Language Variation

Language Variation

         

Language with its different varieties is the subject matter of socio-linguistics. Socio-linguistics studies the varied linguistic realizations of socio-cultural meanings which in a sense are both familiar and unfamiliar and the occurrence of everyday social interactions which are nevertheless relative to particular cultures, societies, social groups, speech communities, languages, dialects, varieties, styles. That is why language variation generally forms a part of socio-linguistic study.

          Language can vary, not only from one individual to the next, but also from one sub-section of speech-community (family, village, town, region) to another. People of different age, sex, social classes, occupations, or cultural groups in the same community will show variations in their speech. Thus language varies in geographical and social space. variability in a social dimension is called sociolectical. According to socio-linguists, a language is code.  There exist varieties within the code. And the factors that cause language variation can be summarized in the following manner:

Nature of participants, their relationship (socio-economic, sexual, occupational, etc.

Number of participants (two face-to-face, one addressing a large audience, etc.)

Role of participants (teacher/student priest / parishioner /father/son/husband/wife, etc.)

Function of speech event (persuasion, request for information ritual, verbal, etc.)

Nature of medium (speech, writing, scripted speech, speech reinforced by gesture, etc.)

Genere of discourse (scientific, experiment, sport, art, religion, etc.)

Physical setting (noisy / quiet / public / private / family / formal/familiar/unfamiliar, etc.

Language Varieties

Language varies from region to region, class to class, profession to profession, person to person, and even situation to situation. Socio-linguistics tends to describe these variations in language with reference to their relationship with society. It shows that the relationship between language variation and society is rather a systematic relationship. It manifests that there are four major social factors involve in this variation: socio-economic status, age, gender, and ethnic background of the user or users of language. Due to all these four factors language differs on four levels chiefly:

1.   Phonological Level

2.   Lexical Level

3.   Syntax Level

4.   Discourse Level

          In other words, variation within a language with reference to its use or user can be defined in terms of ‘difference of linguistic items’. R. A. Hudson in his Sociolinguistics manifests:

“What makes a language variety different from another is linguistic items that it includes, so we may define a variety of language as a set of linguistic items with similar social distribution”.

In the following, six major language verities will be discussed, namely: Idiolect, Register, Diglossia, Pidgin, Lingua Franca and Esperanto. Besides this, it will also be observed that how a language variety differs from another closely related variety. For instance, what is difference between Idiolect and sociolect? How register differs from dialect? What makes distinguish pidgin from other varieties?