Varieties of English
How to handle speech
Thorsten Trippel
Universität Bielefeld
Material provided by a pool of colleagues: Dafydd Gibbon, Vivian Gramley, Alexandra
Thies
Overview
- Local varieties
- Social varieties
- Registers
- Irish English
- Transcription exercise
Local varieties of English
- Find out how many countries use English as an official language
- How many speakers of English live in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand?
- How many speakers of English are recorded?
Excursus: First and Second Language
- First language
- first language spoken (and maintained), usually spoken at home with the family, often also
used elsewhere
- Second language
- language acquired (or learned) after the first language, used widely for
work/business/social activities; sometimes refers to the official language which is not a
first language to the majority, especially in countries with a colonial background and/or a
wide variety of indigenous languages.
- Lingua franca
- A common business language (the "language of the francs"), which is not necessarily the
first language of any of the communicating parties.
- Pidgin
- A simplified lingua franca developed in a contact situation, usually for trade and
business, with restricted vocabulary and structures, often using structures from more than one
source language. Never spoken as a first language.
- Creole
- Language that developed from a pidgin language to a language widely used and taught as a
first language.
Variation of languages
- Linguistic levels of variation:
- Distinctive factors
- Dialect
- variety spoken in different area/regional variety
- Sociolect
- variety spoken by different social groups
- Idiolect
- variety spoken by specific person
Phonemic varieties (of English)
- Different phoneme inventory
- Number of phonemes differs
- Articulatory features of phonemes differ
- Some varieties are allophonic
- Isogloss: Boundary between neighbouring varieties of a language, on each side of the
boundary, there is a different variety spoken
Sociolects
- Variety of different social classes
- Academic language
- Aristocratic language
- Working class
- ...
- Examples:
- RP: non-regional, marked for upper class and/or high level of education
- BEV: marked for race, often associated with lower class
Sociolect vs. register
- Register
- Variety of language spoken in a specific situation/embedded into a social context; using
the appropriate terms for the social group
- Sociolect
- Can be used in various registers, more general
Sociolects, registers, dialects are sometimes hard to differentiate, they overlap.
Irish English
Presentation by Rene Kallus
Yet another link
-
Peter Sellers any his approach to
varieties of British English
-
Hugh Laurie discusses lexical
differences of BE and GenAm (note also the phonological differences between the involved
parties)