to, say, Southern American English,
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and this evidenced by the fact that if, for example, you turn on your television and watch a national news broadcast,
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the anchor is very likely not to use Southern American English.
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Now, very generally dialects are mutually intelligible, whereas languages are mutually unintelligible.
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So if I'm speaking to you, and I understand you, and you understand me, then we're probably speaking the same language,
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whereas if I don't understand you, and you don't understand me, we're probably not speaking the same language.
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Now this is easy enough in theory, but in practice it becomes complicated because dialects exist along what is called a "dialect continuum".
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A dialect continuum is a situation in which a large number of contiguous dialects exist,
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and each of those dialects is mutually intelligible with the next but with dialects at opposite ends of the continuum being mutually unintelligible.
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Now let me give you an example from English.
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So I speak Western American English, and Western American English, as a dialect, is contiguous with
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or neighbors with Southern American English, which I can also understand.
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Southern American English, in turn, neighbors with Eastern American English, and I can pret ty much understand that with relative ease,
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but if we take a dialect at the other end of the continuum in English--say, Scottish English,
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now the differences are really pronounced (no pun intended),
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so even though Western American English and Scottish English are drawing from essentially the same grammatical system,
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the differences in the lexicon or vocabulary and pronunciation are so different
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that you could be forgiven if you mistook Western American English and Scottish English as different languages entirely.
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So the notion of a dialect is intricately bound up with this concept of an "accent".
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Now, an accent often has a really negative connotation when people say, "so-and-so has an accent",
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or "I'm embarrassed to talk because I have an accent,"
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but from a linguistics perspective, an accent is a totally neutral idea because everyone has an accent.
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If someone's speaking a language, they're going to b e speaking a dialect of that language,
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and if they're speaking a dialect of that language, they're going to have an accent.
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So an accent, therefore, is really just aspects of pronunciation that help identify where we are from,
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whether regionally or socially.
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So the important thing to understand is that an accent is not just a regional phenomenon,
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in terms of where you are from and where you were raised,
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it's also a social one.
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So depending on certain demographic factors like age, gender, and socio-economic status, your accent will be different from your peers',
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and that's a perfectly normal thing in the study of language.
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Now, one of the most well-known studies in sociolinguistics
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that highlights the close relationship between dialect, and accent, and prestige
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comes from William Labov,
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who in the 1960s studied "ɹ"-lessness among English speakers in New York City's department stores.
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So, very briefly, "ɹ"-lessness just has to do with
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either the presence or absence of the [ɹ] sound in some words.
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So, for example, if I say the phrase,
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"I parked my car in Harvard Yard", I'm using the [ɹ] sound,
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but if I say (in a bad Boston accent),
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"I parked my car in Harvard Yard", I'm not using the [ɹ] sound.
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So this was really the focus of Labov's study.
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So what he did is to kind of talk to salespeople from three department stores in New York City,
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on the assumption that salespeople from those department stores
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wold try to match the language of their customers,
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and this is a well-known phenomenon in sales today.
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So what he would do is he would go to these three department stores, which had very different levels of prestige.
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One was Sak s Fifth Avenue, which was treated as the "high-prestige" store in his study,
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Macy's, which was the "middle-prestige" store,
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and S. Klein, which was the "low-prestige" store in his study.
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So he went to each of those stores and basically asked questions of the salespeople that elicited the response, "fourth floor",
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and he used that phrase, specifically , because there are two opportunities to hear the [ɹ] sound:
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in "fourth" and again in "floor".
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So he would ask these salespeople, for example, "excuse me, where are men's shoes located?",
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and the salesperson would say, "oh they're on the fourth floor",
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but then he would lean in and pretend not to have heard them, asking them to repeat it,
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and they would say, "they're on the fourth floor."
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So not only in the use of the phrase "fourth floor"are there two opportunities to hear the [ɹ] sound,
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but there's also a casual and a more careful pronunciation that is provided by the salespeople.
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So this is something we typically do when somebody asks us to repeat a bit of information--
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we give them a little bit more of a careful pronunciation, right?
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So this was a very clever method that he was using, and the results supported his hypothesis,
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so what he found was that salespeople from the store with the highest prestige,
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Saks Fifth Avenue--those salespeople were more likely to use [ɹ] in their speech compared to
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salespeople from the store with the lowest prestige, S. Klein--they were much less likely to use [ɹ] in their speech,
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or to put it another way, salespeople from Sak's Fifth Avenue were more likely to say "fourth floor",
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whereas salespeople from S. Klein were more likely to say (in a bad NYC accent), "fourth floor".
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So what this highlights here is, again, that variation in sociolinguistics is not just about the geographical variety--where you are from,
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it's also about where you are from socially, so, again, age, socioeconomic status, gender--
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these things can affect our accent, and maybe, more generally, our dialect as speakers,
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and that's a perfectly natural thing.
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So this study, again, remains one of the most famous to this day,
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and this is why we call William Labov the father of variationist sociolinguistics.
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So now that we've differentiated between a language and a dialect,
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and we've discussed dialects in terms of existing on a continuum,
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now, let's address the question of, "well, how do we know where one dialect stops and another begins?"
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And, as you may have guessed, this answer is not always clear, but there is one concept that's really useful here,
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and that is the notion of an "isogloss".
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An isogloss is a boundary that separates the use of one linguistic form from another linguistic form.
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Now, this is not a political boundary, mind you--an isogloss really corresponds to some sort of prominent geographic boundary,
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such as a mountain range or a broad river,
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which in the past served as real barriers that prevented groups of speakers from interacting freely with one another, right?
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It's not so easy to climb over a mountain range or cross a broad river to talk to people on the other side.
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So I could propose that there is actually an isogloss that corresponds with the Sandia Mountains.
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So I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is nestled at the base of the Sandia Mountains,
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and on the other side of the Sandia Mountains--going east and headed towards Texas,
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I think that there are some differences in how words are used and how words are pronounced.
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S o, for example, I could propose an isogloss, where on the other side of the Sandia Mountains,
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speakers are more likely to use the word "y'all" to refer to second-person plural,
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whereas on this side, or in Albuquerque, on that side of the isogloss,
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speakers are more likely to say "you all" or "you" for the second-person plural form.
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So, again, we're just looking at one linguistic form here.
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I could also propose another isogloss where, for example, east of the Sandia Mountains,
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speakers are more likely to merge the vowels [ɪ] and [ɛ] in the pronunciation of certain words.
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So, for example, the words "pin" and "pen" are two different pronunciations for me,
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so I'll say, "I need to put a pin on my coat" or "I need to write with a pen",
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so they have different vowels in each of those words,
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but east of the Sandia Mountains, speakers are more likely to merge those pronunciations into one single form,
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so that a speaker east of the Sandia Mountains is more likely to say (in a bad Texan accent),
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"I need to put a pin on my coat" and "I need a pen to write with."
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So this "pin"/"pen" merger is well-documented in linguistics and, again, represents another possible isogloss.
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So as these isoglosses accumulate in the same geographical location, this gives linguists cause to propose a dialect boundary.
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So a dialect boundary is really nothing more than a bundle of isoglosses.
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Finally, let's discuss the concept of slang.
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Slang is words and phrases--informal language--that are typically used by younger speakers to reinforce group membership.
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So as I mentioned in my "Language Change" video, language changes from one generation of speakers to the next.
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As long as there are speakers around, language will change, and that's a perfectly natural phenomenon,
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although many older speakers of a language really don't like language change,
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and I'm thinking, specifically, in terms of slang here.
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So maybe you have grandparents or parents who just kind of deride the use of slang among kids these days,
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or very generally just rail against the way younger speakers use the English language.
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Well, like I said, language change is perfectly natural, but, you know,
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a lot of people do have well-entrenched beliefs that just, you know, never seem to go away about how language should be used.
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So slang constantly shifts from one generation to the next, so, you know, some terms like "tubular", "far out", "groovy"...
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they've really fallen out of use, but we may see the same for slang terms that are used these days.
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So, you know, "lit" , "on fleek", "yeet"... these may disappear sometime in the future as well.
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They might stick around--we're not so sure.
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So the really interesting thing here about slang is that everyone is an expert,
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and along those lines, I'd be really curious if you could post a comment below
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and provide an example of slang that you use or that you have heard, and let's talk about them!
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So will it have a long shelf life or will it disappear soon?
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I'd be curious to know your thoughts on that as well.
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Okay, that's it for this video.
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I hope you found this useful.
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Thank you so much for watching, and in the meantime, I'll see you soon.
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Take care!
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