社会语言学-6--Regional-and-Social-Variation.pptVIP

Chapter 6：Regional and Social Variation Language differentiate internally as speakers distance themselves from one another over time and space; the changes result in the creation of dialects of the languages. Over sufficient time, the resulting dialects become new languages as speakers of the resulting varieties become unintelligible to one another. Dialect geographers have traditionally attempted to produce their findings on maps in what they call dialect atlasses. They try to show the geographical boundaries of the distribution of a particular linguistic feature by drawing a line on a map. Quite often that dialect boundary coincides with some geographical or political factors. ?pp132-133 Dialect studies grow out of the data of rural or urban sampling limitations? It tends to ignore densely populated areas, specifically large sprawling urban areas, because of the complexities of both sampling and data evaluation. The selection of informants also tends not to be very well controlled, often reflecting no more than the judgment of the person collecting the data that a particular individual is ‘representative’ of the area being sampled. Since most of us realize that it is not only where you come from that affects your speech but also your social and cultural background, age, sex, race, occupation, and group loyalty, the traditional bias toward geographic origin alone is a serious weakness. Speakers from different regions certainly interact with one another; dialect breaks or boundaries are not ‘clean’; and change can be said to be ‘regular’ only if you are prepared to overlook certain kinds of irregularities as exceptions, relics, borrowings, ‘minor’ variations and so on. Furthermore, the varieties of a language spoken within large gatherings of people in towns and cities must influence what happens to other varieties of that language. Dialect geography does raise a number of issues. One is the kind of