Language and Society
A unit of social organization that best accounts for language variation. A group of speakers that share similar attitudes and patterns regarding language variation but do not necessarily know one another. (e.g the city of Chicago)
What is a Speech community?
Occurs naturally in every speech community.
What is variation?
The acronym AAVE.
What is African American (Vernacular) English?
Use of a specific language depending on the environment or those around you.
What is code-switching?
Southerns' word for carbonated beverage.
What is coke?
A unit of social organization that best accounts for language variation. A group of speakers that is best defined by their relationships with one another. People that interact and know each other.
What is a social network?
A reason for language change. The reason for differences across regions as well as groups of people in the structure of sentences, word meaning, and structure of words.
What is cognition?
Using language as a tool for discrimination against a group of people. Speakers of AAVE are often told that they are speaking "incorrectly" or "wrong" and should speak in the "standard."
What is racism? What is white supremacy?
To speak in a way to either reduce or increase social connection or distance between one another.
What is accommodation?
Residents of Milwaukee call a water fountain or drinking fountain this.
What is a bubbler?
A unit of social organization that best accounts for language variation. A group of people that come together (locally) to work and engage mutually (e.g a book club)
What is a community of practice?
One reason for language change. The reason for differences in the production of sound both externally and internally between people.
A feature of AAVE in which the mid, front, and lax vowel become a high, front lax vowel before the nasal consonant and is a feature of AAVE that is shared with Southern dialects. Speakers who pronounce words such as "pen," "sense," or "stem" as "pin," "since," or "stim" are showing characteristics of...
What is the pin/pen merger?
The nationwide support and integration of learning two languages (one of these would be English.)
What is the English Plus movement/argument?
Dialects (and language overall) are shaped by a number of social factors.
Allows for local language structures to both spread and be preserved.
What are dense, multiplex networks?
A form of language expression that adheres to what is believed to be "standard" or "formal." Language when it is used to display a form of status or power.
What is Overt Prestige?
Term to describe when the verb "be" is used to mark something that occurs regularly.
E.g He always be reading.
What is the habitual be? What is a pattern of AAVE?
Official government business would have to be conducted all in English. These include: court hearings, government documents, public records, official meetings, etc.
What is Official English?
Are often unconscious, unquestioned, and believed to be "common sense." Media also plays a role in shaping.
What are language attitudes? What is the perception of dialects that are not our own?
Allows for regional and national language (e.g standard dialects) structures to spread.
What are loose networks?
Language when it is used to connect with others of a specific group identity, or show solidarity (can be done by using "non-standard" varieties.)
What is Covert Prestige?
1) Teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm, which reflects White Mainstream English!
2) Teachers stop teaching Black students to code-switch! Instead, we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!
3) Political discussions and praxis center Black Language as teacher-researcher activism for classrooms and communities!
4) Teachers develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!
5) Black dispositions are centered in the research and teaching of Black Language!
What are the 5 main demands for Black Linguistic justice? {in a society where the "standard" takes precedence over all other varieties, especially AAVE?}
Using Spanish as a monolingual English speaker to appear humorous. Used as a stand-in for racism as its use "requires access to assumptions about who Spanish speakers are: silly, lazy, corrupt, stupid, sexualized, etc."
e.g No problemo, el-cheapo, bad hombre, es no my yob.
What is Mock Spanish?
A characteristic of Northern Anglo dialects (especially Wisconsin) when the low front vowel /æ/ raises to mid front tense [e]
before voiced velars /g/ and /ŋ/.
bag [beg]
magazine [megəzin]
What is bag-raising?