Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Linguistics post 3: Lects

Lects

Welcome to the third in a series of threads on linguistics. (The first two were “Why I Dislike Ultra Woman” and “What is Linguistics, Anyway?”) Today’s post is on lects. A lect is a variety of a particular language as used by an individual or a group of language users. Lects may vary markedly from one another in terms of their pronunciation and their vocabulary. Different lects within a language are far less likely to vary in their morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure), although there may be some variation in these areas as well.

The most well-known type of lect is a dialect – the variety common to a group within a particular geographical area. At what point do dialects become so different that they are considered to be different languages? Is it when they differ so much that speakers of the two varieties can no longer understand one another (the mutual intelligibility criterion)?

It may surprise you to know that the answer to whether two communication systems are dialects of the same language or two different languages is NOT determined either by their mutual intelligibility or by their linguistic similarity. It is generally determined by the geopolitics of the speakers. There is an aphorism that says that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Some of the different dialects of Chinese are mutually unintelligible when spoken orally – in order to communicate, speakers of two such different dialects will either find a dialect they have in common (often Mandarin); or, failing that, while they speak they will use their index fingers to “write” what they are saying on the palm of their hands for the other conversant(s) to read. The Chinese system of writing attempts to transcribe the meanings rather than sounds of the language; it uses ideograms or logograms rather than letters. Each word would be represented by one or more ideograms. The speakers of the different dialects all share a writing system.

From a linguistic standpoint, and from the standpoint of mutual intelligibility, Swedish and Norwegian are much more alike than are some of the different dialects of Chinese. The same could be said of Spanish and Italian. The reason that the Chinese variants are considered to be dialects of a single language while Swedish and Norwegian, and Spanish and Italian, are considered to be separate languages has far more to do with national boundaries than linguistic ones.

Of course, the dialect vs. language decision is not as easy as using the “army and navy” test. If it were, I would not speak English; I would speak the “United States-an” language. (Of course, Noah Webster, the creator of the first American English dictionary, had wanted the U.S. to have our version of English be considered a separate, American, language, as a further means of showing our independence from England. Incidentally, it is him we can thank for many of the spelling differences such as our “color” vs. England’s “colour”.)

Another example: Is Scots a dialect of English or is it a separate language? Your answer will likely have at least as much to do with your political leanings as it will with any linguistic analysis.

As an aside, this discussion brings to mind a line from my favourite musical – My Fair Lady. In the song which begins, “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” Henry Higgins says, “Why in America, they haven’t used it [i.e., English] for years!” The musical is based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. It was also Shaw who pointed out that, “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”

So, as with many things language-related, the difference between a dialect and a language can by no means be determined by a single test. The division between a dialect and a language is societally imposed; there is no single criterion (e.g., mutual intelligibility, linguistic similarity, or geo-political boundaries) which an objective observer would be able to apply as a litmus test.

Incidentally, *everyone* who speaks a language speaks a dialect of that language. Some dialects are considered more favourably within a given society than others, and some mark one more obviously than others as having lived in a particular region, but *everyone* speaks a dialect. If you hear someone contrasting using a dialect with using “standard” English, you can rest assured that the person speaking has not learned the technical definition of a dialect! The “standard” would be considered a dialect, as well. I also wish to emphasize that *from a linguistic perspective* no lect is inherently superior to any other lect. Any perceived superiority is purely a subjective, social construct, not an objective, linguistic one. I plan to go into more detail about this in another thread.

In addition to dialects, there are other lects. For example:

- Age lects: You are far more likely to hear octogenarians than teenagers refer to ice boxes and horseless carriages, for example. Slang terminology tends to be very age specific. Everyone knows how ridiculous adults sound when they try to talk to their teenagers using the teenager’s slang.

- Gender lects: These are more pronounced in some languages than in others. A few generations ago, men in America were much more likely than women to swear aloud; that difference has lessened considerably in recent years.

To take an extreme example of a genderlect, according to http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/linguistics/examples.jsp , “In one segment of the Dublin deaf community, the native [Irish Sign Language] vocabularies for women and men are so different that they can impair communication on the most mundane topics. For example, men and women have different signs for everyday terms, such as 'cat,' 'Monday,' 'night' and 'red.' These varieties emerged from sex-segregated education at two residential schools for the deaf in Dublin.”

A single word or phrase might mark multiple lects. If you knew nothing about a person other than that they would say, “Oh, dearie me!” when they were flustered, you would likely guess the person to be an older woman.

- Idiolects: An idiolect is the way an individual speaks. No two people speak a language in the exact same way. Although there is obviously a great deal of overlap – or mutual intelligibility would be impossible – different individuals have slightly different vocabularies, and may use the same words in slightly different ways. Different people will have slightly different pronunciations of words and different preferences for how to assemble a sentence. It is such variations which allow experts to say with reasonable confidence that it was, in fact, the defendant who left the harassing message on the plaintiff’s answering machine or that a newly discovered text is not a hitherto unknown play by Shakespeare.

Please note that I have liberally scattered “weasel words” such as “tend,” and “likely,” throughout my discussion of lects. Although I would be rather surprised to find a teenage boy seriously uttering “Dearie me,” it could well happen. Most people have probably heard some adult *attempting* to sound “cool” by using teenage slang. And of course if one moves, one’s own idiolect may gradually change from being typical of the dialect spoken in the old place and may acquire aspects of the dialect spoken in the new region. Many people are bi- or multi-lectal: Able to switch the lect they use depending on the people with whom they are speaking.

“Register” is the term used for the language variety used for a particular purpose or social setting. For example, “The broad croaked” and “The woman passed away” convey the same basic meaning – that an adult female human being died – but the meaning is expressed using very different registers. The two sentences would not be used interchangeably, and they would have very different impacts upon the listener. A more subtle example would involve how carefully one chooses to articulate words: For example, “walking” would sound more formal than “walkin’,” and “Did you eat?” would be more formal than, “Djeet?” (If you listen closely, in the United States, at least, you will often hear people say something that sounds much more like the latter than the former.) Every language actually has five different registers; if you are interested in learning a little about all five, I would refer you to http://www.pflugervilleisd.net/curriculum/ela/grade1/documents/LanguageRegisters.pdf .

There is a misconception that the more formal registers are better than the less formal ones; but each serves its own purpose. Each is appropriate in some settings and inappropriate in others. An analogy frequently used by linguists is that registers are like clothing: One cannot say that a tuxedo is better than a bathing suit: The former would be uncomfortable and not particularly useful on a beach; the latter would be preposterous at a wedding. Each article of clothing, and each register or lect, has its own place.

*Much* more could be said about lects; but I hope that this post has given you a general feel for some of the different types of lects. In my next thread, I plan to discuss common misconceptions about signed languages.

Word up, dog. I feel ya, girlfriend. Yo.

Seriously, this is a fascinating discussion, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Best of all, it's extremely useful for writers. After all, we wouldn't want Bobby Bigmouth to speak in Elizabethan English, would we? (Although that might be an interesting plot bunny, should anyone wish to abscond with it.)

Oh, dearie me, is it that time already? Gotta slide, Clyde.

Fascinating! I didn't know there were so many lects - only knew of dialects because I think that one is more common knowledge.

With regards to idiolects, I think almost everyone would be "able to switch the lect they use depending on the people with whom they are speaking."

For example, at home I speak more "casually" (and mix my languages) than at university (depending to whom I am speaking to and there I would stick to one language) and so forth.

I am really enjoying these "lessons" - you never can know enough!

Terry and DW, I'm glad you are enjoying the series and finding something of value in it.

Terry, Thank you for the day-brightening humour. :-)

DW, I agree that everyone who has reached a certain comfort level in a language (I am purposely avoiding any technical terminology here) can switch registers. When I wrote about being bi- or multi-lectal I had been thinking more in terms of dialects. People will sometimes switch among the dialects of the places where they have lived when speaking with people in one of those places. They may also choose to affect a more prestigious dialect than their own when they are trying to impress people.

Joy,
Lynn

I think those who are in control of others are also able to say which dialects, sociolects etc. are "nice", "sophisticated" etc. and which are not. And they will tell you that it is their own dialects that are nice.

For example, since I live in the part of Sweden that is very close to Denmark, I am able to make a lot of comparisons between Sweden and Denmark, and I can see that Sweden is a lot more "capital-oriented" than Denmark is. That is, Stockholm dominates Sweden much more than Copenhagen dominates Denmark. One consequence of this is that upper-class people in Stockholm speaking their upper-class Stockholm dialect are understood not to speak a dialect at all. Instead they are thought to speak "national Swedish", or the only "right" kind of Swedish. They are regarded as the only dialect-free people in Sweden. "Stockholm-dialect", by contrast, is seen as something that is spoken by poorer and less educated people in Stockholm.

More than ten years ago there was a shattering conflict in former Yugoslavia, and a lot of people living there fled to Sweden. Even before the conflict broke out, however, a lot of people from Yugoslavia had been granted citizenship in Sweden. The two dominant groups in Yugoslavia are Serbs and Croats, and they spoke a language that was called Serbo-Croatian. A friend of mine asked a Serbian aquaintance of hers what the difference was between the Serbian and Croatian languages. "They are similar, but not the same," the Serbian woman had answered. "Serbian is a little finer." Serbia was the dominant and the richer part of former Yugoslavia.

In the same way that males dominates over women, men can decide what words are to be used to describe men and women. It is hardly a coincidence that women are often called bitches, but a man is usually called a son of a bitch. It is his mother who is the problem, not primarily himself. Also think of the ugly word "whore" for a woman whose sexual behaviour is reprehensible. There is no similarly ugly word for a man who is very promiscuous.

The word "rapist" is admittedly very ugly, but it is not a lot worse than the expression "a raped woman". Two Swedish researchers looked into a few cases where high school girls had been raped by a boy at the same school. In every case, the reaction by most of the other students at the school was that the girl was either a liar who had made the story up altogether, or else she was a whore who slept with everybody. Most of the other students blamed the girl, not the accused rapist.

This pattern became frighteningly obvious last year at a high school in northern Sweden. A boy raped a girl, who reported the rape to the police. The police found the boy's DNA on the girl's panties, and when he was questioned by the police the boy confessed. He took back his confession later, but he was nevertheless found guilty. He wasn't sent to jail because of his young age, but he was sent to another school and was not allowed to return to his old one. But when the boy was found guilty and sent away, the girl was ostracized at school and treated as a traitor, a liar and a slut. (Is there a male word for "slut", by the way?)

At the end of term the boy's old school had a ceremony at church as usual (Sweden is very secular nation, but there is no formal separation between church and state, and many schools have end-of-term ceremonies at church). The minister issued a special invitation for the boy who had raped the girl to attend. During the ceremony, the boy stood near the altar, dressed in white, and gave roses and hugs to all his former classmates. Afterwards, the minister was very pleased, claiming that the boy had stood up for "human dignity". Later that very night, however, the boy raped another girl. He was found guilty of this rape, too, and was sent to a treatment home for young sex offenders.

Now a large group of students at the school became still more agitated and claimed that the boy had been found guilty of two rapes even though he had committed none of them. So they contacted national Swedish television and asked them to come and make a documentary about how an innocent boy had been victimized by lying girls and a corrupt legal system. And indeed a TV team was sent to the small town in the north to find out what had happened there. The resulting documentary was devastating. There was a lot of evidence that the boy was indeed guilty of the two rapes, and his taped confession in particular (the confession that he later took back) made it very, very hard to believe that he was innocent. No evidence that he was innocent was put forth by any of his defenders. Of course, the most shocking thing was not the boy himself but his community, which unquestioningly backed up a rapist and turned its back on a raped girl. The minister who had celebrated the boy's "courage" and "human dignity" came through as a man who loved all his "brothers" but had little interest in a raped and suffering girl. And the principal of the school, who looked kind of terrified when she was being interviewed, said that she wanted to be "neutral" and not take sides, even though a raped girl was hounded at her school and two courts of law had found that the boy was a rapist and two girls had been raped.

My point in telling this story was to show that in a small and somewhat isolated community, the tendency among young people to blame the rape victim and exonerate the rapist, at least if the accused rapist is a boy who is moderately well-liked, was allowed to run amok.

I think that one important reason for the fight to exonerate boys accused of rape is that the word "rapist" is so ugly. It is too heartbreaking to apply that word to a well-liked boy. A lot of people, not least a lot of kids, boys and girls, are willing to fight to save a popular boy from that epithet. A raped girl, by contrast, is raped no matter who did it to her, so she is already fallen. Therefore it is easier to brand such a fallen girl as a liar than to accept that a popular boy is a rapist.

But I think that the words we use to describe boys and girls, men and women, show that the tendency to blame girls and women and exonerate boys and men is probably universal.

(Did you know that there is a fantastically derogatory word describing people like me, the feminists? That word is feminazi. Wow, I say. The offical Superman homepage, supermanhomepage.com, has a guy named Neal Bailey who wrote the offical review for "Superman Returns". He called Kate Bosworth's Lois in that movie a "feminazi". Wow. Look at that movie again and ask yourself where Lois in there acts like a female Nazi, or like a woman who wants to exterminate men.)

The winner writes history and makes up the words, too.

Ann

One of my professors particularly enjoys pointing out that there is no such thing as Standard English (a point with which I agree wholeheartedly). If you poll all English speakers, you will get a multitude of different answers to this query - for instance, Brits might say RP is standard while Americans might refer to the elusive accent usually used by news anchors.

The topic of varities of English in particular is amazingly broad because there are just so many - and they are not always mutually intelligible... for instance, Jamaican English as it is spoken among L1 speakers is barely understandable to me, a Canadian English speaker. Last year I borrowed a DVD of a movie called Dancehall Queen, entirely in Jamaican English, and had to watch with subtitles.

I also recall referring to age-lects as chronolects; that was in a French course, but I had assumed the same word would be used in English as well...

Idiolects are interesting; I have a friend who pparticularly likes to push the boundaries of English by using words of dubious validity such as "oftenly". Particularly interesting are idiolects which involve code-switching.

Julie

Ann, thank you for your post. You've actually helped lay the groundwork for a tangential discussion on language and culture in my next thread, which will discuss what determines whether a communication system is, in fact, a language. (I just finished writing the first draft of the post this morning. I'll probably post it by the end of the weekend.)

Julie, you make a good point about multiple standards for English. And you are giving me an opportunity to relate an anecdote I had wished to mention, but which had not fit nicely into my earlier post...Many years ago, I shared an office. When my officemate was not in the room, I would play music without using headphones. One day, he came in and heard a bit of my recording...It was of a Scotsman singing some Child Ballads. The songs were a capella and were in Scots. They were perfectly intelligible to me, and I had assumed they would be to other Americans, as well. Apparently, I was mistaken. My officemate listened to a few bars and then asked me whether the song was in Hebrew. Not only did he not understand what was being sung, he couldn't even identify the language. (As an aside, I personally think of Scots as a dialect of English. I am neutral with regards to Britain's politics, so I am only using linguistic similarities as the basis of my opinion.)

I'll bet your friend likes Tigger.

Code-switching is a topic near and dear to my heart. My dissertation actually involved a phenomenon closely tied to code-switching; specifically, the use of individual American Sign Language signs by hearing individuals who were communicating primarily in spoken English. On occasion, the individuals did truly code-switch -- they would stop speaking, make a sign, and then resume speaking. Most of the time, however, the signs occurred simultaneously with speech. The signs were used both to emphasize and elaborate on what was said.

Joy,
Lynn