Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Peter L Patrick
Language Rights
Univ of Essex
Thus they have forms (sounds or gestures, which can be written, #1);
The way forms fit into structures gives rise to linguistic functions.
Now the linguists begin to get into trouble with (some of) the sociolinguists...
LG474 Notes
Peter L Patrick
Language Rights
Univ of Essex
Educational institutions use arbitrary language standards as gatekeeping devices to reproduce the status quo (#6).
o Yet most people firmly believe education is the key to opportunity.
Variation: When two or more different forms can occur in precisely the same
environment, with the same meaning. I.e., we mean variation in form, holding
the meaning (or function) constant: several ways to say (/do) the same thing.
LG474 Notes
Peter L Patrick
Language Rights
Univ of Essex
Variability: Differences in language use that are defined over social groups (as
Variation was differences in language use defined over linguistic form). Thus,
Regular differences between men and women speaking the same
Ive just mentioned the speech community, a concept which is notoriously hard
to define and self-serving but essential to the field. For now lets define it as:
A social community which shares the same vernacular variety/ies, as well
as a set of norms for both using it and interpreting its use.
Now that we have the Four Vs, we can use them to define Linguistic Diversity,
which is perhaps the key concept of Language Rights.
LG474 Notes
Peter L Patrick
Language Rights
Univ of Essex
(Thanks to Dave Sayers for stimulating my discussion of this topic please see his 2009 Essex
PhD in the Sociology Dept. for an extended discussion of linguistic diversity.)
Which fields it has (as recently as the end of the 1950s) evolved from,
e.g. social psychology, anthropology, human geography, sociology;
LG474 Notes
Peter L Patrick
Language Rights
Univ of Essex
Here are some places for newcomers to find brief answers and definitions:
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lg/lg232/DefinitionsSlx.html
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lg/lg232/Standards.html
http://www.une.edu.au/langnet/
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lg/lg232/SpeechComDefs.html
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/summary.html