Sociolinguistics studies the interaction between language and society. Sociolinguistics is a concept that is wide and ever-changing. To check it requires one to put in long hours of research and analysis, and therefore sociolinguists have come out with research paper writings to study this concept. You Need To Know About Language Contact and Language Variation.
Such dynamism of language also tolls the students, and they have to go for assignment help in case of working on this concept.
Another aspect of language is bilingualism. Bilingualism is the existence of different languages within a speech community. It directly refers to the language variations we have in our country. When we talk about language or its variations, the first thing that we refer to is the dialect.
Dialect refers to the variety of a language spoken by a community. The dialects vary from one community to another. Thus they differ from other dialects.
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Another important point is that a language is a collection of dialects.
For example, if we talk about the English language, it has dialects like Cockney English, American English, Australian English, British English, South African English, etc.
Therefore all these dialects are combined to give a generalized term, that is, English. Despite this, there are certain differences between a language and a dialect, and these differences can be much easily highlighted by political segregation (to make it clear, they differ from linguists’ segregation:
- Hindi, Urdu, Swedish, Norwegian, and Czech can be socially and politically defined languages.
- While the dialects of these differ, as in, the dialects of Hindi or Chinese, and the like.
- If speakers of two different dialects can understand each other (are mutually intelligible), they are said to belong to the same language, while if they are mutually unintelligible (not able to understand each other), they belong to different languages.
Certain factors support language variation:
- Regional: The language, in this case, varies according to the region people inhabit. For example, in Britain, you will speak English, China-Chinese, then the language may be different in New York than in Boston. National boundaries separate the regions; still, there are chances that variation may exist within miles of territory. Due to lack of communication among areas, differences grow, and variation increases.
- Social: The social factors are class, education, sexual orientation, gender, etc. In such a case, due to education, a person may speak the refined language while the other may speak a less refined one; even due to the gender differences language variation may found, a more sophisticated language used by females.
- Ethnic: These are related to the variations due to the existence of different ethnic groups. Nothing inherited or has any biological cause. People identify with their group and adopt these languages.
People may often adopt a standard dialect based on the idealized version of the language. This idealized version may be the dialect of the most popular or the capital city of a country. This standard dialect may make communication between people easier and act as a unifying factor.
These language variations may be a reason for bilingualism. Some may come with a language they have spoken for years and then mingle with the people of a different language. Thus these people know both these languages and can say to be bilingual. This bilingualism is a result of language contact; therefore, let us understand what language contact is. Language contact is the result of people speaking different languages coming in with each other.
Several causes of language contact:
- Geographic Proximity of Languages: When people speaking different languages are geographically close, there are chances that people may naturally adopt each other’s speech.
- Education: With changing times, there is a demand for people to know different languages to become easier. Therefore people try to learn these languages, and they also inculcated in the curriculum of students. Thus education again becomes a reason for language touch and facilitates easy communication among people.
- Prestige Language: When you try to adopt a better and more refined, it may again result in language touch. For example, during colonization, several colonies attempted to adopt the better language of their colonizers and thus try to make themselves equivalent.
- Second language Influence: There may be people in with people speaking a different language due to cultural reasons and thus adopt a second language.
There are several impacts of this language contact:
- Most importantly, the adoption of a second language may result in the death of the native language of the speakers when all these speakers have died.
- Frequent lexical borrowing may be another impact. In such a case, you borrow the structure and grammar of another language.
- Increased dominance of the popular language can decrease the power of the less spoken one. When people start giving importance to the new or borrowed language, they may start giving less importance to their native language or the language they originally spoke.
- Multilingualism is another major impact of language relation. Learning several languages due to language relation may cause multilingualism.
Several sociolinguistics have come out with their research paper writing and identified causes for these aspects of language and how great an impact they leave on society.
Language is not all that we speak, listen or write. It’s more than that, and its dynamism troubles the students learning it. Therefore such students have to go for Essay Writing Help especially while working on the case studies. The points mentioned above are a brief introduction to what is to be studied in language.