Language Varieties
1. Speech community
It is a group of people who live in the same society and share a set of linguistic norms and
expectations. Such groups can be villages, towns, countries, political or professional communities,
communities with shared hobbies, interests, lifestyles, or even just a group of friends. The linguistic
features in common are found at the level of vocabulary, phonology and syntax. your family is a
speech community, another speech community would be comprised of your parents and their
colleagues at work, another one is you and your brothers and another one is you and your friends.
A speech community emphasizes two shared concepts:
• Shared community membership
• Shared linguistic communication
Individuals adjust their language as they come into contact with members of different speech
communities.
2. Types of Dialects
Variation in language may be found in:
2.1 Regional (Geographical) Dialect
As people speaking the same language spread over a wide geographical area, dialectal differences
among them increase. The larger the geographical distance between two groups of the same
language community is, the greater the inter-dialectal differences will be.
2.2. Social Dialect (Sociolect):
People differ according to their social, economic and educational status. Such factors certainly
influence the person’s dialect. An educated man uses a language that is different from an illiterate’s.
A professor’s dialect is different from an artist’s. The speaker’s educational level determines the
level and type of their companionship. Who you are determines with whom you socialize. Each
group develops their own distinct social dialects (sociolect).
2.3. Individual Dialect (Idiolect):
Let’s assume that two individuals belong to the same region, live in the same city and even in the
same street, are from the same family and have the same socio-economic status. Their individual
dialects will inevitably be different. Everyone speaks their native or foreign language in a unique
manner that distinguishes him/ her from other speakers of the same dialect. This unique manner is
called an idiolect. A language like English, spoken natively by about 500 million people has, in fact,
500 million distinct idiolects. No two persons speak a language in exactly the same way.
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Every idiolect is characterized by some physical features dependent on the physiology of the
speaker’s vocal system. There are speech characteristics that are special to every single speaker.
2.4. Racial Dialect:
A rational minority living among a language majority develops its own dialect, which is the
outcome of the interaction between two languages: the first language of the minority (L1) and the
second language (L2) which is the language of the majority. L3 is then created, a new dialect of L2.
In the USA, for instance, Afro-Americans have their own dialect called Black English. Turks in
Germany have developed Turkish German; a dialect resulted from German influenced by Turkish.
In countries with a lot of immigrants, like the USA, there are dozens of racial dialects: every
immigrant minority develops a special racial dialect, e.g. Vietnamese English, Spanglish,
Mexican English…
2.5. Professional Dialects:
Every profession has its own jargon, which means a professional dialect, a dialect with its unique
terminology. Engineers, for instance, use terms not used by psychologists or lawyers or cooks and
agriculturists use different terms than those used by doctors. Each jargon has its own lexicon
(vocabulary).
2.6. Colloquial and Standard Dialects:
Every language normally shows itself in two major varieties: standard and colloquial. The standard
dialect (SD) is that of science, literature, formal writings, university lectures, dignified speeches…
The colloquial dialect (CD) is spoken at home, streets, and where the SD is not used.
The CD is characterized by its short sentences, simple structure and frequent vocabulary. The SD
and the CD are in complementary distribution: one is used where the other cannot be used. The
degree of difference, however, between the SD and the CD varies from a language to another .
