The maintenance of regional dialects: a matter of gender? Boys, but not girls, use local varieties in relation to their friends' nativeness and local identity (original) (raw)
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The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation.
2013
Despite the assumption in early studies that children are monostylistic until sometime around adolescence, a number of studies since then have demonstrated that adult-like patterns of variation may be acquired much earlier. How much earlier, however, is still subject to some debate. In this paper we contribute to this research through an analyses of a number of lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic variables across 29 caregiver/child pairs aged 2;10 to 4;2 in interaction with their primary caregivers. We first establish the patterns of use — both linguistic and social — in caregiver speech and then investigate whether these patterns of use are evident in the child speech. Our findings show that the acquisition of variation is highly variable dependent: some show age differentiation, others do not; some show acquisition of styleshifting, others do not; some show correlations between caregiver input and child output, others do not. We interpret these findings in the light of community norms, social recognition and sociolinguistic value in the acquisition of variation at these early stages.
Chapter 11. Sociostylistic variation in L2 French
John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 2022
Using a mixed-effects model and sociolinguistic interviews, this study provides empirical evidence for the emergence of targetlike patterns of phonological variation in L2 French learners during study abroad. Specifically, this study examines the acquisition of a phonological variable demonstrating sociostylistic variation in L1 speech: variable schwa deletion in clitics (/ə/ realized as [oe] or null, as in tu me dis [ty moe di] ~ [tym di] 'you tell me'). Results demonstrate that variation patterns of L2 French learners are conditioned by the phonological context of the clitic and that acquisition of variation follows a predictable order based on clitic type. Results also demonstrate that time spent abroad and social networks with native speakers are significant predictors of L2 variation patterns.
The dialect laboratory: introductory remarks
De Vogelaer, Gunther & Guido Seiler (2012). The dialect lab: dialects as a testing ground for theories of language change. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins., 2012
Even though adolescence is well-known to be a key period for the acquisition of vernacular varieties, there seems to be little research on how attitudes change during adolescence. In addition, most sociolinguistic studies on adolescent language hardly discuss developmental factors. This study tries to mend these gaps in our knowledge, by investigating how attitudes towards a number of varieties of Dutch change in Flemish children between 8 and 18 years of age. Adolescence is shown to be a period in which attitudes further emerge and change considerably. The youngest children in our sample do seem to recognize Standard Dutch as a model for their own speech, and are thus competent to distinguish between different varieties of Dutch, but they hardly attribute any non-linguistic significance to language variation. As children grow older, they realize that there is a correlation between language variation and societal prestige. In addition, they become more sensitive to the 'covert prestige' of, especially, the local variety, which is increasingly evaluated as indexing integrity and as a means towards social and/or in-group success. Significant parallels are revealed between sociolinguistic and psychosocial development, including 11-12year-olds' tendency to think in terms of 'perceived popularity' (Cillessen and Rose 2005), and the peak around the age of 16 in conventional and social-clique dominated reasoning about friendship .
Socializing Language Choices: When Variation in the Language Environment Supports Acquisition 1
A child's family network helps scaffold his/her language acquisition, transmitting style and variation through language choice and usage. By way of this knowledge, the child becomes a competent speaker in his/her community. We conducted a case study in Veneto (Italy), where children grow up in contact with both the regional language, Veneto, and Italian, the official national language. Adopting a (psycho)sociolinguistic approach to our corpora, we observed the language production of a young boy, Francesco (25 months) as he participated in multiparty interactions with his nuclear (his parents) and extended family members (his grandparents and one aunt). All utterances were transcribed and assigned to a category: Veneto, Italian, or mixed. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the child's utterances and those produced by his interlocutors. The overall results show that (1) adults prefer using Italian in their child-addressed speech, (2) Francesco uses mainly Italian, and (3) lexical choices made during multiparty interactions showed that Francesco's Veneto production was greater when he was interacting with speakers who use more Veneto. The qualitative analyses focus on the adults' different recasts of vocalic elements produced by Francesco in the determiner slot. We discuss how variation might guide the process of language socialization. Key words: Veneto – Italian – determiners – pragmatics – variation – language socialization 1 I would like to thank Vivian Waltz for proofreading this manuscript.
Divjak, Dagmar & Stefan Gries (eds.). Frequency effects in language. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012
Language change is well-known to show frequency effects. Depending on the mechanism of change that is observed, frequent items may lead a change or lag behind in it (see, e.g., Bybee and Hopper 2001: 10-19 for discussion). This chapter discusses shifts in the gender system of East and West Flemish dialects of Dutch. It is shown that at least two mechanisms of change are at work, viz. standardisation, which causes lexical items to adopt the gender of their Standard Dutch counterpart, and resemanticisation, i.e. a tendency in Dutch to replace the 'grammatical' system of pronominal reference with a system operating on a semantic basis, in which highly individuated nouns trigger the use of etymologically masculine pronouns (hij 'he', hem 'him'), whereas weakly individuated nouns are referred to with neuter het 'it' . It is investigated to what extent frequency data can be used to disentangle the effects of standardisation and resemanticisation. Data from a questionnaire survey show that standardisation affects high-frequency items, whereas resemanticisation affects low-frequency items. In addition, differences are found with respect to the type of frequency data that provide the best match for the data. For standardisation, frequency data extracted from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) provide the best results, whereas resemanticisation is better predicted using a frequency measure capturing age of acquisition and usage frequencies in child language. This underscores that frequency effects often merely reflect some deeper property of language patterns rather than being a conclusive explanation in their own right. In this chapter, frequency effects in standardisation reflect the intensity to which dialect speakers are exposed to nouns' standard language gender, whereas the frequency effects in resemanticisation reveal different ages at which nouns are acquired by children, which appears to influence the odds that these nouns' grammatical gender can be learned successfully.
Second dialect acquisition: A sociophonetic perspective
Many people change aspects of their accent after moving to a new region. What kinds of changes are made, and why does it matter? Studies of second dialect acquisition (SDA) indicate that geographically mobile speakers change specific dialect features in ways that reflect the complex interaction of linguistic, social, and developmental factors in language use. This article reviews these findings from a sociophonetic perspective, paying particular attention to their theoretical implications, the methodological issues associated with studying SDA, and avenues for future research.
Whether social uses of language, in concert with their acquisition, are driven by the awareness of the social value assigned to linguistic variants remains unanswered. The present study examines how 185 French native speakers, aged from 2 to 6 years from different social backgrounds, produce and evaluate a well-known French phonological alternation, the liaison: obligatory liaisons, which are categorical and do not vary sociolinguistically for adults, and variable liaisons, which are a sociolinguistic variable and are more frequently produced by higher-class adults. Different developmental and social patterns were found for obligatory and variable liaisons. Children's productions of obligatory liaisons were related to their judgments when 3-4 years old, regardless of the children's social backgrounds.
Social Dialects from a Linguistic Perspective: Assumptions, Current Research, and Future Directions
1969
This paper begins with a discussion of the assumptions basic to the study of both language and social dialects: verbal systems are arbitrary. all languages or dialects are adequate as communicative systems. they are systematic and ordered and learned in the context of the community. A survey of current work and findings in dialect studies follows. In the last part of the paper. the author discusses research needs in the areas of (1) field techniques (size of sample necessary for a reliable l s.,
Vous or tu ? Native and non-native speakers of French on a sociolinguistic tightrope
International Review of Applied Linguistics 42 (4), 383-402, 2004
Sociolinguistic rules governing choice of pronouns of address are notoriously difficult in French, despite the fact that the number of variants is rather limited: the more formal vous versus the more informal tu. Children with French as L1 learn to use pronouns of address appropriately as part of their socialization process. The learning curve is much steeper for instructed learners of French and many never reach the summit. The present contribution focuses on the effects of situational and sociobiographical variables on the self-reported and actual use of pronouns of address in native and non-native French. Data on self-reported pronoun use in different situations were collected from 125 participants through a written questionnaire. A corpus of conversations between native (n = 9) and non-native (n = 52) speakers of French provided data on the actual use of address pronouns.