Review: speech community

Do you remember speech community?

**ASK STUDENTS: What’s a speech community? We discussed it last lecture…

SPEECH COMMUNITY: All the people that you talk to everyday who use your language and dialect and now we can add: people who you talk to everyday you who use your language and dialect or languages and dialects.

For example in any given day, a immigrant New York taxi driver may speak his regional dialect, a social dialect (working-class), Standard English, and maybe a different native language, for example Arabic.

VERBAL REPERTOIRE

Now, every person within his or her speech community has what is called a verbal repertoire

SLIDE 2: Verbal Repertoire

VERBAL REPERTOIRE: The total range of linguistic resources a person has at his disposal is called a verbal repertoire. This could be another language, or it could be a regional or social dialect.

Now, any speaker of a language/code chooses the words he needs, or just likes, from his VERBAL REPERTOIRE.

SLIDE 3: EXAMPLE

For someone who is multilingual, one language might be better for one thing and another for something else. Maybe you speak Russian at home and on the street, but you do a lot of business in English. Later, when you discuss politics with a friend, you switch to Ukrainian. Maybe you use a particular language with a different relative? This is an example of how you might use your verbal repertoire.

THE POINT is YOU choose when to use a particular language, and when not to.

Code-mixing

To return to code-mixing:

Code-mixing, again, is the mixing of two distinct languages or codes in a sentence. It usually happens in speech communities where people know more than one language very well—in fact, it happens in your speech community. Right?

It is our first example of what happens when different languages meet. The purpose for code-mixing seems to be to symbolize a somewhat unclear, ambiguous situation where neither one or the other language will describe it best. I like the example from the book—the author calls it a linguistic cocktail: a little of this language and a little of that language mixed up to make something better. It is often used also as an identifying mark of a persons multicultural origin. To suggest you come from both worlds—two worlds represented by the two languages.

An interesting example of this is Surzhyk:

Slide 4: surzhyk

Surzhyk: суржик, is currently the mixed language used by fifteen to twenty percent of the population of Ukraine. It is a mixture of Ukrainian substratum with Russian superstratum. Normally Russian vocabulary is combined with Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation.

The most interesting aspect of code-mixing between languages is that there are certain rules that still have to be followed. Only one particular syntactic constraint is possible.

Note that, the fact that there are rules suggests some underlying possibly universal rules for using language that can apply to both languages at once. If you remember Chomsky’s idea of a Universal Grammar, this is one of the places where it intersects with sociolinguistics.