Dialect continuum

Compare/Contrast Chinese (HK) culture with another culture. “Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.” (Mencken, n.d.) This shows that culture is always exists in any circumstance. In accordance with different periods, different countries, cultures become different and interactive. Like Hong Kong and Japan, where contain its own distinctive culture, yet influence each other culturally. Although Chinese culture (HK) and Japanese culture differed…

Language is a means of communication. Human beings have the most complicated language which have many systems within the same system. There are more than 6000 languages around the world (Anderson, 2010). The speaker of any language determine the history of the language and how it has been codified in dictionaries and what is should be a language or correct language and what it should not be a language or correct language. English language is one clear example of these processes of the language.…

1. Introduction This paper reports sociolinguistic variation and change patterns of T-glottalling in Manchester comparing with other dialects of English. T-gottalling, the phonological process whereby /t/ is replaced by a glottal stop in non-initial position, has been considered as the accent all over the UK in recent years. Database (number of token, factors); the definition of T-glottalling and simple example; the characteristic of Manchester pattern; T-glottalling, in English phonology, a…

English Punctuation through the Ages Punctuation can be defined as all the marks such as question mark, exclamation mark, quotation marks, period, comma, apostrophe, colon, semicolon, dash, and brackets/parentheses that are used in many languages’ writing texts to separate sentences, phrases and clauses in order to clarify their true meanings. No one can deny that without these marks both writers and readers would be lost and quite confused about the written language in front of them.…

David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage” is a book review on Bryan A. Garners “A dictionary of Modern American usage”. Wallace begins his review by stating that he believes Garners dictionary to be very good, however the only way for him to explain the magnitude of why Garners dictionary is good is to delve into the underlying strife involved in the politics of lexicography. He explains that there are “Usage Wars” which are silent wars fought in the introductory pages of…

they did not bother apologizing to her. Tan expresses that she feels proud to speak broken English to her mother because it is the broken English that built a lovable connection with her mother and she enjoys communicated with her mother using that dialect of English. Tan does a great job at explaining the struggles her mother faced from being an immigrant that does not speak fluent English. Immigrant parents are often calling their children for help with her paperwork, reading the mail and…

many similarities with other dialects including several nonstandard and standard English varieties spoken in the United States (Bailey, Baugh, & Mufwene, 2013). AAE have been at the center of a number of public debates and its analysis has sustained and sparked debates among sociolinguists (Bailey, Baugh, & Mufwene, 2013). It is difficult to explain how many individuals speak AAE since it is unclear about its exact meaning.…

I don’t even know how long we have been together. I have tried plenty of times to get rid of him, but he insisted on staying. I tried hiding in the dark but he is like the moon he follows every step that I made. In the morning, I attempted to leave through the front door, but the door would not open. It is like I am locked inside a cell. I had my first nightmare with the English language when I was in 6th grade. I remember clearly what occurred. It was a sunny day when my teacher uttered in the…

The ancient Maya independently developed a number of complex verbal and written languages, that were crucial to their culture. Today, 31 Mayan languages are spoken by modern Maya people. These languages all take their roots from older Mayan languages, which originate from the hypothetical language “Proto-Mayan”, which is theorized to have been born in the highlands of what is now Guatemala around 4000 years ago. Mesoamerican societies are special in that they are one of very few societies…

In the first place, dictionaries with standardized and regulated words will help us maintain “conventions of usage” (Bryson, 1990, p.151). “We must agree to spell cat c-a-t and not e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, and we must agree that by that word we mean a small furry quadruped that goes meow and sits comfortably on one’s lap and not a large lumbering beast that grows tusks and is exceeding difficult to housebreak” (Bryson, 1990, p.150). We seem to have so many names for the same items. Sub sandwich’s can…