Language Domain and Language Use

Dahlia G. MaglasangReporter

Linguists use the term vernacular to refer to the language a person grows up with and uses everyday in life in ordinary, commonplace, social interactions.

Haugen (1966) has pointed out that language and dialect are ambiguous terms.

Language is used to refer to a single linguistic norm or group of related norms, and dialect is used to refer to one of the norms.

Different dialects of Chines and not different languages.

Indo-European family of languages

Bell, 1976 set seven criteria to distinguish one language from the others

1. Standardization – refers to the process by which a language has been codified in some way. (Fairclough 2001, it becomes much of the wider process of economic , political and cultural unification..of great...importance in the establishment of a nationhood, and the state is the favored form of cpitalism)

2. Vitality refers to the existence of a living community of speakers. Used to distinguish alive from dead languages (Manx and Cornish)

3. Historicity refers to the fact that a particular group of people find a sense of identity through using a particular languages: it belongs to them.

4. Autonomy – a language must be felt by its speakers to be different from other languages.

5. Reduction refers to the fact that a particular variety may be regarded as a sub-variety rather than as an independent entity.

6. Mixture refers to feelings speakers have about the “purity of the variety they speak.

7. De Facto norms refers to the feelings that many speakers have that there are both “good speakers and poor speakers and that the good speakers represent the norms of proper usage.

A dialect is a subordinate variety of a language, so that we can say that Texas English and Swiss German are, respectively ,dialects of English and German.

The language name (i.e. English and German) is the superordinate term.

Ways People SpeakCategorizing the way people speak Idiolect and Sociolect Individuals speak in characteristic ways

that may be peculiar to them in certain circumstances we call this idiolect.

People often use language in ways that they share with many other people most generally we can call these pattern sociolects.