МІНІСТЕРСТВО ОСВІТИ І НАУКИ УКРАЇНИ

ХАРКІВСЬКИЙ НАЦІОНАЛЬНИЙ УНІВЕРСИТЕТ

імені В.Н. Каразіна
Факультет іноземних мов

ПРАКТИЧНА РОБОТА
з курсу «Мова. Культура. Суспільство»

Тема:« Language variation. Standard variety. Pan-dialectal competence. Types of lects:

idiolects, dialects»

Виконавці:
Солдатова Валерія
Кулемєчев Степан
Гасанова Аміла
Долженко Валерія
Групи:
ЯК-31
ЯФ-31

Харків 2022
 Table of contents
1. Basic Text
o Language variation.
o Standard variety.
o Pan-dialectal competence.
o Types of lects: idiolects, dialects.
2. Satellite video
3. Key words
4. Phrasal sets
5. Let’s talk
6. List of sources
 Language Variation

Regional Social Contextual

Dialect Sociolect Register

Standard Field
Idiolect
Dialect

Mood
Ethnolect

Non Standard Tone

Dialect
Class Dialect Variation

Upper class
Accent
Jargons
Middle class

Lower class
Gender
Difference
Men/Women
 (1) Language variation. Standard
variety. Pan-dialectal competence.
Types of lects: idiolects, dialects
In order to argue about language variation, about standard variety, about pan-dialectal competence, to
understand how idiolects differ from dialects, let us start from the end and from the reverse, asking the
question: what is a dialect and what is an idiolect. By answering it, we can talk about the related
concepts mentioned above to arrive at some understanding for the purposes of our meeting.
So, dialect. The word has many formulations united by one idea. Although no scholar has been able to
give an unambiguous interpretation of the word, many encyclopedic works nevertheless speak of
dialect as a "variation of language"1, 2 supplementing this idea with minor extensions.
Anyway, not the introductory, not the profane, not the purely encyclopedic, but the scientific definition
of dialect has a long history of failures, which ended with the advent of modernity.
The reason for this is far from the weakness of linguists, but rather the inaccessibility of the intuitive
concept. The questions that arise in formulating it defeat any attempt to find a definition.
For example, can we consider Ukrainian or French to be dialects? As, for example, Old Slavonic or
Romance, or - let us go further - Indo-European?
The next question may sound as follows: if a dialect is a kind of language, why cannot we call a
language a kind of dialect? Who says, for example, that French and English are different languages,
and that the dialect of the Ryukyu Islands refers to Japanese, when by most accounts they are mutually
distant?
These questions do not allow the dialect-language dichotomy to fit into one or two lines. One can say: a
dialect is a variation of a language, but what does this "variation" mean: how to fumble for it, much
less how to separate it from other variations, and what prevents one from declaring all languages as
variations in this case?
The questions generate distrust of the dichotomy itself. That is why, for example, the famous linguist
Noam Chomsky was one of the first to reject any "dialect-language" division, citing the excessive
politicization of the taxonomy and the admittedly non-practicity at the edge of fictitiousness 3.
Idiolect is also a "blind corner" of linguistics. If we define it as "the language or speech pattern of one
individual at a particular period of life" 4 like a typical dictionary meaning, we also encounter a rather
broad ambiguity.
Obviously, there are people in the world who speak somewhat more irregularly than is customary in
literary speech. After all, we must admit that many of us, if not all, do.
To know all the rules of the world from the syntax handbooks of Dietmar Eliashevich Rosenthal and to
use every time in speech speaking in Russian, without brightening up, for example, with some other
words that have not yet entered the literary language - you could claim that this is the literary norm,
which nevertheless seems quite unattainable.
1 Энциклопедия Британника: “dialect, a variety of a language that signals where a person comes from.”
2 Мерриам Уэбстер: “a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar[...]”
3 Noam Chomsky 1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use: “the commonsense notion of language has a
crucial sociopolitical dimension[…] Rather, all scientific approaches have simply abandoned those elements of what is
called ‘language’ in common use.”
4 Merriam-Webster Dictionary of the English language: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiolect
But, for example, if a person is a little more liberated and introduces into speech trendy words like
"meme", "weaboo", "gamer" - as almost all young people do - in this case, in the absence of fixation of
these words in the explanatory dictionaries of Ukrainian, Russian, English or any other language, then
there is something wrong in his literary speech, but the question arises: how to call it from a scientific
point of view?
We could call it an idiolect, since it is definitely a pattern of speech, characteristic of a particular
person, as the use is in any case highly individual.
We could call it a sociolect, because it is easy to find at least a couple of people who use non-literary
words in a common manner because they belong to a common interest group (scientists, physicists,
translators, artists, Japanese cartoonists, minorities, etc.).
We would end up calling it a dialect if, for example, these scientists, physicists, or fans of Japanese pop
culture lived geographically compactly, for example in the same dormitory.
They could call it illiteracy, since a deviation from the literary "correct" norm is so called. What is that?
Could it be language? Why not?
Nor does the attribution of specific speech to linguistic variation and standard variety, terms that also
have neither a specific line of demarcation nor a clear definition.
What is linguistic variation? This notion has no basis in fact, rather it is an umbrella term that
encompasses all sorts of language variation - which sounds rather shaky because of the even greater
scope for abusive interpretation. In cleverer words it is formulated roughly as: regional, social, or
contextual differences in the ways that a particular language is used.5
Of course, the term is not worth a penny and is as useless to science as the unit of measure "far" is to
astronomy.
But the clarity of the term "standard variation" cannot be denied. If the previous term referred more or
less both to a dialect and language, this term refers exclusively to a language.
There are no two Japanese languages, and although we live in a reality where it is not Martin Luther or
Taras Shevchenko who form languages or parallel fixed standard forms of one language, but
government ministries through policy and language planning that protect the sacred "ancestral
language", we are talking about some single universal language basis - we are dealing with a standard:
how to correctly conjugate verbs, place punctuation, sound phonetics, use categories of politeness, etc.
- how right it is and how useful it is for language development from the point of view of state linguists.
Standard means a language somehow or other created on the basis of some dialect. It can be a
metropolitan dialect, as in Japanese, Chinese or Russian, or it can be a dialectal basis on an exterritorial
basis, as in Ukrainian or German.
This term is short and clear, and its developers honestly state "variation" in its name, because, as we
know, to some extent all people are carriers of certain idiolects, and there is no pure standard in nature.
As opposed to the state-unifying system of standardized language, there is what is called pandialectical
competence. In contrast to the picture of standardized language, pandialectical competence is a natural
process of standardization of idioms, not an artificial one.
If the state chooses a dialect and inflates it into a standard by artificially interfering with language time
and space, introducing repressive laws and crippling language, pandialectical competence is a natural
laissez-faire development and a standardization not inferior in scope to state standardization.
This kind of standardization does not usually depend on political motives, but mainly on economic
ones, when one nation accepts a foreign language or dialect as a lingua franca for the sake of mutually
intelligible negotiations in a kind of mediating language - called pidgin or Creole.

5 R.L. Trask, Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics.

So we see the precision of the terms pandialectic competence (although the precision was formed only
after my disclosure) and standartized diversity, but the broadness of the interpretation of dialect and
language - or rather their obvious immediate difference - does not allow them to be used as strict
scientific terms.
Indeed, the problem of "language-dialect" is a highly politicized issue. In one way or another, the
efforts of nationalism have assigned language a role as the identity of a nation and a people.
Language, in many places, is both a symbol of division and a symbol of unification. Dialect, or rather
the recognition of an idiom as a dialect, is also a political move aimed at suppressing a new competing
idiom, a new language that will cause a "split" within a supposedly "monolithic nation," or a
unification at a split.
For example, the Ukrainian language is gaining momentum in Ukraine for the sake of unification of
Ukrainians against the background of disunity with Russia, while at the macro level the same
Ruthenian language is not recognized as a separate language, but is considered by our Solo-linguistic
lawmakers as simply an untenable offshoot, or rather a "dialect" of Ukrainian.
Or, for example, recall the history of the Vietnamese language, when the French colonial administration
imposed the Latin alphabet on the Vietnamese instead of the Chinese hieroglyphics 6. This decision was
predetermined not by science, but by politics: both colonial (France) and nationalistically engaged
figures presenting then 20th century revolutionary China as an enemy perhaps worse than France.
One may recall the ideas of some Japanese intellectuals to abandon hieroglyphics altogether (Maejima
Hisoka), or even to adopt simplified English (Mori Arinori), which would have alienated the
representatives of the Rising Sun from the Chinese - by the Meiji era - much hated7.
Language is a weapon of propaganda and politics, and, as one famous linguist, Max Weinreich, said,
"dialect with army and navy.
In the absence of linguistic criteria, we invent sociological and political ones, speaking not from a
philological point of view, evaluating corpus, vocabulary, articulation and syntax, but from a social
one: the uses, the receptions, the self-identifications of users, which of course looks shaky because we
bypass the methodology of the science of linguistics directly addressing this question.
Sometimes our authorities do not hesitate to ignore the scientific insights that inhibit their political
moves.
The fault of linguistics's political subjugation has been the general tendency of private political
interests to infiltrate linguistics in much the same way as they have infiltrated economics, creating a
certain bias and indeterminacy.
We see a bias in linguistics as well, which prevents a return to science and, perhaps for some, an
inconvenient truth. There is no scientific justification in the methodology of classifying idioms as
language or dialect, much less any definitions.
Ruthenian has come to be considered a dialect, and Putonghua is referred to as Chinese far from
because it is necessary or it is a natural process of dialect development reversal, but because of some
kind of power interests and political manipulation.
The questions remain unresolved, and linguistic science has not been taken up in resolving this
dichotomy.

6 Language planning and language policy: East Asian perspectives (pp.159-206)Chapter: Viet Nam: Quoc Ngu,
colonialism and language policyPublisher: Psychology Press
7 Ueda, Atsuko. Language, Nation, Race: Volume 1 (New Interventions in Japanese Studies) (p. 19-29). University of
California Press. Kindle Edition
(2) Satellite video
https://youtu.be/QHhOFZgoono
Varieties of language: The term linguistic variation (or simply variation) refers to
regional, social, or contextual. Differences in the ways that a particular language is
used. In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called an isolect or lect, is a specific form of a
language or language cluster. Variation between languages, dialects, and speakers is
known as interspeaker variation. There is the four types of language variation of
different kinds of Language Varieties: pidgin, creole, regional dialect, minority
dialect.
Factors that influence it include gender, age, social class, etc.This may include
languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard
variety.
3. Key words

Key terms: language, variation, standard, variety, pan-dialectal, idiolects, dialects

4. Phrasal Set

- Accent- Dialect-
Jargon- Vocabulary-
Words- Sounds

-Language is a weapon of
- Different ways of speaking - Language propaganda and politics-
Influences the way we think Dialect with army and navy-
about reality - To express ideas- Sociological and political-
Argue a point- Provide directions Evaluating corpus-
Vocabulary- Articulation and
syntax
5. Let’s talk
1. Do you understand this quotation? Do you agree with this
statement?
“Language is dialect with army and navy”
2. Types of global communication:
a) standard variety, b) pan-dialectal competence
3. Think about distinguishing between the following terms:
a) Idiolect, b) dialect
4. Simulate a dialogue:
a) between people who agree and disagree with the statement “Ukrainian
or French are dialects of Indo-European language”
5. Act as:
a) the state's recognition of the idiom as a dialect has only cultural move,
b) that calling an idiom as a dialect is a political move also.
(6) The list of Sourses
 Энциклопедия Британника: “dialect, a variety of a language that signals where a
person comes from.”
 Мерриам Уэбстер: “a regional variety of language distinguished by features of
vocabulary, grammar[...]”
 Noam Chomsky 1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use: “the
commonsense notion of language has a crucial sociopolitical dimension[…]
Rather, all scientific approaches have simply abandoned those elements of what is
called ‘language’ in common use.”
 Merriam-Webster Dictionary of the English language: https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/idiolect
 R.L. Trask, Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics
 Language planning and language policy: East Asian perspectives (pp.159-
206)Chapter: Viet Nam: Quoc Ngu, colonialism and language policy Publisher:
Psychology Press
Ueda, Atsuko. Language, Nation, Race: Volume 1 (New Interventions in Japanese
Studies) (p. 19-29). University of California Press. Kindle Edition