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African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English

African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called Black English, Black Vernacular, or Black English Vernacular (BEV), is a type of Southern American English lect (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of the American English language. It is known colloquially as Ebonics or Jive. With pronunciation that in some respects is common to that of southern U.S. English, the lect is spoken by many blacks in the United States. AAVE shares many characteristics with various Creole English dialects spoken by blacks in much of the world. AAVE also has grammatical origins in, and pronunciation characteristics in common with, various West African languages.

History and social context

AAVE has its deepest roots in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade, but also has features of English spoken in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries. Distinctive patterns of language usage among African slaves and, later, blacks arose out of the need for multilingual populations of African captives to communicate among themselves and with their captors. During the Middle Passage, these captives (many already multi-lingual speakers of dialects of Wolof, Twi, Hausa, Yoruba, Dogon, Akan, Kimbundu, Bambara and other languages) developed pidgins (simplified mixtures of two or more languages). Over time in the Americas, some of these pidgins became fully developed creoles. Significant numbers of blacks still speak some of these creoles, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Any language used by isolated groups of people is likely to split into various dialects. The pronunciation of AAVE is based in large part on Southern American English, an influence that no doubt was reciprocal in many ways. The traits of AAVE that separate it from Standard American English (SAE) include:
- grammatical structures traceable to West African languages;
- changes in pronunciation along definable patterns, many of which are found in creoles and dialects of other populations of West African descent (but which also emerge in English dialects uninfluenced by West African languages, such as Newfoundland English);
- distinctive slang; and
- differences in the use of tenses.
AAVE also has contributed to Standard American English words of African origin ("gumbo", "goober", "yam", "banjo", "bogus") and slang expressions ("cool," "hip," "hep cat"). In areas of close socialization between speakers of AAVE and other groups of people, many speakers of AAVE are not black. AAVE's departure from Southern American English was a natural consequence of cultural differences between blacks and whites. Language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and pride. AAVE has survived and thrived through the centuries also as a result of various degrees of isolation from Southern American English and Standard American English—through both self-segregation from and marginalization by mainstream society. Most speakers of AAVE are bilectal, since they use Standard American English to varying degrees as well as AAVE. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with the rise in socioeconomic status, although almost all speakers of AAVE at all socioeconomic levels readily understand Standard American English. Most blacks, regardless of socioeconomic status, educational background, or geographic region, use some form of AAVE to various degrees in informal and intra-ethnic communication. (This selection of lect according to social context is called code switching.) AAVE is often erroneously perceived by members of mainstream American society as indicating low intelligence or educational attainment. Furthermore, as with many other creole dialects, AAVE sometimes has been called "lazy" or "bad" English by those who do not understand Creolization or the role of null phonemes. Such appraisals also may be due in part to AAVE's substitution of aspect for tense in some cases. Some challenge whether AAVE should be considered a valid form of English at all. However, among linguists there is no such controversy, since AAVE, like all lects, shows consistent internal logic and structure. In the late 1990s, the formal recognition of AAVE ("Ebonics") as a distinct lect and its proposed use as an educational tool to help black students become more fluent in SAE became a controversial subject in the United States.

AAVE as a Creole

When European slavers arrived in Africa to buy slaves, they found that many had no common language. Dillard (1972) quotes slave ship Captain William Smith: :As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different, that the Natives, on either Side of the River, cannot understand each other.… [T]he safest Way is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side of the River, and having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel. Some slave owners preferred slaves from a particular tribe. For consigned cargoes, language mixing aboard ship was sometimes minimal. There is evidence that many enslaved Africans continued to use fairly intact native languages until almost 1700, when Wolof became the basis of a sort of intermediary pidgin among Africans. It is Wolof that comes to the fore in tracing the African roots of AAVE. By 1715, the African pidgin was widely enough known to make its way into novels by Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. Cotton Mather claimed to have been very familiar with his slaves' speech, knowing enough to affirm that one of his slaves was from the Coromantee tribe. Mather's imitative writing shows features present in many creoles and even in modern day AAVE. By the time of the American Revolution, black creoles had not quite established themselves to the point of mutual intelligibility among varieties. Dillard (1972) quotes a recollection of "slave language" toward the latter part of the 18th century: :Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe; but me fall asleep, massa, and no wake 'til you come… It was not until the time of the Civil War that the language of the slaves became familiar to a large number of educated whites. The abolitionist papers before the war form a rich corpus of examples of plantation creole. In Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), Thomas Wentworth Higginson detailed many features of his soldiers' language. In particular, this book contains the first reference to the distinction within AAVE "been" between stressed BÍN and unstressed bin. After emancipation, some freed slaves traveled to West Africa, taking their creole with them. In certain African tribal groups, such as those in east Cameroon, there are varieties of Black English that show strong resemblances to the creole dialects in the U.S. documented during this period. The languages have remained similar due to the homogeneity within tribal groups, and so can act as windows into a past state of Creole English.

Educational issues

Proponents of various bills across the U.S., notably a resolution from the Oakland, California school board on December 18, 1996, wanted Ebonics officially declared a language or dialect. At its last meeting, the lame duck Oakland school board unanimously passed the resolution before stepping down from their positions to the newly elected board, who held different political views. The new board modified the resolution and then effectively dropped it. Had the measure remained in force, it would have affected funding and education-related issues. The Oakland resolution declared that Ebonics was not English, and was not an Indo-European language at all, asserting that the speech of black children belonged to "West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems". This claim was quickly ruled inconsistent with current linguistic theory, whereby AAVE is a dialect of English and thus of Indo-European origin. Further, the differences between modern AAVE and Standard English are nowhere near as great as those between the French language and the Haitian Creole language, that can rightly be called a separate language in its own right. The statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based" also contributed to widespread incredulity and hostility. (Supporters of the resolution later stated that "genetically" was not a racist term but a linguistic one.) Proponents of Ebonics instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public. The belief underlying it is that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers acknowledged that AAVE was not a substandard version of standard American English but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciational norms. For black students whose primary dialect was Ebonics, the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that dialect, both for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language [sic]... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills." Teachers were encouraged to recognize that the "errors" in standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, and indeed were not errors at all but instead features of a grammatically distinct form of English. Rather than teaching standard English by proscribing non-standard usage, the idea was to teach standard English to Ebonics-speaking students by showing them how to translate expressions from AAVE to standard American English. Framers of the Oakland resolution recognized that, when teaching anyone a language or lect with which they are unfamiliar, it is important to differentiate between understanding and pronunciation. (This consideration appears in later discussion, not in the resolution itself.) For instance, if a child reads "He passed by both of them" as "he pass by bowf uh dem", a teacher must determine whether the child is saying passed or pass, since they are identical in AAVE phonology. Appropriate remedial strategies here would be different from effective strategies for an SAE speaker who read "passed" as "pass". Pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages appear to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. Baratz and Stewart (1969) introduced AAVE speakers to reading using "dialect readers"—sets of text nearer to the child's dialect than SAE text. This helps the child focus on translating symbols on paper into words without worrying about learning a new language at the same time. Simpkins, Holt, and Simpkins (1977) developed a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a bridge version, which was closer to SAE without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version. The results were very promising, but in the end the program was not widely adopted for various political and social reasons which impacted the refusal of school systems to recognize AAVE as a dialect of English. Opinions on Ebonics still run the gamut from advocacy of official language status in the United States to denigration as "poor English". Teaching children whose first language is AAVE poses problems beyond simply that of which pedagogic techniques to add, and the Oakland approach has support among some educational theorists. However, such pedagogical approaches give rise to educational and political disputes that often show strong racial and cultural biases. Despite the clear linguistic evidence, the American public and policymakers remain divided over whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate lect of English. In July 2005, Mary Texeira, a sociology professor at Cal State San Bernardino, suggested that Ebonics be included in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Though she had no standing in the school district, the recommendation was met with a backlash similar to that in Oakland nine years before.

Grammatical features

Phonological features

- Reduction of certain diphthong forms to monophthongs, in particular, to and to . For example, "boy" pronounced as "boh".
- Pronunciation of the dental fricatives voiceless dental fricative (as in SE thing) and voiced dental fricative (as in SE then) changes depending on position in a word. Word-initially, they become the alveolar stops and and elsewhere they become the labiodental fricatives and . Examples: then is pronounced den , smooth is pronounced smoov , thin is pronounced tin , and tooth is pronounced toof . This contrasts with West African-based English creoles and pidgins where instead of the SE "th" occurs regardless of placement, e.g., "brudda" for "brother." The rule for AAVE can be expressed in standard phonological rule notation: #

\begin
- & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
\end \to \begin
- & \mbox \\
- & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
\end \quad / \quad \# \_\_\_

\begin
- & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
\end \to \begin
- & \mbox \\
+ & \mbox \\
\end \quad / \quad \_\_\_

- AAVE is non-rhotic, so the alveolar approximant is usually dropped if not followed by a vowel. However, intervocalic may also be dropped e.g. "story" realized as "sto'y" i.e. . A number of rhotic AAVE speakers do appear to exist, however.
- Realization of final ng , the velar nasal, as the alveolar nasal in function morphemes and content morphemes with two syllables like -ing, e.g. "tripping" as "trippin". This change does not occur in one-syllable content morphemes, that is sing is sing and not sin , but singing is singin wedding can be weddin , morning is often mornin , something is somethin , nothing is nuthin .
- More generally, reduction of vocally homogeneous final consonant clusters. That is, test becomes tes (they are both voiceless), hand becomes han (they are both voiced), but pant is unchanged, as it contains both a voiced and an voiceless consonant in the cluster (Rickford, 1997).
- In certain cases, transposition of adjacent consonants, particularly when the first is . For instance "ask" realized as "aks" or "gasp" as "gaps".
- Pronunciation of and both as before nasal consonants, making pen and pin homonyms.
- Pronunciation of and both as before 'l', making feel and fill homonyms.
- Dropping of /t/ at the end of contractions i.e. the pronunciation of don't and ain't as and .
- Dropping of word initial /d/, /b/, and /g/ in tense-aspect markers i.e. the pronunciation of don't like own.
- Lowering of to or before causing pronunciations such as theng/thang for thing, thenk/thank for think, reng/rang for ring etc.

Aspect marking

The most distinguishing feature of AAVE is the use of forms of be to mark aspect in verb phrases. The use or lack of a form of be can indicate whether the performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In SAE, this can be expressed only using adverbs such as usually. It is disputed whether the use of the verb "to be" to indicate a habitual status or action in AAVE has its roots in various West African languages.

Remote Phase Marker

The aspect marked by stressed 'been' has been given many names, including Perfect Phase, Remote Past, Remote Phase (Fickett 1970, Fasold and Wolfram 1970, Rickford 1999, respectively). This article uses the third. With non-stative verbs, the role of been is simple: it places the action in the distant past, or represents total completion of the action. A Standard English equivalent is to add "a long time ago". For example, She been tell me that translates as, "She told me that a long time ago". However, when been is used with stative verbs or gerund forms, been shows that the action began in the distant past and that it is continuing now. Rickford (1999) suggests that a better translation when used with stative verbs is "for a long time". For instance, in response to "I like your new dress", one might hear Oh, I been had this dress, meaning that the speaker has had the dress for a long time and that it isn't new. To see the difference between the simple past and the gerund when used with been, consider the utterances: : I been bought her clothes means "I bought her clothes a long time ago". : I been buyin' her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".

Negation

In addition, negatives are formed differently from standard American English:
- Use of ain't as a general negative indicator. It is used in place of SE "am not", "isn't", and "aren't".
- Negation agreement, as in I didn't go nowhere, such that if the sentence is negative, all negatable forms are negated. This can be traced to West African languages, but is usually stigmatized in Standard English (although this wasn't always so; see double negative).
- If the subject is indefinite (e.g. nobody instead of Sally or he), it can be inverted with the negative qualifier (turning Nobody knows the answer to Don't nobody know the answer, also adding multiple negation). This emphasizes the negative, and is not interrogative, as it would be in SAE.

Lexical features

For the most part, AAVE uses the lexicon of SAE, particularly informal and southern dialects. There are some notable differences, however. It has been suggested that some of this vocabulary has its origin in West African languages, but etymology is often difficult to trace and without a trail of recorded usage the suggestions below cannot be considered proven. In fact, several have other more widely accepted etymologies.
- bogus from Hausa boko, meaning deceit or fraud.
- cat from the Wolof suffix -kat, which denotes a person.
- dig from Wolof dëgg or dëgga, meaning "to understand/appreciate".
- hip from Wolof hipi, meaning "to be aware of what is going on".
- honky, a derogatory term for a white person, may come from Wolof xonq, meaning red or pink. AAVE also has a separate vocabulary of words that have no Standard English-language equivalent, or with strikingly different meanings from their common usage in SAE. For example, there are several words in AAVE referring to white people which are not part of mainstream SAE and may be little known outside the black community. A "gray dude" is a white male, as is a "paddy boy", the latter likely derived from "paddyroller", a corruption of "patroller", who were vigilantes who caught runaway slaves and kidnapped free blacks and made a living collecting bounties or selling them into bondage. "Ofay" is another general term for a white. "Kitchen" refers to the particularly curly or kinky hair at the nape of the neck, "siditty" means snobbish or bourgeois, and "roach-in-the-corner killers" are pointy-toed shoes.

Other grammatical characteristics

Some of these characteristics, notably double negatives and the use of been for "has been", are also characteristic of general colloquial American English. Linguist William Labov carried out and published the first thorough grammatical study of African American Vernacular English in 1965.
- Perhaps most strikingly, the copula is often dropped, as in Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Arabic. For example: You crazy! ("You are crazy") or She my sister ("She is my sister"). The phenomenon is also observed in questions: Who you? ("Who are you?") and Where you at? ("Where are you?"). As in Russian and Arabic, the copula is omitted only in the present tense, and must be specified in the past tense.
- Present-tense verbs are uninflected for person: there is no -s ending in the present tense third person singular. Example: She write poetry (="She writes poetry")
- There is no -s ending indicating possession—the genitive relies on adjacency. This is similar to many creoles throughout the Caribbean. Many languages forms through the world use an unmarked possessive; it may, here, result from a simplification of grammatical structures and tendency to eschew particle usage. Example: my mama sister (="my mama's sister")
- The word it denotes the existence of something, equivalent to Standard English there in "there is", or "there are". This usage is also found in the English of the US South. Examples It's a doughnut in the cabinet (="There's a doughnut in the cabinet") and It ain't no spoon (="There is no spoon").
- Altered syntax in questions: She signifyin' all hankty (snobbish). Who duh hell she think she is? (="She's acting like a snob. Who the hell does she think she is?") Note also the use of "all" as an adverb of manner or degree, as well as the omission of the dummy verb "do" (does). How you tole him I'm try'na see her? (="Why did you tell him I want to see her?") Normal clause inversion of the past tense verb in forming questions is not practised.
- Use of say to introduce quotations, actual or otherwise. For example, "I thought, say, 'Why don't he just rap wit' her?'"

References

- Dillard, J. L. (1972). Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. Random House. ISBN 0-394-71872-0.
- Mufwene, Salikoko et al. (1998). African-American English: Structure, history and use. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11732-1.
- Rickford, John (December 1997). Suite for Ebony and Phonics. Discover magazine Vol. 18 No. 12.
- Rickford, John (1999). African American Vernacular English. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-21245-0.
- Rickford, John and Rickford, Russell (2000). Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. John Wiley. ISBN 0-471-39957-4.

External links

- [http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/features.htm Large inventory of AAVE phonological features]
- [http://www.une.edu.au/langnet/aave.htm AAVE page from UNE's Language Varieties site]
- [http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/DIALECT_READERS_REVISITED.html Dialect Readers Revisited]
- [http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/Home_Linguistics.html Find the Experts, the Linguists who know the most about this topic.]
- [http://www.linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/ebonics-res1.html full text of the Oakland resolution]
- [http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-56.html a later, revised resolution from Oakland] clarifying the school board's position
- [http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/ebonics.lsa.html a resolution from the Linguistic Society of America] in support of the Oakland school board's decision
- [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1997/01/19/SC55142.DTL Opening Pandora's Box]—Toni Cook interview that clarifies the intent of the Oakland resolution
- [http://www.missouri.edu/~bkstdwww/ebonics.html 1999 essay in The African-Americanist] University of Missouri
- [http://www.dandrake.com/ebonics.html The Ebonics resolution] Critique of the Oakland resolution (with annotated text) and of most of its critics
- [http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/EbonicsExamples.html Ebonics Notes and Discussion] History and coinage of "Ebonics".
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/African+American+Vernacular+English-english/ African American Vernacular English Wordlist] from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition
- [http://www.cabcalloway.cc/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/jive_dictionary.htm The Cab Calloway Orchestra Jive Dictionary ] Category:American English Category:African American culture Category:Languages of the United States Category:Sociolinguistics ja:黒人英語

Southern American English

Southern American English is a dialect of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from central Kentucky and northern Virginia to the Gulf Coast and from the Atlantic coast to eastern Texas. Southern American English can be divided into different sub-dialects (see American English), with speech differing between, for example, the Appalachian region and the coastal area around Charleston, South Carolina. The South Midlands dialect was influenced by the migration of Southern dialect speakers into the American West. The dialect spoken to various degrees by many African Americans, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), shares many similarities with Southern dialect, unsurprising given that group's strong historical ties to the region. The Southern American English dialect is often stigmatized (as are other American English dialects such as New York-New Jersey English). Therefore, many speakers of this dialect often attempt to eliminate many of its more distinctive features from their personal idiolect, settling for a more "neutral-sounding" English (General American), though more often this involves changes more in phonetics than vocabulary. Well-known speakers of Southern dialect include United States Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton along with playwright Tennessee Williams and singer Elvis Presley. Comedian Jeff Foxworthy, a speaker of this dialect himself, refers to it in one of his routines as "apparently not the world's most intelligent-sounding accent."

Overview of the Southern dialect

The overall Southern dialect generally follows the borders of the Confederate states that seceded from the United States during the American Civil War. The general southern dialect has its origins in the English immigrants who moved to the South in the 17th and 18th centuries, of whom most were of European Celtic origins (according to an 1860 census, "three-quarters of white Southerners had surnames that were Scottish, Irish or Welsh in origin." [http://www.americasvoices.org/archives2003/AdamsJ/AdamsJ_061403.htm]). These immigrants brought with them a very distinct style of English speaking, which was then combined with the African languages spoken by the African Americans who were at this time enslaved in the South. Over time this cultural and linguistic diversity combined with the South's rural isolation, and longtime use and familiarity with the King James Version of the Bible in religious life, to produce a unique American dialect. The Southern dialect in some form can be found chiefly in the States of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, and the Ozark and Little Dixie areas in Missouri. The dialect found in the remaining rural areas of tidewater Maryland is similar to the dialect found in Virginia, and some experts have also suggested that the dialect found in two of Delaware's three counties is related to Southern. There are also places in Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, where the prevailing dialect is Southern in character, due to historical settlement by Southerners. Also, the speech patterns in the rural areas of the southernmost Counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois could also be considered Southern.

Pronunciation

Few generalizations can be made about Southern pronunciation as a whole, as there is great variation between regions in the south (see the different southern American English dialects section below for more information). One phenomenon that is probably found throughout the region is the merger of and before nasal consonants, so that pen and pin are pronounced the same, but the pin-pen merger is not found in New Orleans and Savannah. This sound change has spread beyond the south in recent decades and is now quite widespread in the Midwest and West as well. Other typical (sometimes stereotypical) aspects of the Southern accent:
- becomes before , for example wasn't, business, but hasn't is sometimes still pronounced because there already exists a word hadn't pronounced . : before
- The diphthong becomes monophthongized to . Some speakers exhibit this feature at the ends of words and before voiced consonants but Canadian-style raising before voiceless consonants, so that ride is and wide is , but right is and white is ; others monophthongize in all contexts. The [aː]-sound tends toward an [/æː/]-sound throughout most of the region, so that word pairs like rod (SAE [raːd], normally pronounced without any noticeable rounding) and ride (SAE [ræːd]) are never confused. :
- The diphthongization or triphthongization of the traditional short front vowels as in the words pat, pet, and pit: these develop a glide up from their original starting position to , and then back down to schwa. This is the feature often called the "Southern drawl." : : :
- Like Australian English and English English, the English of the coastal Deep South is historically non-rhotic: it drops the sound of final /r/ before a consonant or a word boundary, so that guard sounds similar to god (but the former has a longer vowel than the latter) and sore like saw. Intrusive /r/, where an /r/ sound is inserted between two vowel sounds ("lawr and order") is not a feature of coastal SAE, as it is in many other non-rhotic accents. The more western (including Appalachian) varieties of SAE are rhotic. Non-rhoticity is rapidly disappearing from almost all Southern accents, to a greater degree than it has been lost in the other traditionally non-rhotic dialects of the East Coast such as New York and Boston. The remaining non-rhotic SAE speakers also uses intrusive r, like New England and New York City. : | before /+con/ : | before #
- The distinction between the vowels sounds of words like caught and cot or talk and tock is mainly preserved. In much of the Deep South, the vowel found in words like talk and caught has developed into a diphthong, so that it sounds like the diphthong used in the word loud in the Northern United States.
- For many Southern speakers, some nouns are stressed on the first syllable that would be stressed on the second syllable in other accents. These include police, cement, Detroit, and behind.
- The distinction between and , as in horse and hoarse, for and four etc., is occasionally preserved, especially in non-rhotic varieties.
- Lax and tense vowels often merge before a dark 'l', making pairs like feel/fill, fail/fell, and fool/full homophones. Some speakers may distinguish between the two sets of words by reversing the normal vowel sound, e.g., feel in SAE may sound like fill, and vice versa. The final 'l'-sound in words like fool may be elided altogether, as it normally is in AAVE.
- The distinction between w and wh, as in wine and whine is preserved for some speakers.
- The distinction between , , and in marry, merry, and Mary may be preserved by some speakers, but often is not. The r-sound becomes almost a vowel, and may be elided after a long vowel, as it often is in AAVE.
- Yod-dropping is not found among many speakers, thus , , , in due, new, tune is preserved.
- The distinction between and in furry and hurry is preserved.
- In some regions of the south, there is a merger of and , making cord and card, for and far, form and farm etc. homonyms.
- The distinction between and in mirror and nearer, Sirius and serious etc. is preserved.
- The distinction between pour and poor, more and moor etc. is lost in many regions.
- The l's in the words walk and talk are often pronounced, causing the words talk and walk to be commonly pronounced /wAlk/ and /tAlk/ by southerners. A sample of that pronunciation can be found at http://www.utexas.edu/courses/linguistics/resources/socioling/talkmap/talk-nc.html.

Word use

- Use of double modals ("might could," "might should," "might would," etc.)
- "You" may be "ye" ("Did ye get yer car?")
- Use of drowneded as the past tense of drown. Use of degradated as the past tense of degrade.
- Use of hot water heater for the tank that heats the water in a house, apartment, business etc., but this is also heard in many other parts of the United States.
- Occasional preservation of the aspirative "h" for the third person singular neuter ("hit").
- Use of the contraction "y'all" as the second person plural pronoun. Its uncombined form - "you all" - is used less frequently.
- When speaking about a group, "y'all" is general (I know y'all)--as in that group of people is familiar to you and you know them as a whole, whereas "all y'all" is much more specific and means you know each and every person in that group, not as a whole, but individually (I know all y'all)
- Some Appalacian and Ozark dialects prefer "you'uns," and by extension "we'uns" and "they'uns" or even "'uns" used as a pronominal suffix to certain verbs.
- Use of a- prefix on -ing verbs, such as "He was a-hootin' and a-hollerin,'" or "the wind was a-howlin'"
- Use of "fixin' to" or "a-fixin' to" as an indicator of immediate future action. For example: "He's fixin' to eat," or "We're a-fixin' to go."
- Use of the word "done" in place of "have" in present perfect constructions, such as in "We done gone to town" (We have gone to town).
- Partial or total replacement of "have" (to possess) with "got," as in "I got one of them" (I have one of those).
- Use of the word "ain't" in place of "have not" in past perfect constructions, as in "I ain't done nothin'" (I have not done anything).
- Replacement of "doesn't" with "don't" (he don't, she don't, it don't, John don't)
- Use of past participle forms in place of simple past tense forms, as in "I seen that" (I saw that) or "He come up here" (He came up here).
- Replacement of "those" with "them."
- Use of "over yonder" in place of "over there" or "in or at that indicated place," especially when being used to refer to a particularly different spot, such as in "the house over yonder"
- Partial or total replacement of reflexive pronouns, "myself" becoming "me," "himself" becoming "him," etc. For example, "I'm fixin' to paint me a picture," or "He's gonna catch him a big one."
- Use of "to love on someone or something" in place of "to show affection to" or "be affectionate with someone or something." For example: "He was lovin' on his new kitten."
- Use of the term 'mosquito hawk' for a dragonfly or a crane fly (Diptera Tipulidae).
- Use of the term 'Frigidaire' or 'ice box' for a refrigerator.
- A distinction between the words 'barbecue' and 'grill.' Barbecued chicken is different from grilled chicken, and so on.
- Word use tendencies from the [http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html Harvard Dialect Survey]:
- A carbonated beverage in general as "coke" or "cocola," likely influenced by the dominance of Coca-Cola in the region
- The small land crustaceans that roll when you touch them as "roley-poleys" rather than "pill bugs" or "woodlouse"
- The push-cart at the grocery store as a "buggy"
- The small freshwater crustacean in lakes and streams as a "crawdad," "crawfish," or "crayfish" depending on the location (note: the pronunciations of crawfish and crayfish can be inverse to the spelling; i.e. crawfish pronounced as though it was spelled crayfish and vice versa)

Different Southern American English dialects

In a sense, there is no one dialect called "Southern." Instead, there are a number of regional dialect found across the Southern United States.

Virginia Piedmont

The Virginia Piedmont dialect is possibly the most famous of Southern dialects because of its strong influence on the South's speech patterns. Because the dialect has long been associated with the upperclass or aristocratic plantation class in the South, many of the most important figures in Southern history spoke with a Virginia Piedmont accent. Virginia Piedmont is non-rhotic, meaning speakers pronounce "R" only if it is followed by a vowel (contrary to New York City English, wherein non-rhotic accent is now mostly used by middle- and lower-class speakers). The dialect also features the Southern drawl (mentioned above).

Coastal Southern

Coastal Southern resembles Virginia Piedmont but has preserved more elements from the colonial era dialect than almost any other region of the United States. In addition, like Virginia Piedmont, Coastal Southern is non-rhotic.

South Midland

This dialect arose in the Appalachian and Ozark Mountains. The area was settled largely by Scots-Irish, Scots Higlanders, persons from the North and Western Parts of England and Wales, and has retained a number of elements of Elizabethan English (the language spoken by Shakespeare).

Ozark

This dialect developed in the heart of the Ozark Mountains. The dialect was made famous as the one supposedly spoken by the Beverly Hillbillies.

Baltimorese

Baltimorese, sometimes phonetically written Bawlmerese, is a dialect of American English which originated among the white blue-collar residents of southern Baltimore. Today, it is heard throughout the city and in some areas of central Maryland, in the Mid-Atlantic United States, though its "native speakers" remain overwhelmingly white and working class. It shares many characteristics of other types of Southern speech, as might befit a port city of a border state. The films of John Waters, all of which have been filmed in and around Baltimore, usually feature actors and actresses with thick Baltimore accents, particularly in his early films.

Southern Appalachian

Due to the isolation of the Appalachian regions of the South, the Appalachian accent is one of the hardest for outsiders to understand. This dialect is also rhotic (unlike most Southern dialects), meaning speakers pronounce "R"s wherever they appear in words. The Southern Appalachian dialect is, among all the dialects of American English, the one most closely related to the Scots dialect of English (see Scots language, Ulster Scots language). The dialect can be heard, as its name implies, in North Georgia, North Alabama, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, Southwestern Virginia, and West Virginia. Southern Appalachian speech patterns, however, are not entirely confined to these mountain regions previously listed. For instance, there are places in Georgia far from the mountains where among the white population, the manner of speech is indiscernable from the speech spoken in the North Georgia mountains — for instance Glascock County and Jefferson County in the east central part of the state. The common thread in the areas of the South where a rhotic version of the dialect is heard is almost invariably a traceable line of decsent from Scots or Scots-Irish ancestors amongst its speakers. The dialect is also not devoid of early influence from Welsh settlers, the dialect retaining the Welsh English tendency to pronounce words beginning with the letter "h" as though the "h" were silent; for instance "humble" often is rendered "umble".

Gullah

Sometimes called Geechee, this creole language originated with African American slaves on the coastal areas and coastal islands of Georgia and South Carolina. The dialect was used to communicate with both Europeans and members of African tribes other than their own. Gullah was strongly influenced by West African languages such as Vai, Mende, Twi, Ewe, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, and Kikongo. The name and chorus of the Christian hymn "Kumbaya" is said to be Gullah for come by here. Other English words attributed to Gullah are juke (jukebox), goober (Southern term for peanut) and voodoo. In a 1930s study by Lorenzo Dow Turner, over 4,000 words from many different African languages were discovered in Gullah. Other words, such as yez for ears, are just phonetic spellings of English words as pronounced by the Gullahs, on the basis of influence from Southern & Western English dialects.

Gulf Southern

This area of the South was settled by English speakers moving west from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, along with French settlers from Louisiana (see the section below).

Louisiana

Louisiana features a number of dialects. There is Cajun French, which combines elements of Acadian French with other French and Spanish words. This dialect is spoken by many of the older members of the Cajun ethnic group and is said to be dying out. Many younger Cajuns speak Cajun English, which retains Acadian French influences and words, such as "char" (dear) or "nonc" (uncle). The standard French language can also still be heard in Louisiana, along with different mixtures of all of these dialects and languages.

African American Vernacular English

This type of Southern American English orignated in the Southern States where African slaves at that time were held as slaves by the whites. These slaves originally spoke indigenous African languages but were forced to speak English to communicate with their masters and each other. Since the slave masters spoke Southern American English, the English the slaves learned, which has developed into what is now African American Vernacular English, had many SAE features. Eventually the slaves were freed and some emigrated back to Africa to what is now known as Liberia. While the African slaves and their descendants lost most of their language and culture, various vocabulary and grammatical features from indigenous West African langugaes remain in AAVE. While AAVE may also be spoken by members of other ethnic groups, it is largely spoken by and associated with blacks in many parts of the U.S. AAVE is often considered a substandard dialect of English and as a result, speakers desiring social mobility typically learn to code-switch between AAVE and a more standardized English dialect.

External link

- [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/NationalMap/NatMap1.html U.S. dialect map]

References

- Crystal, David (2000). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press.
- Labov, W., Ash, S. and Boberg, C. (to appear 2005). The Atlas of North American English, Mouton/de Gruyter. Category:American English Category:U.S. South

Lect

A variety of a language is a form that differs from other forms of the language systematically and coherently. Variety is a wider concept than style of prose or style of language. Some writers in sociolinguistics use the term lect, apparently a back-formation from specific terms such as dialect and idiolect. Examples of varieties are:
- dialects, i.e. varieties spoken by geographically defined speech communities
- idiom is a term neutral to the dialect–language distinction and is used to refer to the studied communicative system (that could be called either a dialect or a language) when its status with respect to this distinction is irrelevant (thus it is a synonym to language in the more general sense);
- sociolects, i.e. varieties spoken by socially defined speech communities
- standard language, standardized for education and public performance
- idiolects, i.e. a variety particular to a certain person
- registers (or diatypes), i.e. the specialised vocabulary and/or grammar of certain activities or professions
- ethnolects, for an ethnic group
- ecolects, an idiolect adopted by a household Varieties such as dialects, idiolects, and sociolects can be distinguished not only by their vocabulary, but also by differences in grammar, phonology and prosody. For instance the tonal word accents of Scandinavian languages has differing realizations in many dialects. As another example, foreign words in different sociolects vary in their degree of adaptation to the basic phonology of the language. Certain professional registers such as legalese show a variation in grammar from the standard language. For instance English journalists or lawyers often use grammatical moods such as subjunctive mood or conditional mood, which are no longer used frequently by other speakers. Many registers are simply a specialised set of terms (see technical terminology, jargon). It is a matter of definition whether slang and argot are to be considered included in the concept of variety or of style. Colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions are usually understood as limited to variation of lexicon, and hence of style.

Dialect

A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. The number of speakers, and the area itself, can be of arbitrary size. It follows that a dialect for a larger area can contain plenty of (sub-) dialects, which in turn can contain dialects of yet smaller areas, et cetera. A dialect is a complete system of verbal communication (oral or signed but not necessarily written) with its own vocabulary and/or grammar. The concept of dialects can be distinguished from:—
- sociolects, which are a variety of a language spoken by a certain social stratum,
- standard languages, which are standardized for public performance (e.g. written standard), and
- jargons, which are characterized by differences in vocabulary (or lexicon according to linguist jargon). Varieties of language such as dialects, idiolects and sociolects can be distinguished not only by their vocabulary and grammar, but also by differences in phonology (including prosody). If the distinctions are limited to phonology, one often uses the term accent of a variety instead of variety or dialect.

Standard and Non-standard Dialects

A standard dialect (also known as a standardized dialect or "standard language") is a dialect that is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include government recognition or designation; presentation as being the "correct" form of a language in schools; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a "correct" spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature that employs that dialect (prose, poetry, nonfiction, etc.). There may be multiple standard dialects associated with a language. For example, Standard American English, Standard British English, and Standard Indian English may all be said to be standard dialects of the English language. A nonstandard dialect, like a standard dialect, has a complete vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but is not the beneficiary of institutional support.

"Dialect" or "Language"

There are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, although a number of paradigms exist, which render sometimes contradictory results. The exact distinction is therefore a subjective one, dependent on the user's frame of reference. Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages
- solely because they are not (or not recognized as) literary languages,
- because the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
- or because their language lacks prestige. The term idiom is used by some linguists instead of language or dialect when there is no need to commit oneself to any decision on the status with respect to this distinction. Anthropological linguists define dialect as the specific form of a language used by a speech community. In other words, the difference between language and dialect is the difference between the abstract or general and the concrete and particular. From this perspective, no one speaks a "language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. Those who identify a particular dialect as the "standard" or "proper" version of a language are in fact using these terms to express a social distinction. Often, the standard language is close to the sociolect of the elite class. In groups where prestige standards play less important roles, "dialect" may simply be used to refer to subtle regional variations in linguistic practices that are considered mutually intelligible, playing an important role to place strangers, carrying the message of wherefrom a stranger originates (which quarter or district in a town, which village in a rural setting, or which province of a country); thus there are many apparent "dialects" of Slavey, for example, geographically widespread North American indigenous languages, by which the linguist simply means that there are many subtle variations among speakers who largely understand each other and recognize that they are each speaking "the same way" in a general sense. Modern day linguistics knows that the status of language is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine dialects. An opposite example is the case of the Chinese language whose variations are often considered dialects and not languages despite their mutual unintelligibility because they share a common literary standard and common body of literature. The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot" ("A language is a dialect with an army and a navy"), illustrating the fact that languages are created by assimilation. This is perhaps the most widely cited statement of an analogy that has been attributed to other authors. (Weinreich explicitly states that he did not coin it.) It has been suggested that the initial wording was provided by, Hubert Lyautey as, "Une langue, c'est un dialecte qui possède une armée, une marine et une aviation." ("A language is a dialect with an army, a navy and an air force." ). A separate article discusses the origin of the language-dialect aphorism in greater detail.

Political factors

Depending on political realities and ideologies, the classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of speech can be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. English and Serbo-Croatian illustrate the point. English and Serbo-Croatian each have two major variants (British and American English, and Serbian and Croatian, respectively), along with numerous lesser varieties. For political reasons, analyzing these varieties as "languages" or "dialects" yields inconsistent results: British and American English, spoken by close political and military allies, are almost universally regarded as dialects of a single language, whereas the standard languages of Serbia and Croatia, which differ from each other to a similar extent as the dialects of English, are being treated by many linguists from the region as distinct languages, largely because the two countries oscillate from being brotherly to being bitter enemies. The Serbo-Croatian language article deals with this topic much more fully. Parallel examples abound. Macedonian, although mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and often considered to be a Bulgarian dialect, is touted in Republic of Macedonia as a language in its own right. In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic (mainly Christian) political party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for "Lebanese" to be recognized as a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect, and has even advocated replacing the Arabic alphabet with a revival of the ancient Phoenician alphabet. There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately altered to serve political purposes. One example is Moldovan. No such language existed before 1945, and most non-Moldovan linguists remain sceptical about its classification. After the Soviet Union annexed the Romanian province of Bessarabia and renamed it Moldavia, Romanian, a Romance language, the Cyrillic alphabet was restored and numerous Slavic words were imported into the language, in an attempt to weaken any sense of shared national identity with Romania. After Moldavia won its independence in 1991 (and changed its name to Moldova), it reverted to a modified Latin alphabet as a rejection of the perceived political connotations of the Cyrillic alphabet. In 1996, however, the Moldovan parliament, citing fears of "Romanian expansionism," rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to change the name of the language back to Romanian, and in 2003 a Romanian-Moldovan dictionary was published, purporting to show that the two countries speak different languages. Linguists of the Romanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity". In contrast, spoken languages of Han Chinese are usually referred as dialects of one Chinese language, to promote national unity. The article "Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?" has more details. The significance of the political factors in any attempt at answering the question "what is a language? is great enough to cast doubt on whether any strictly linguistic definition, without a socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy aphorism discussed at the end of the preceding section is cited.

The historical linguistics point of view

Many historical linguists view every speech form as a dialect of the older medium of communication from which it developed. This point of view sees the modern Romance languages as dialects of Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of ancient Greek, and Tok Pisin as a dialect of English. This paradigm is not entirely problem-free. It sees genetic relationships as paramount; the "dialects" of a "language" (which itself may be a "dialect" of a yet older tongue) may or may not be mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent language may spawn several "dialects" which themselves subdivide any number of times, with some "branches" of the tree changing more rapidly than others. This can give rise to the situation where two dialects (defined according to this paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic relationship are mutually more readily comprehensible than more closely related dialects. This pattern is clearly present among the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French, despite both languages being genetically closer to French than to each other: French has undergone more rapid change than have Spanish and Italian.

Concepts in dialectology

Concepts in dialectology include:

Mutual intelligibility

Some have attempted to distinguish dialects from languages by saying that dialects are mutually comprehensible while languages are not. But this concept may not be as clear-cut as it may at first seem. Italian speakers and Spanish speakers, for example, may be able to understand a considerable proportion of each other's closely-related Romance languages, whereas Lombards and Sicilians, speaking what are described as dialects of the same language, may encounter considerable barriers to mutual comprehension.

Diglossia

Another problem occurs in the case of diglossia, used to describe a situation where, in a given society, there are two closely-related languages, one of high-prestige, which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and one of low-prestige, which is usually the spoken vernacular tongue. An example of this is sanskrit, which was considered the proper way to speak in northern India, but only accessible by the upper class, and prakrit which was the common (and informal or slang) speech at the time.

Dialect continuum

A dialect continuum is a network of dialects in which geographically adjacent dialects are mutually comprehensible, but with comprehensibility steadily decreasing as distance between the dialects increases. A well-known example is the Afrikaans-Dutch-Frisian-German dialect continuum, a vast network of dialects with four recognized literary standards. Although standard Dutch and German are not mutually intelligible, a chain of dialects connects them, with no break in intelligibility between any geographically adjacent dialects along the continuum. A network of dialects similarly exists among the Eastern Slavic languages, among which Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian are recognized as three literary standards. The Serbo-Croatian language can also be viewed as a network of four major dialects and three literary standards. The Romance languages -- Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Provençal, French, Occitan, Corsican, Sardinian, Sicilian, Romansh, Friulian, other Italian dialects, Romanian, and others -- form another well-known continuum.

Diasystem

A diasystem refers to a single genetic language which has two or more standard forms. An example is Hindi-Urdu or Hindustani, which encompasses two main standard varieties, Urdu and Hindi.

Pluricentrism

A pluricentric language is a language with several standard versions.

The Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework

One analytical paradigm developed by professional linguists is known as the Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework. It has proved popular among linguists in Continental Europe, but is not so well known in English-speaking countries, especially among people who are not trained linguists. Although only one of many possible paradigms, it has the advantage of being constructed by trained linguists for the particular purpose of analyzing and categorizing varieties of speech, and has the additional merit of replacing such loaded words as "language" and "dialect" with the German terms of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache, and Dachsprache, words that are not (yet) loaded with political, cultural, or emotional connotations. It may prove to be a tool helpful for enabling people to see some ancient and poisoned linguistic controversies through a different lens of perception.

Selected list of articles on dialects

- Varieties of Arabic
- Catalan dialect examples
- List of Chinese dialects
- List of dialects of the English language
- Flemish dialects
- Dialects of the French language
- Cypriot dialect
- Irish dialects
- Italian dialects
- Sicilian language
- Japanese dialects
- Korean dialects
- Norwegian dialects
- Gilaki and Mazandarani (Persian dialects)
- Warsaw dialect
- Portuguese dialects
- Dialects in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
- Slovenian dialects
- Spanish dialects and varieties
- Swedish dialects in Ostrobothnia
- Bergensk, used in Bergen, Norway

External links

- [http://www.terralingua.org/Definitions/DLangDialect.html Language or dialect?] (Terralingua)
- [http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9215/arts.htm Incorporating Dialect Study into the Language Arts Class]
- [http://www.ericdigests.org/1997-4/dialects.htm Vernacular Dialects in U.S. Schools]
- [http://www.theverybestofstuff.de/contents/dialectology.html Fishermen's Dialect on the South-East Coast of Scotland.] Category:Language varieties and styles als:Dialekt ko:방언 ja:方言

Ethnolect

Ethnolect is a variant of a language spoken by a certain ethnic/cultural subgroup and distinguishing them as a mark of social identity. The term combines the concepts of a ethnic group and language (-lect). Example: African American Vernacular in the American English context as a feature of African American or Black society. The term was first used to describe the monolingual English of descendents of European immigrants in Buffalo, New York (Carlock, E. and Wölck, W. 'A method for isolating diagnostic linguistic variables: The Buffalo ethnolects experiment' in D. Sankoff and H. Cedergren, ed.: Variation Omnibus. Edmonton 1981:17-24). Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, some scholars understand the term ethnolect as language or dialect.

Sociolect

In linguistics, a sociolect is the language spoken by a social group, social class or subculture. In this regard it differs from the idiolect, which is the form of a language peculiar to an individual. Sociolect is also distinct from dialect, which is a form of speech peculiar to a certain area. However, dialects often have a particular social status, so that a given variant may be considered simultaneously a dialect and a sociolect. For example, Parisian French is a dialect in that it is peculiar to the city of Paris, but it is a sociolect in that it is the national prestige language, and is used throughout the country by people of high social status.

Language

A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes and the rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages. Though language is commonly used for communication, it is not synonymous with it. Human language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is instinctive in childhood. In their natural form, human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for the symbols in order to communicate with others through the senses. Though there are thousands of human languages, they all share a number of properties from which there are no known deviations. Humans have also invented (or arguably in some cases discovered) many other languages, including constructed human languages such as Esperanto or Klingon, programming languages such as Python or Ruby, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.

Properties of language

Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also contain a grammar, or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols. While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it is primitive and relatively unexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also has a grammar, it can manipulate its symbols to express clear and regular relationships between them. For example, imagine going on a walk with a person who only knew individual symbols, or words. If you saw a dog, he might say, "Dog scare" or "Scare Dog". Although any English speaker would have some notion of what he was talking about, the relationship between the words is unclear. Is he scared of dogs? Or just that dog? Or does he want to scare the dog off? Does he think the dog is scared? But if you respond, "I’m not scared of dogs," the relationship between dog and scare is quite apparent and hence the meaning of the utterance. Another important property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean nothing. That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian speakers nada means hope. However, it must be understood that just because in principle the symbols are arbitrary does not mean that a language cannot have symbols that are iconic of what they stand for. Words such as meow sound similar to what they represent, but they could be replaced with words such as jarn, and as long as everyone memorized the new word, the same concepts could be expressed with it.

Human languages

Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science studying them is linguistics. Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For example, the boundaries between named language groups are in effect arbitrary due to blending between populations (the dialect continuum). For instance, there are dialects of German very similar to Dutch which are not mutually intelligible with other dialects of (what Germans call) German. Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not always possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.) The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache, and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.

Origins of human language

Scientists do not yet agree on when language was first used by humans (or their ancestors). Estimates range from about two million (2,000,000) years ago, during the time of Homo habilis, to as recently as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man. The nature of speech means that there is almost no data on which to base conclusions on the subject.

Language taxonomy

The classification of natural languages can be performed on the basis of different underlying principles (different closeness notions, respecting different properties and relations between languages); important directions of present classifications are:
- paying attention to the historical evolution of languages results in a genetic classification of languages—which is based on genetic relatedness of languages,
- paying attention to the internal structure of languages (grammar) results in a typological classification of languages—which is based on similarity of one or more components of the language’s grammar across languages,
- and respecting geographical closeness and contacts between language-speaking communities results in areal groupings of languages. The different classifications do not match each other and are not expected to, but the correlation between them is an important point for many linguistic research works. (There is a parallel to the classification of species in biological phylogenetics here: consider monophyletic vs. polyphyletic groups of species.) The task of genetic classification belongs to the field of historical-comparative linguistics, of typological—to linguistic typology. See also: Taxonomy, Taxonomic classification—for the general idea of classification and taxonomies.

Genetic classification

The world’s languages have been grouped into families of languages that are believed to have common ancestors. Some of the major families are the Indo-European languages, the Afro-Asiatic languages, the Austronesian languages, and the Sino-Tibetan languages. The shared features of languages from one family can be due to shared ancestry. (Compare with homology in biology.)

Typological classification

An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages on the basis of the basic order of the verb, the subject and the object in a sentence into several types: SVO, SOV, VSO, and so on, languages. (, for instance, belongs to the SVO language type.) The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen completely independently. (Compare with analogy in biology.) Their cooccurence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural languages—language universals.

Areal classification

The following language groupings can serve as some linguistically significant examples of areal linguistic units, or sprachbunds: Balkan linguistic union, or the bigger group of European languages; Caucasian languages. Although the members of each group are not closely genetically related, there is a reason for them to share similar features, namely: their speakers have been in contact for a long time within a common community and the languages converged in the course of the history. These are called areal features. NB. One should be careful about the underlying classification principle for groups of languages which have apparently a geographical name: besides areal linguistic units, the taxa of the genetic classification (language families) are often given names which themselves or parts of which refer to geographical areas.
Constructed languages
One prominent artificial language, called Esperanto, was created by L. L. Zamenhof. It is a compilation of various elements of different languages, and it is intended to be an easy-to-learn language. Another prominent artificial language, called Ido, is intended to be reformed Esperanto. Other constructed languages strive to be more logical than natural languages; a prominent example of this is Lojban. Other writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary, artistic, or personal reasons. One of Tolkien’s languages is called Quenya, which is a form of Elvish. It has its own alphabet, and its phonology and syntax are modelled on Finnish. Linguist Mark Okrand has devised Klingon and Vulcan for Star Trek, which have since been developed into full languages.
The study of language
The oldest surviving written grammar for any language is believed to be the Tolkāppiyam (தொல்காப்பியம்), a book on the grammar of the Tamil language, written around 200 BCE by Tolkāppiyar. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowel was a breakthrough. The historical record of the study of language begins in North India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the (अष्टाध्यायी). grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; the phoneme was only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi an-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology. Later in the West, the success of science, mathematics, and other formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the academic discipline of linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.
Animal (nonhuman) language
While the term animal languages is widely used, most researchers agree that they are not as complex or expressive as human language; a more accurate term is animal communication. Some researchers argue that there are significant differences separating human language from the communication of other animals, and that the underlying principles are not related. In several widely publicised instances, animals have been trained to mimic certain features of human language. For example, chimpanzees and gorillas have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language; however, they have never been taught its grammar. There was also a case in 2003 of Kanzi, a captive bonobo chimpanzee allegedly independently creating some words to mean certain concepts. While animal communication has debated levels of semantics, it has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that human languages do. Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements of group behaviour and the existence of "mirror cells" in primates. This, however, may not be a scientific question, but is perhaps more one of definition. What exactly is the definition of the word "language"? Most researchers agree that, although human and more primitive languages have analogous features, they are not homologous.
Formal languages
Mathematics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including programming languages and markup languages, but also some that are far more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by some combination of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
See also

- Common phrases in different languages
- Computer-assisted language learning (a historical perspective)
- Deception
- Ethnologue, which provides a fairly complete list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
- Extinct language
- FOXP2 (Language gene)
- ILR scale (defines five levels of language proficiency)
- ISO 639 (2- and 3-letter codes for language names)
- Language education
- Language reform
- Language policy
- Language school
- Linguistic protectionism
- Linguistics basic topics
- List of language academies
- List of languages
- List of official languages
- Naming
- Non-verbal communication
- Non-sexist language
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- Philology and Historical linguistics
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- Whistled language
References

- Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Crystal, David (2001). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Katzner, K. (1999). The Languages of the World. New York, Routledge.
- McArthur, T. (1996). The Concise Companion to the English Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Kandel, Jessel, and Schwartz (1991). Principles of Neural Science. McGraw Hill (esp. p. 1173).
External links

- [http://www.zompist.com/ Mark Rosenfelder’s Metaverse] provides a useful listing of 5000 languages and dialects (grouped by their relationships), where the numbers one to ten in each language may be found
- [http://www.geocities.com/agihard/mohl/mohl_languages.html Museum of Languages]
- The [http://www.ethnologue.com/ Ethnologue], a catalog of the world’s languages
- [http://www.language-capitals.com Language Capitals] Guide to 8 major languages of the world with facts, characteristics and varieties
- [http://www.vistawide.com/languages/ World Languages and Cultures] — Practical information and resources on languages and language learning
- [http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/animals/animals.html Animal sounds in different languages]
- [http://www.netz-tipp.de/languages.html Distribution of languages on the Internet]
- [http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/ Speech accent archive]
- [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/G_Kunkel/homepage.htm a collection of bird songs] provides many kinds of bird songs
- [http://acp.eugraph.com The Animal Communication Project]
- [http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/categories/lang.html Language Articles]
- [http://www.primitivism.com/language.htm Language: Origin and Meaning by John Zerzan] Category:Technology als:Sprache zh-min-nan:Gí-giân ko:언어 ms:Bahasa nb:Språk ja:言語 simple:Language th:ภาษา

Creole language

A Creole is a language descended from a pidgin that has become the native language of a group of people. The majority of Creole languages are based on English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Spanish as the superstrate language, with local or immigrant languages as substrate languages. Pidgins are rudimentary languages improvised by non-native speakers; when pidgins creolize, however, they develop fully-formed and stable grammar structures, usually as a result of the pidgin being natively learned by children (see Nicaraguan Sign Language). In some cases the groups of people who speak such a language are called Creoles.

Development of a Creole

While the uses of the words "creole" and "pidgin" usually mix when referring to trade languages, linguists consider them two separate categories. While pidgins are formed as a drastically simplified form of communication between two or more languages (and therefore have no standard grammar or pronunciation), creoles are categorized as a pidgin that has been learned by the children of pidgin-speakers and therefore has a more complex grammar and fixed phonology, syntax, and morphology. Pidgins can be come full languages in only a generation, as with Tok Pisin, which has become a pidgin, and now a language in a period of 90 years. Creoles can remain as a sort of second, local standard, like the Haitian creole, or if there is sufficient contact with the superstrate language they can decreolize to conform to a more standard dialect, which has happened a little in Hawai'i and is one theory of the development of African American Vernacular English from Slave English.

General Features of Creoles

Study of Creole languages around the world (in particular by Derek Bickerton) has suggested that they display remarkable similarities in grammar and are developed uniformly from pidgins in a single generation, lending support to the theory of a Universal Grammar; critics, however, argue that his examples are largely drawn from creoles derived from European languages, and that non-European-based creoles such as Nubi or Sango display fewer similarities. Even considering only creoles from European languages, the similarities in grammatical structure are striking, especially considering that they evolved in communities which were isolated from one another. For example, these creoles tend to have similar usage patterns for definite and indefinite articles, and similar movement rules for phrase structures. Below are described some of the better-known creoles.

Arabic creoles

Nubi

An Arabic-based Creole spoken by descendants of Sudanese soldiers mainly in Kenya and Uganda, formed in the nineteenth century from a Sudanese Arabic-based pidgin used for intercommunication among southern Sudanese ethnic groups. See also Varieties of Arabic.

Juba Arabic

A major language of inter-ethnic communication in Equatoria (southern Sudan), creolized from the same pidgin Arabic as Ki-Nubi.

Babalia Creole Arabic

A Shuwa Arabic-based Creole spoken in 23 villages of the Chari-Baguirmi Prefecture in southwestern Chad; the substrate language was Berakou.

Native American creoles

Dutch creoles

In Guyana, the two Dutch-based creoles Berbice Dutch Creole and Skepi Dutch Creole were formerly widespread; the latter is extinct, and the former declining fast. In the US Virgin Islands, Negerhollands, now extinct, was also a Dutch-based Creole. There is also a Dutch-influenced Creole spoken in Netherlands Antilles, called Papiamento, but it is originally a Portuguese-based Creole.

English Creoles

Belizean Creole

Belizean "Kriol", is one of the main branches of Central American Creole English, closely related to Miskito Coastal Creole , Colón Creole, and Providencia Creole English. It is a Creole language based on English. Spoken in Belize. The Creole is used as lingua franca in Belize; it is spoken by 70% of the population. To speak it is to be Belizean.

Bislama

Bislama (older Bêche-la-mar) is an English-based Creole, and is the national language of Vanuatu.

Gullah

Gullah is an English-based Creole spoken in the Sea Islands and the adjacent coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida.

Hawaiian Creole English

Hawaiian Pidgin began as a pidgin jargon used in the early European colonization of the Hawaiian Islands. English served as the superstrate language, with Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Hawaiian elements incorporated. Children started using it as a lingua franca, and by the 20's it had creolized and become a minor language of Hawaii, as it still is today.

Hibradin Krayolle

Spoken in the Deep South of the United States. It relies heavily on Scots English, Gaelic, English, French, Cherokee and Caribbean Creoles of Northern Florida. This Creole was spoken by the groups of early immigrants from the Western Isles of Scotland (Hebrides) to the Southern states of the USA (The Carolinas, Alabama, Northern Mississippi and Tennessee). It relies heavily on Scottish-Gaelic for the lexicon and on a Franco-German patois for the noun usage but uses Carolinian Cherokee for adjectives. A variant of this was believed to have been spoken in the