Dialect continuum

article “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” provides an argument regarding a resolution arrived at by the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee (CCCC) concerning students’ dialects. From the article, this became an issue due to an influx of students with foreign dialects in American schools. Thus, the significant argument in the article regarded whether students should uphold language variety, modify or eradicate it altogether. Some scholars assume the existence of…

language, and within each language are different variations. And as social and political affairs progress, so will each language and variation grow and mold into different, new languages as they come together. Despite the wide variety of languages and dialects and their astounding differences, there are still clearly many distinct properties that amalgamate all language together through the human ability to communicate. Despite the congruencies between language and identity, they cannot and…

Throughout centuries, people from all around the world have experienced a change in the way they communicate. Communication has always been part of our lifestyle and it has changed as generations adapted new cultures, moved to other countries, etc. The article, What the World Will Speak in 2115, gives us a better explanation of how communication has varied from time to time. As well as how languages differ from one another and the different languages that have been revolving the world in the…

My transformation of the Shakespearean text employs many different grammatical features to create an effective, modern version of Marc Antony’s soliloquy. Features such as nominalisation, paragraphing and abstract noun groups are a few of the features used. My transformation is suitable for modern audiences, using both language and people that today’s society is familiar with. My transformed version of the soliloquy uses many grammatical techniques and features to make it as interesting and…

classmates had a fairly similar reaction when reading Mark Twain’s literary great, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although, I had a totally different reaction. The reason for classmates’ disdain of this novel was due to Mark Twain’s usage of dialects. They had a really hard time understanding what was happening, especially when the characters “spoke.” My friends have even told me they downright stopped reading or hated the novel even more when the character, Jim the slave, makes his grand…

therefore should be regarded as Englishes (Gee, 2011). Each child experiences the same development process of communication although it may take place under different circumstances, like in a different variation of English, different accent or different dialect. Different registers are used when the individual is presented in a variety of situations that match the formality that arises. For example, communication from parent to child would be respectful, authoritative and nurturing whilst it…

blacksmith’s boy, you might know the son of the local baronet, but you didn’t speak his language. You spoke the language of your social group, and he that of his, and over the centuries these social dialects remained widely separated” (329). England today is still separated by the difference in dialects and accents, and it is easy to tell someone’s background and family history solely based on the way they are speaking. It is hard to cross the social lines because of the great barrier that…

different culture; however, what they least expect is that the language they speak is a personal form of art. In Student’s Right to Their Own Language, the author describes the situation of, “whether our rejection of students who do not adopt the dialect most familiar to us is based on any real merit,” the author then continues on speaking how those trying to make changes are “rejecting the students themselves, rejecting them because their, racial, social, and cultural origins.” Being able to…

In English instruction, both slang and dialect are treated as unsatisfactory forms of communication. The emphasis on proper English in the classroom neglects to acknowledge the diversity of the speakers who constitute the Diaspora of English. Consequently, many English speakers do not even know the difference between slang and dialect, and are unaware of how their own speech is affected. For instance, if a young person were to say “I ain’t got no homework today”, this may be interpreted as slang…

integrity and speak properly? This situation is one that I know I am not alone in, which leads me to ask: What is standard American English, really? I think it has more to do with where you are rather than a “by the book” grammatical breakdown of a dialect given to a country by the…