Socio Lect
Socio Lect
Socio Lect
Anti-Language
Code Switching
Diglossia
Ethnic Dialect
Hyperlect
Idiolect
Isogloss
Language Variety
Lect
Legal English and Legalese
Linguistic Variation
Regional Dialect and Regionalism
Register
What Is a Dialect?
"Even though we use the term 'social dialect' or 'sociolect' as a label for the
alignment of a set oflanguage structures with the social position of a group in a status
hierarchy, the social demarcation of language does not exist in a vacuum. Speakers are
simultaneously affiliated with a number of different groups that include region, age,
gender, and ethnicity, and some of these other factors may weigh heavily in the
determination of the social stratification of language variation. For example, among older
European-American speakers in Charleston, South Carolina, the absence of r in words
such as bear and court is associated with aristocratic, high-status groups (McDavid
1948) whereas in New York City the same pattern of r-lessness is associated with
LOL-SPEAK
"When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, in 2007, to share cat
photos with funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up. They
probably werent thinking about long-term sociolinguistic implications. But seven years
later, the 'cheezpeep' community is still active online, chattering away in LOLspeak, its
own distinctive variety of English. LOLspeak was meant to sound like the twisted
language inside a cats brain, and has ended up resembling a down-South baby talk
with some very strange characteristics, including deliberate misspellings (teh, ennyfing),
unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and word reduplication (fastfastfast). It can be
difficult to master. One user writes that it used to take at least 10 minutes to read adn
unnerstand a paragraph. (Nao, itz almost like a sekund lanjuaje.)
"To a linguist, all of this sounds a lot like a sociolect: a language variety thats spoken
within a social group, like Valley Girlinfluenced ValTalk or African American Vernacular
English. (The worddialect, by contrast, commonly refers to a variety spoken by a
geographic groupthink Appalachian or Lumbee.) Over the past 20 years, online
sociolects have been springing up around the world, from Jejenese in the Philippines to
Ali G Language, a British lingo inspired by the Sacha Baron Cohen character."
(Britt Peterson, "The Linguistics of LOL." The Atlantic, October 2014)