Concepts
A neutral, technical term to refer to dialects.
What is language varieties?
Switching codes across clauses vs. switching codes within a clause
What is Code-Switching vs. Code-Mixing?
A way to gather data quickly in the public domain.
What is a Rapid Anonymous Survey?
The desire to be left alone vs. the desire to be appreciated.
What's Negative Face vs. Positive Face?
The effect of a third-party who's present but not included in a conversation on that conversation.
What is Auditor's Effect ?
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What's an example of a Variable and its Variants?
A hypothesis that words and grammatical features influence how people perceive reality.
What's Linguistic Relativity or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
In one situation, I tailor my speech to match my listeners' perspectives or backgrounds; in another situation, I assert my style of speaking regardless of the listeners' perspectives or backgrounds.
What's Audience Design vs. Speaker Design?
A method to gather data in different tasks or activities to elicit language use in different styles.
What is the Sociolinguistic Interview?
A trade language created for quick transactions among people who don't speak each other's languages vs. the full-fledged language developed from it.
What is a Pidgin vs. a Creole?
A broader term to refer to language or dialect without making a distinction between the two.
What is Code?
Come on, it's Saturday night! You've gotta come with us to the game, bro!
What's an example of Positive Politeness Strategies?
A measure of the strength and liveliness of a language, often in terms of demographic, social, and institutional support, usually indicating whether the language will flourish or die out.
What's Ethnolinguistic Vitality?
A distinction between code choice to express in-group identity and code choice to express distance from another group, usually used to describe immigrant communities in a new country such as Spanish speakers in the US.
What is 'We' Code vs. 'They' Code ?
When a researcher observes something, the very act of observing it changes the nature of the data.
What is the Observer's Paradox?
Commonly recognized and expressed positive attitudes toward a language variety vs. implicit, unsaid positive attitudes toward a language variety.
What's Overt Prestige vs. Covert Prestige?
The process in which regional dialects become less distinct, often due to movement into a new urban center by speakers of different varieties.
What is Dialect Leveling?
I tried to speak in Pidgin with my good neighbor but came off as just another non-local.
What's an example of Subjective Convergence but Objective Divergence in speech accommodation ?
A way to describe how closely or loosely connected people in a community are, in order to understand how the strength of their connection may impact their language use.
What's a Social Network?
The difference between describing regional dialects and describing people's attitudes to regional dialects.
What's Regional Dialectology vs. Perceptual Dialectology?
A method of study public signs in which analytic attention is paid not only to the content and context of the signs but also how people interact with these signs.
What's an Ethnography of Linguistic Landscapes?
(a) Countries where English is a native language of most of the population and serve as norm-providers for other countries vs. (b) Countries formerly under English-speaking colonizers but now are developing new norms vs. (c) Countries where English is learned and used as a foreign language and are norm-dependent.
What's Inner Circle vs. Outer Circle vs. Expanding Circle?
The phenomenon of using different resources from multiple voices in our own speech or writing.
What is Heteroglossia?
The community of TESOL students and alumni in our program.
What's an example of a Community of Practice?
A common working language shared by people who use it as a second language.
What is a lingua franca?
Language's referential meaning which can be found in a dictionary vs. language's social meaning which can only be found in a specific context of use
What's Semantic Meaning vs. Indexical Meaning?
A technique to probe into people's attitudes toward language varieties, in which participants hear speech samples by the same speaker speaking in different varieties and are told that these samples are by different speakers.
What is Matched Guise Technique?
The provider of words (often the language of a dominant group) vs. the provider of grammar (often the language of the colonized group) for a creole.
What's a Lexifier vs. a Substrate?
Speaking in a code that belongs to another group, not the speaker's usual code, usually for interactional effects.
What's Crossing?
A Vietnamese teacher of English in Vietnam normally uses Vietnamese for classroom management but switches to English when scolding students who did not do their homework.
What is metaphorical codeswitching?
A framework to study language in public signs, in which attention is paid to code preference (which language is predominantly displayed), inscription (font types, colors, etc.), and emplament (where the sign is placed).
What is Geosemiotics?
(a) Recognizing words and grammar at the literal level vs. (b) Understanding the meaning of a sentence vs. (c) Interpreting the intended meaning of a sentence in context.
What's Intelligibility vs. Comprehensibility vs. Interpretability?
(a) an idiosyncratic, unsystematic language usage that is not widely recognized by any community vs. (b) a systematic language usage that is different from native-speaker norms vs. (c) same as (b) plus it is widespread in a large community (e.g., a country) vs. (d) same as (c) plus it is codified and used by authoritative figures.
What is a Mistake vs. a Deviation vs. an Innovation vs. a Norm?
A theory to analyze social identities as interactive processes in discourse in which speakers index their own identities and the identities of their recipients.
What is Positioning Theory?
(a) I went hiking with the TESOL group and shared with Jean the series of photos from the hike, then when I saw her I told her about the hike vs. (b) I found a popular meme about determination and inserted my hiking photo to create a new meme vs. (c) I took a photo of my hiking fellow plopping down exhausted on the ground on the top of the mountain and post the photo on the forum of the Linguistics Society of America, with the caption "When The Linguist Reaches A New Height."
What are examples of Resemiotization, Recombination, and Recontextualization?