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December 04, 2005
Chapter 5, Sociolinguistic Concepts
Comments:
The part in “Language and attitudes to language” that refers to teachers’ judgments about students who “look and sound intelligent” is interesting. I think teachers try not to do this, but it happens regularly, especially in bigger schools where teachers have less time to get to know the students one-on-one.
“Me Tarzan you Jane” is much different than saying “sort of”. Sort of is used when you’re in an informal setting and not quite sure of what you’re saying. The Tarzan quote refers to someone who doesn’t know much English.
It is daring of the author to say that certain languages would not be as well-suited as others to speak about particular topics. However, when you think about it, he’s right because it probably would be very difficult to explain civil engineering in Amazonian Indian language not because of some type of inferiority but because there is not a need for engineering words in their culture (I assume, based upon the author’s words).
It is an interesting point that “There is, in fact, no standard English accent, and standard English may be spoken with any accent”. We can all understand each other, no matter whether it is a British accent or Southern accent.
“An adult’s passive vocabulary, for example, typically includes several hundred words which he understands but does not use.” I never thought about this before, but I bet it’s true. Many of these words are probably from other dialects and we would think it out of character for us to use them, but we do understand them.
Questions: Were the professor’s recordings that we listened to in class inspired by the Giles experiment? How different are the dialects between upper-middle class British and the farmers from Devon? Why would they find so much trouble understanding each other? **see paragraph #4 above-- does he mean that there are also no general accents in terms of countries? Isn’t there a general American dialect, and a general British dialect that speak for the majority of citizens?
Posted by lcishagan at December 4, 2005 08:18 PM