Sociolinguistic Patterns

By Gabriela Quezada Cabezas

Sociolinguistic Patterns

External Patterns Regional Patterns

Social Class Gender Age Style Network

Urbanization Migration

Regional Patterns It is connected with an

increase in social stratification.

It tend to promote linguistic diversity as well

as uniformity. Urbanization

Incoming migrants from rural areas often discard marked dialect forms as part of the process of acommodation.

The net result is dialect levelling Migration

External PatternsSocial Class

Ocuppation

Education

Income

Sociolinguistic Variables » Phonological variables: A. Postvocalic /r/: shows a geographically as well as socially

significant distribution.

B. ing: Alveolar /n/ nasal /ŋ/ : It is a well-kown marker of social status over most of the English-speaking world.

C. /h/ alternation between /h/ and lack of /h/: the lower a a person’s social status, the more likely he or she is to drop hs.

» Grammatical variable: • The variable concerns the use of non-standard third person singular

present tense verb form without –s e.g he go.

The intersection of social and stylistic continua is one of the most important findings of quantitive sociolinguistics Working claas.

Style can range from formal to informal depending on social context, relationship of the participants, social class, sex, age, physical environment, and topic.

Style

Formal Informal

Gender

Women tend to use higher-status variants more frequently than men.

There also strong correlations between patterns of social stratification and gender.

Women tend to hypercorrect more than men, especially in the lower middle class.

In the Victorian era “speaking properly” became associated with being female.

Men Women

Age

o The Age distribution of a variable may be an important clue to ongoing change in a community.

o The youngest speakers between the ages of 7 and 16 use more standard forms than the young adults between the ages of 16 and 20.

Social Network

Dense Network Multiplex Network

Is one in which the people whoma given speaker

kown and interacts whit also know each other.

Is one in which the individuals who interact

are tied to one another in other ways.

It takes into account different socializing habits of individuals and their degree of involvement in the local community.

Standardization It is one of the main agents of inequality.

This process converts one variety into a standard by fixing and regulating its spelling, grammar. Etc.

It is not an inherent , but rather and acquired or deliberately and artificially imposed characteristic.

Standard languages do not arise via “natural” course of linguistic evolution or suddenly spring into existence . They are created by concsious and deliberate planning, which may spam centuries.