Team 1

Regional and
social dialects
Juana Lilia Chavarria Delesma
Hugo Alberto Pérez Calderón
Angel Yamil Hernandez Vidaña
Miguel
Content

Regional variation

Social variation

Social dialects
Introduction
This section is focused on language variation
in monolingual communities.

What is a monolingual community?

A monolingual community is a group of

people who use and know only one language.
In these communities, there is a social
expectation that people will speak the same
language during social interactions.
Language variation
The term linguistic variation (or
simply variation) refers to regional,
social, or contextual differences in
the ways that a particular language
is used.
Variation is a principal concern in
sociolinguistics. It has been
discovered that variation is typically
the vehicle of language change .
Regional variation

what is it?
A regional variation refers to the
differences in language usage based
on geographical location. These
variations can occur at multiple
linguistic levels, including vocabulary,
pronunciation (accent), grammar,
and syntax.
International varieties
International varieties are different
versions of the same language spoken in
different countries.

Each country or region might have its

own way of speaking, with differences in
how words are said, what words are
used, and sometimes even how
sentences are put together.
 Intra-national or
intra-continental variation
Intra-national variation refers to differences in how a language is
spoken within the same country. These variations can occur between
regions, cities, or even social groups within a country. People in
different parts of a country may use different words, have distinct
accents, or follow slightly different grammar rules, even though they
speak the same language overall.
Cross-continental variation:
dialect chains
A dialect chain occurs when a language gradually
changes from one region to another over a wide
geographic area. People who live near each other
in neighboring regions can generally understand
each other, but as you travel farther along the
chain, the differences increase, making it harder
to understand speakers from distant areas.
 RP: a social accent

In earlier centuries, you could tell where an English lord or lady came from
by their regional form of English. But by the early twentieth century, a
person who spoke with a regional accent in England was most unlikely to
belong to the upper class. Upper-class people had an upper-class
education, and that generally meant a public (i.e. private!) school where
they learned to speak RP. RP stands not for ‘Real Posh’ (as suggested to me
by a young friend), but
rather for Received Pronunciation – the accent of the best educated and
most prestigious members of English society. It is claimed that the label
derives from the accent which was ‘received’ at the royal court, and it is
sometimes identifi ed with ‘the Queen’s English’, although the accent used
by Queen Elizabeth II, as portrayed so brilliantly by Helen Mirren in the
movie The Queen , is a rather old-fashioned variety of RP. RP was promoted
by the BBC for decades. It is essentially a social accent not a regionalone.
Indeed, it conceals a speaker’s regional origins.
Standard English
The dialect we grace with the name standard
English is spoken with many different accents.
But, as illustrated in the discussion of regional
dialects, there are also many standard
Englishes. US standard English is
distinguishable from South African standard
English and Australian standard English, for
instance, and all three differ from the British
standard dialect.
 People can be grouped together on the basis of similar
Caste dialects social and economic factors. Their
language generally refl ects these groupings – they use
different social dialects. It is easiest to see the evidence
for social dialects in places such as Indonesia and India
where social divisions are very clear-cut. In these
countries, there are caste systems determined by birth,
and strict social rules govern the kind of behaviour
appropriate to each group. The rules cover such matters
as the kind of job people can have, who they can marry,
how they should dress, what they should eat, and how
they should behave in a range of social situations. Not
surprisingly, these social distinctions have corresponding
speech differences. A person’s dialect is an indication of
their social background.
 Social class dialects
The concept of social class refers to the
differences that exist between groups of people,
based on factors such as prestige, wealth and
educational level. These differences are reflected
in many aspects of daily life, including language,
as people from different social classes tend to
speak differently.
VOCABULARY
The study of how vocabulary varies between
social classes has been explored notably in
England. During the 1950s, an academic named
Alan Ross introduced the concept of U and non-U
to refer to upper and lower class speakers. For
example, upper class speakers tended to use
terms such as sitting room instead of lounge and
lavatory instead of toilet.
Sociolinguistic Studies

William Labov's studies showed that variations in

language are linked to social structure. In New
York, he found that the upper classes use more
“prestigious” linguistic forms, while the lower
classes prefer informal variants.
 Grammatical patterns on-
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patterns sta

Grammatical patterns refer to the structured and The key idea is that grammatical structures such
consistent ways in which words are arranged to as verb forms, sentence structures,

form sentences within a language. These patterns agreement, and negative structure are not

follow rules of grammar, which dictate how uniform but vary depending on social factors like

elements like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other class, gender, ethnicity, and formality of the

parts of speech interact with each other. situation.

 Subject-Verb Agreement:
Verb forms
Standard grammatical pattern:
standard grammatical pattern:
She plays the piano every day.
I finished that book yesterday.
The verb "plays" agrees with the singular subject
"she."
Non-standard verb forms:
I finish that book yesterday.
Non-standard grammatical pattern (common in
some dialects):
She play the piano every day.
In some varieties of English, the verb doesn't
change to reflect the subject’s number or person.

sentece structures/Word Order: Negative structures

standard grammatical pattern : Standard grammatical pattern:
I am going to the store. (Subject + verb + object) Nobody wants any chips.

Non-standard word order (often in informal speech non standard grammatical pattern:
or regional dialects): Nobody don't want no chips.
I be going to the store. (Common in African
American Vernacular English [AAVE])
¡GRACIAS POR
SU ATENCIÓN!