Lingua e traduzione inglese 1

Early language acquisition

Humans acquire the language that they are exposed to, and they can acquire different languages at once. The stages are the same around the world, with some differences in structural levels that can be more important in some languages (Hungarian).

• Pre-birth: Language acquisition begins in the womb; the baby begins to familiarise with sounds and intonations of the people they’re close to.
• Birth to 6 months: As soon as they’re born, they can suck and swallow, and around 8 weeks, they start cooing. (They can do the lip sounds “ba, ma”.) Then there is the stage of babbling (playful strings of sounds), and they learn how to produce different intonations (questioning, complaining). They are modelling the extended sound pattern on what they hear without understanding.
• 6 to 18 months: The stage of holophrastic speech. Here, the baby is able to understand some words attached to familiar objects/people. By the end of this stage, the vocabulary is around 150 words, and many of those have extended meanings (e.g., "hot" used to indicate fear/danger). The process of establishing the appropriate range of a word is its packaging. This can happen because new vocabulary terms that cover part of the previous domain of an existing word are learned.
• 18 months to 2 years: Up to this stage, a child may repeat the same words over and over (echolalia). Then the child learns how to combine different words at first in two-word phrases (concatenation). The child learns that some items are semantically connected, mentally grouped together, and spoken in groups (network building). By age two, a child has an active vocabulary of around 500 words but can understand many more. Children's pronunciation also develops rapidly: almost all the vowel sounds that a child will need in the language are available by the age of two.
• 2 to 5 years: The pronunciation, intonation, and syntactic ability are perfected. Conversational and other pragmatic skills also develop fast: children learn how to hold the floor, how to interrupt appropriately, and how to negotiate politeness strategies.
• 6 years old: In this stage, the child acquires a rich capacity for language; from this critical age point, any further languages will have to be learned rather than acquired. This suggests that our human brains are genetically hardwired with a language acquisition device that allows us to acquire any languages we encounter in infant life and then shuts down.

History of English

English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark, and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Anglo-Frisian languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages (and, possibly, British Latin) that had previously been dominant.

Old English

Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. The biggest difference is the case system; there were inflections added to the end of nouns to indicate their function in the sentences. Old English had gender for nouns, and number was marked too. Phonetically speaking, it had phonemes that modern English hasn’t, like the letters 'bp', 'ae', and 'a-'.

Middle English

In the Middle English period, most of the cases were lost in favour of a more fixed word order for several reasons: The influence of Norman French and Orleans French brought a class speaking a non-case language. Even Danish influence, thanks to Viking invasions, with the speakers of Old Englishes, produced a contact situation that led to similarity in word roots. Standard plurals were being used in preference to -en, and weak past inflections were more productive than strong forms.

Modern English

By the time of the introduction of printing presses, Middle English relied more on syntactic word order than inflection. Language had a pronunciation change: this was known as the great vowel shift and was generally characterized by the raising of most vowel sounds (e.g., 'name' became 'neim'). Rhoticity was gradually lost from Old English, with modern exceptions only in Southwest and Northwest England. The common rhoticity in most American accents is due to the fact that settlers left England largely from rhotic areas and at a time that preceded the general loss of British rhoticity.

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics can be defined as investigating the interplay between language and society. One of the crucial areas which sociolinguistics focuses upon is how we vary our language used in different social contexts. Different levels of formality will affect the speech style we choose to adopt and affect the perception of social status and power between speakers. Another area of interest for sociolinguists is the study of language changes over time. Sociolinguists examined regional variation, cataloguing differences between speakers in specific areas. For instance, older speakers from rural locations who have never left the area of their birth were perceived to speak a form of pure dialect. The principal aim of this research was to record variations so that dictionaries and grammars of original varieties could be published.

Key terms

A distinction is made between the terms accent and dialect. Accent refers to pronunciation, while dialect refers to lexis and grammar as well as pronunciation. There are categories of stereotypes, markers, and indicators, coined by sociolinguists to describe language features.