Language standardizationàlanguage planning is one way out of the communication dilemma.
Social variation (sociolect): linguistic differences associated with respective definable social groups even within the same geographical location.
Stylistic variation: (register)
① ranges on a continuum from casual or colloquial to formal or polite according to the type of communicative situation
② may be used by a particular group of people
③ a particular register often distinguishes itself from other register by having a number of distinctive words, by special grammatical constructions
Idiolectal variation: (idiolect)
A speaker’s linguistic performance is heterogeneous, rather than homogeneous.
Idiolect is a personal dialect of an individual speaker that combines aspects of all the elements regarding regional, social, and stylistic variation, in one way or another.
[C] Standard and non-standard language
The standard language is a superposed, socially prestigious dialect of language. SAE (Standard American English)ßà Network English
Non-standard, or vernacular, languages:
All dialects of a language are equally effective in expressing ideas.
Government policy, historical and cultural tradition
National (official) language
[D] Lingua franca, pidgins, and creoles
Lingua franca: is a variety of language that serves as a medium of communication among groups of people from diverse linguistic backgrounds. It can be generalized to refer to nay other language used as a trade or communication medium.
Pidgin: is a variety of language that is generally used by native of speakers of other languages as a medium of communication. It may contain significant grammatical features of two or more languages, but rule-governed.
Creole: is originally a pidgin that has become established as a native language in some speech community. A pidgin becomes a Creole when it is adopted by a population as its primary language, and children learn it as their first language.
[E] Diglossia and bilingualism
Diglossia: is a situation in which two very different varieties of language co-exist in a speech community, each with a distinct range of purely social functions and appropriate for certain situations. One is a more standard variety called the high variety (H-variety), the other is a non-prestige variety called the low variety (L-variety).
Classical languageà local vernacular
The use of a particular variety may not be determined by a speaker’s social status, but by the communicative situation the speaker is in.
Generally, these two levels of varieties are generally two varieties of the same language. But in the history, there are some other situations in which the high variety may have no genetic relationship with the low one. (the Middle Ages)
Bilingualism: refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are used either by an individual or by a group of speakers, such as the inhabitants of a particular regions or a nation.
Perfect bilingualism is uncommon. One language is usually more dominant than the other.
Most bilingual communities have one thing in common, i.e. a fairly clear functional differentiation of the two languages in respect of speech situations known as domains.
Code-switching: a bilingual speaker often uses two languages alternatively during a conversation with another bilingual speaker.
[F] Ethnic dialect àBlack English Vernacular (BEV)
Ethnic dialect: a social dialect of a language, often cutting across regional differences
BEV: spoken mostly by a large section of non-middle-class American blacks. It is stigmatized as bad English, a purely social attitude that has no linguistic basis.
The social environment of BEV:
The distinctive features of BEV persist not for racial reasons, but for social, educational, and economical reasons.
Speaker of an ethnic dialect like BEV regard the language they speak the major symbol of their socio-cultural identity.
Some features of BEV:
① phonological characteristics: The frequent simplification of consonant clusters at the end of words when one of the two consonants is an alveolar /t/, /d/, /s/, or /z/; the l-deletion rule; the deletion of some word-final stop consonants in words like “side” and “borrowed”;
② syntactical characteristics: the frequent absence of the copula “be”; the systematic use of the expression “it is” where SE uses “there is” in the sense of “there exists”; the use of double negation constructions.



[G] Social dialect
Varieties of language used by groups defined according to class, education, age, sex, and a number of other social parameters
Overt prestige v. covert prestige