Diglossia

PThis study aims to find variations in the language used by a group of people, especially the Ma-kassar language. The author is interested in finding several ways to apologize in the Makassarlanguage in the context of different situations. The author uses semi-structural interviews inobtaining the data, and has interviewed 3 (three) people who work in the field of culture andhistory at the Lagaligo Museum in the South Sulawesi Archaeological Office. The data foundhas shown that it is interesting to know a number of ways to apologize in the Makassar languageand in different situations, and integrated with language items, speech communities, languagevariations and standard languages. And the most prominent is the variety of languages used inapologizing such as visiting someone, eating and drinking, social interactions such as marriage,apologizing for an error, and others.

This book is the second volume of the Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Expanding on the coverage of both regions and methodologies, its aim is to underline the importance of considering folk (i.e., non-linguists') conceptions and perceptions of and responses to dialect phenomena in general, and to language differences in particular. Perceptual dialectology, or even “folk dialectology,” is nowadays understood – thanks to the work pioneered by Dennis Preston over the past two decades – as a multidisciplinary macro-linguistic and micro-sociolinguistic approach within the field of folk linguistics, an enterprise that, in general, gives added prominence to both linguistic structure and details of dialect production and perception differences and attitudes, complementing the more global approach of the social psychology of language. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of the members of a society to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – in short, with social attitudes, such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These non-linguists' emotional responses and perceptions of dialects and dialect divisions may, paradoxically, not coincide with those proposed by linguists, since cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community may lead to the belief that there is a linguistic boundary or a sociolinguistic barrier where in reality there is none, or vice versa. Crucially important, then – as Preston's work has emphasized – is the comparison of scientific and folk characterizations of sociolectal and/or geolectal varieties and areas. Such an approach builds a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use and variety within the community, in our sociolinguistically based search for an understanding of the dynamics of speech communities.

How to tell - and understand - a dirty joke in Kilivila

In this article two aspects of language maintenance are investigated. Firstly, the effect which the variable 'language variety', i.e. standard variety versus dialect variety, has on the language maintenance patterns of Dutch‐and German‐born immigrants in Australia, i.e. do German and Dutch standard speakers maintain their first language variety better than German (Swabian) and Dutch (Limburgs) dialect speakers? The investigation proved that the overall rate of language maintenance in the first generation was not greatly influenced by the fact that the informant was a dialect or a standard speaker. An analysis in terms of 'language variety' did, however, clarify certain patterns of language behaviour which were left unexplained in an analysis in terms of 'language'. It also revealed that certain dialect speakers (here the Limburg dialect speakers) maintained only their dialect and not the standard variety which considerably reduced the group of speakers with whom they could converse in the mother tongue. Language loyalty for dialect speakers from Limburg was perceived only in terms of the dialect and not the standard variety or the Dutch language per se. The second aspect of the investigation was concerned with the phenomenon of diglossia in immigrant societies. Besides Fishman's description of the language situation of immigrants in America as 'bilingualism without diglossia', the concept of diglossia has not been applied to an immigrant context. This investigation shows that the type of diglossia prevalent in the immigrant's home country or region bears a considerable impact on the language situation in the new environment. A plea is therefore made to create a typology of diglossic situations which would greatly enhance the study of language use patterns of immigrants from diglossic areas.

Modern standard Lithuanian language is the result of the development of the language over a period of time. The basis for the language was the dialect spoken in the western part of the Aukštaitija ethnographic area of Lithuania around the city of Kaunas. The vitality, wit, and meaning of the language can be better understood through dialects.
 Today, however, dialects are less and less used by pupils, teachers, and students of philology; we hear less of them on radio and TV. It is understood that public use of dialects is limited by the fact that not all residents of Lithuania can understand texts in local dialects, so the most distinctive, interesting, unexpected, and expressive dialect words and words of the standard language are used passively making the language bookish, its syntactic structure rigid, and changing the whole grammar. Dialects for many pupils and young people are associated with poor language, provincial intellect and other negative associations. Such thinking is provoked by the lack of information and reluctance to take interest in one’s own local dialect as well as many other socio-cultural reasons. However, dialects are a very important part of Lithuanian culture. Many people in the21st century are bilingual, because they can speak both the standard language and dialects or at least the language with clear or slightly felt distinguishing characteristics.
 Contributing to EU attempts to promote local languages and having regard to the fact that the living tradition of dialects in Lithuania is in decline, the Seimas declared 2013 as the Year of Dialects.
 The aim of this article is to discuss the situation in teaching dialects at general education schools and to explore the attitude of teachers and pupils of general education schools to teaching / learning dialects.
 Objectives of the research: 1) to discuss the situation in teaching dialects at general education schools and opportunities for improvement; 2) to compare the attitude of teachers and pupils to dialects; 3) to compare the attitude to dialects of teachers and pupils who work / study in an environment which has a specific dialect and in an environment which does not have a specific dialect.
 The scientific problem of the article is whether teaching and learning dialects in today’s globalised world help students and teachers form their identity?
 Research methods: literary analysis, analytical descriptive method, survey of teachers and pupils, and analysis of the data of the survey.
 The research showed that teachers in the regions pay more attention to dialects than teachers in the city of Vilnius. Most teachers are satisfied with the theoretical material provided in the Lithuanian language textbooks, but would like to see a wider range of interesting and practical tasks. All teachers associate teaching dialects with literature lessons; activities of teachers from the Žemaitija (Samogitia) ethnographic area of Lithuania are particularly interesting as they read the books of Samogitian authors in the Samogitian dialect. Although pupils tend to assess dialect lessons positively, sometimes a very pragmatic approach to dialects can be seen: dialects are not interesting, because pupils do not see benefit from it.

This article addresses the occurrence of certain lexical items and phrases which are used by the Venda royalty in and around the chief's palace. Past studies have primarily referred to these forms as being representative of the so-called Musanda language. This article will motivate the need to recognise social ‘language varieties’ within a standard language, (as opposed to dialects), and will substantiate the viewpoint that the lexical items and phrases as listed, represent the Musanda ‘language variety’, which is indeed a social variety of Venda, that is restricted to the environment of the chief's palace.

Since the century, language policy in China has had a single aim: promotion of the national standard, called Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) in the second half of the century (see Rohsenow and Guo, this volume). In this chapter, I start by discussing whether this aim has been reached. This will allow me to reflect on a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon related to the promotion of Putonghua, namely: vernacularization of the standard language. The vernacularization process described here is not without precedent, even in the history of the Chinese language(s) (see Chen, 1999). Similarly, all languages which have undergone a geographical extension outside of their traditional territory, such as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc., can be shown to have passed through a similar cycle: a first phase of spread, accompanied by linguistic simplification, followed by a geographical fragmentation phase, leading to larger scale variation, and finally a vernacularization phase. This last phase sometimes leads to the development of new and more complex features in language structures, independent of the norms of the original standard (or superstrate) language. However divergent these new vernaculars get, they are nevertheless often regarded as variants of one language, as is the case with English. The question is then twofold. On the one hand, regarding the function of the superstrate language, one can wonder how much the language is still able to function as a lingua franca. Regarding the vernacular varieties of the language on the other hand, one could ask what differentiates them functionally from the substrate topolects. In this chapter, I shall seek an answer to both questions by examining in some detail the status and functions of the national language, as well as those of the emerging vernaculars. First of all, concerning the promotion process of Putonghua, I shall try to assess how much the national standard has really been accepted as a lingua franca by the speakers of other Chinese topolects, and what have been the major obstacles to its spread as such. Second, due to these obstacles, as well as geographical factors, I shall show how the spread of Putonghua appears to lead ultimately to the emergence of regional varieties of the standard language. It will be shown that this phenomenon

A common approach to language awareness is through the contrast between folk and scientific knowledge, the former usually getting brief attention and being assigned little value. This paper argues that the folk awareness of language may be characterised in several different ways, having to do with a wide variety of linguistic characterisations (e.g. overt ‘availability’, ‘degree of accuracy’, ability to ‘control’ language varieties, and the level of specificity of folk knowledge). Only the second of these has to do directly with the folk versus linguist dichotomy, although cognitive constraints on what non‐linguists ‘usually’ know are important factors. More important, however, at least for speakers of American English, are the constraints imposed by notions of language ‘correctness’. In addition, folk linguistics is shown here to be a dynamic area of study, perhaps best uncovered by the analysis of ongoing discourses about language in speech communities. Finally, the value of folk linguistic awareness for both its scientific merit and its importance to applied concerns is briefly discussed.

The coherence of macro-lects (language varieties) is complicated by the presence of internal micro-lects (performances of social identities by subgroups of the speech community), and both macro and micro can be affected by broad social changes. One approach to integrating the two perspectives is the Index of Similarity (IoS), explored here through a discussion of gender and sexuality in Auckland, New Zealand. A corpus of interviews straddling a period of social change in New Zealand provides data comparing vowel spaces across two age cohorts and multiple gendered identities, and shows broad correlations between linguistic alignments and the social landscape in the speech community. The methodologically simple IoS provides an overview of the relationship between micro-lectal identity categories and the macro-lectal variety across the vowel system as a whole, and identifies groups that pattern in socially meaningful ways. Although not a tool for fine-grained analysis of individual variables, the IoS provides a zoomed-out snapshot of the vowel system as a whole, and the gendered categories that comprise the speech community.

Language-the words we use, our syntax and our grammar-is always deployed in a context. We might refer to a collective group as y'all in one context (casually, among friends) but simply as you in another. When students enter our library instruction classrooms, they also enter a new discursive context, this one marked by Boolean syntax, arcane controlled vocabularies, and Aristotelian classification structures that divide the universe of knowledge in ways foreign to the naive user. For example, nothing about using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or SocINDEX database descriptors is natural, nor is the use of and and or as formal structures. Students who seek use of library resources inevitably must learn to navigate these strange new linguistic worlds.Library instructors must balance the demand to teach students how to search successfully in these formal linguistic contexts against a desire to respect the languages and modes of thought students bring from elsewhere into the classroom. As advocates for equity of access to materials, librarians must negotiate the realities of dominant, standard structures of language and organization-often our discursive homes-with the diversity of linguistic and cognitive approaches of our students. These politically and ethically impelled negotiations require us to teach library research as a context in which language struggles take place, rather than as an arena where some words and phrases are simply and acontextually Indeed, when students are taught that only one language variety is correct, instructors consciously and unconsciously reinscribe systems of linguistic dominance that allocate access, opportunity, and reward unevenly among social groups.Composition Studies has long explored this difficult balancing act. In the pages that follow, this article articulates the work done by composition scholars to understand and politicize the problem of multiple discourses in the classroom, as well as conceptualize a potential solution. Rather than arguing for or against the use of different language varieties, Composition Studies has used the concept of the contact zone to imagine the classroom as a space of dialogic struggle where no single language is or correct. Instead, the classroom and the blank page become sites of interpretive struggle for meaning.Following this discussion of the contact zone in the writing classroom, I suggest that teaching librarians might re-conceptualize the contact zone in our own field. Library advocacy work on the problem of standardized language has primarily worked to perfect and change that standard language so that it better reflects a pluralist embrace of the language of our users. While a vital part of an ethical linguistic practice, the focus on correcting library language reinscribes the idea that any language can ever be outside the context of its use. Curiously, the library field has paid less attention to conceptualizing the concrete spaces in which these linguistic struggles take place: the search boxes inside our databases and OPACs. Particularly when we teach students to grapple with their own vocabulary and the controlled vocabularies of library resources, we are already teaching in a contact zone. By articulating and conceptualizing a concept of the database search interface as a contact zone, this article suggests that teaching librarians might work to interrupt the power of dominant language and knowledge schemes rather than re-inscribe them as correct through our teaching practice. In deploying a critical approach to the contact zone, library instruction can be a site of productive struggle between our users and the dominant discursive systems we might all seek to change.Language Varieties in the College ClassroomStudents entering college for the first time are entering more than just new physical facilities. They also enter new discursive communities. One of the primary roles of college teaching is to introduce students to these particular discourses. …

Introduction So far in this book we have looked mainly at two kinds of languages: languages which already had established orthographies, and languages where new orthographies were being developed as part of a planned, or partially planned, process of standardisation. There is certainly an important link between writing and language standardisation (see e.g. Milroy and Milroy 1991 and Joseph 1987), but a language does not have to be standardised before it can be written. There are many contemporary examples of writing in unstandardised language varieties, and many historical examples of writing vernaculars and ‘dialects’, some of which have later become standard languages. However, the writing of language varieties which do not have, or do not yet have, a standard presents particular orthographic problems. In this chapter we will look at some of these problems from a social and cultural perspective. For our purposes, such varieties will be taken to include the following: vernaculars, in the conventional sense of ‘dialects’ of an identified standard language; contact varieties and intermediate varieties which are characteristic of situations where creole languages are in contact with their (standard) lexifier languages, for example Jamaican Creole (Patois) in Jamaica and in Britain; other situations where closely related language varieties exist with a continuum between them, for example in Galicia (Spain) where Galician can potentially be viewed as a variety of Portuguese or as a separate language, and is also close to Spanish.

The study is devoted to analysing the structural status of intermediate varieties in the space between dialects and the standard language, the purpose is to produce a set of criteria for differentiating a language variant - when the observed features of language use are indeed a new variant and when they are simply dialect features. Scientific novelty lies in developing a mechanism for status identification of a language variant, in introducing a procedure for linguistic profiling of an informant based on the regionality index. As a result, it has been shown that the selected criteria, such as uniformity, covariance, the status of the emic category and markers, are a set necessary for determining the status of a language variant.

Dutch is a language spoken by about 20 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium. This region is not only characterised by a complex dialect situation, but also by the use of two institutionalised varieties of the Standard language: Netherlandic Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and is documented in Collins & Mees (1982), Mees & Collins (1983) and Gussenhoven (1999), while Belgian Dutch is spoken in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) by approximately 6 million speakers. This variety is the same as what is commonly referred to internationally as ‘Flemish’. However, the term ‘Flemish’ is avoided here since it erroneously suggests that this language is different from the one spoken in the Netherlands: the lexical and syntactic differences between the two language varieties are very small. Nevertheless, there are significant phonetic differences as well as substantial regional variability within the two speech communities.

This article argues that Arab Christianity has had a unique place in the history of World Christianity. Rooted in a biblical witness, the origins and history of Arab Christianity have been largely forgotten or ignored. This is not primarily as a result of the fact that the Arab Christian historical legacy has been overcome by Islam. Rather, unlike other early Christian communities, the Bible was never translated into the vernacular of the Arabs. By the 7th century the language of the Qur’an became the primary standard of the Arabic language, which then became the written religious text of the Arabs. This article will explore the identity and witness of the Christian presence in Arabia and claims that the development of an Arabic Bible provides a unique counter-example to what most missiologists have assumed as the basis for the spread of the Christian faith as a result of the translation of the Christian scriptures into a vernacular.

The study of speech communities is central to the understanding of human language and meaning. Speech communities are groups that share values and attitudes about language use, varieties and practices. These communities develop through prolonged interaction among those who operate within these shared and recognized beliefs and value systems regarding forms and styles of communication. While we are born with the ability to learn language, we do so within cultures and societies that frame the process of learning how to talk to others. This framing once exclusively occurred as face-to-face interactions within communities of speakers. Constant relocation, mass migration, transmigration, ever-evolving technology and globalization have transformed many societies and increased the need to provide more detailed descriptions and theories regarding the nature of speech communities. The importance of our growing understanding of speech communities remains one of the most significant projects faced by those interested in language, discourse and interaction. This chapter defines and identifies types of speech communities, provides the history of the term and examines its importance to the study of language and discourse in general.