Dialectology
The study of regional dialects
What is dialectology?
A variety of a language associated with a geographical/regional area
What is a regiolect?
A set of languages which have evolved from a common ancestor
What is a language family?
Facts or observations that are common in language but may not be true for all languages
What are language tendencies?
The ability of two people to understand each other when speaking
What is mutual intelligibility?
The language variety of a family or other small group
What is a familect?
The field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison
What is linguistic typology?
"All languages have pronouns" is an example of this
What is an absolute universal?
Situation in which a large number of contiguous dialects exist, each mutually intelligible with the next, but with the dialects at either end being mutually unintelligible
What is a dialect continuum?
A variety of a language associated with an ethnic group
What is an ethnolect?
Characteristics that are common to all human languages
What are language universals?
"If a language is VO, it will have prepositions. If it’s OV, it will have postpositions" is an example of this
What is an implicit universal?
A phenomenon in which the presence of an observer influences the behavior of the subject being observed
What is the observer's paradox?
A variety of a language defined by social factors such as age, religion, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status
What is a sociolect?
Facts or observations that apply to ALL known languages in the world
What are absolute universals?
Unacknowledged biases, assumptions, or limited perspectives stemming from one's own cultural background
What is a cultural blind spot?
The study of the impact of social status on the production of /ɹ/ in casual speech
What is Labov's Department Store experiment?
The language variety of an individual speaker
What is an idiolect?
Characteristics of a language that imply the presence of another characteristic
What are implicit universals?
Specialized knowledge and perhaps specialized ways of talking about this knowledge, as relating to the environment
What is traditional ecological knowledge?