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2 Languages, Dialects, and Varieties
KEY TOPICS
The difference between a language and a dialect
Defining a standard/standardized language
Defining dialects by region: drawing geographical boundaries
Development of social and ethnicized dialects
How languages create meaning and how the meaning of languages is created
Indexicality and entexualization
We stated in the introductory chapter that the concept of language is considered by many sociolinguists to be an ideological construct. Further, we noted that all languages exhibit internal variation, that is, each language exists in a number of varieties and is in one sense the sum of those varieties. We use the term variety as a general term for a way of speaking; this may be something as broad as Standard English, or a variety defined in terms of location and social class (e.g., ‘working‐class New York City speech’), or something defined by its function or where it is used, such as ‘legalese.’ In the following sections, we will explore these different ways of specifying language varieties and how we define the terms ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ (regional and social). We will also address how the associations between language and social meaning develop and are used in communicating in different speech contexts.
What is a Language?
What do we mean when we refer to a language or, even more important, the idea of mixing languages? As we will discuss further in chapters 8 and 9, recent research has coined many new terms to describe what has traditionally been called multilingualism – ‘(trans)languaging,’ ‘metrolingualism,’ ‘heteroglossia.’ These terms reflect the idea that languages are ideological constructs; while we (usually) have names for different ways of speaking and can describe their features, in practice linguistic boundaries may be fluid. Not only do many people mix languages, but in some contexts, language users do not recognize the linguistic elements they use as part of different codes but simply as a normal way of speaking (Jaspers and Madsen 2019). Further, as we will discuss below, dialect continuums also challenge the perspective of languages as discrete, bounded entities.
The idea of languages as distinct codes is very deeply ingrained in society (and in linguistics!), and it is consequently often a very jarring concept to grasp. Throughout this text, we will continue to point out how ideologies about language lead us to think in ways which are not supported by empirical linguistic data. While we will continue to use the terms ‘language’ and ‘code,’ we recognize that these are words which refer to static systems, while linguistic communication is dynamic and flexible.
Language or Dialect?
For many people there is no confusion at all about what language they speak. For example, they are Chinese, Japanese, or Korean and they speak Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, respectively. In these cases, many people see language and ethnicity or nationality as virtually synonymous (Coulmas 1999). However, for many people, there is no one‐to‐one correlation between these categories; some people are both Chinese and French, or may identify as simply Canadian, not Korean Canadian, regardless of what languages they speak.
Most
