LIN229H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Canadian English, North Germanic Languages, Mutual Intelligibility
Document Summary
You can"t acquire language as a child from a tv or the radio, because you need to be interacting with other human beings. Even if we were identical twins, we would have differences in the way we speak. Everyone"s human experience is different and thus we acquire language based on our experiences. We also use language based on our experiences. We can say that each speaker has an idiolect; meaning an internal grammar that generates sound choices, morphemes, syntactic structures. A dialect is a subset of the same language (variations of the same language) In bc, you can hear things like the following in their use of language/accent: There"s no real variation within the social strata - the lower, middle and upper class use the r in the same exact way. Labov"s study quantified these unconscious language choices that we make and that we may not even realize. English spoken in the city of boston would be a regional dialect.
