Riassunto esame di inglese I

VARIETY

Variety in language is a particular kind of speech or writing that you find in a particular situation. Sometimes it's also called a Register. For example, lawyers in court speak in a special way to the judge, they're using the variety (or register) of Legal English. English language has a lot of varieties.

REGIONAL VARIATION

Never mix up a dialect and an accent!!

A dialect is recognized because of its distinctive words, while an accent is a matter of pronunciation! For example, people in Glasgow and Edinburgh speak the Scots dialect of English, but their accents are very different. And also, many kinds of accents are used when people speak standard English.

DIALECT

REGIONAL DIALECTS:

When we talk about dialects, we refer to it shows a person's geographical origins in a particular country or city. American English and British English are both dialects of English. And within Britain, you can find different kinds of dialects.

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Cockney English refers to the accent and dialect of English traditionally spoken by working-class Londoners. There are a great many phonetic differences between Cockney and RP, some of the most noticeable are:

1. 'th' - Cockney would replace voiceless 'th' /θ/ in words like 'think', 'theatre', 'author', with /f/

2. Glottal Stops /ʔ/ - Cockney speakers will use glottal stops to replace /t/ before consonants and weak vowels

3. 'h' dropping - In Cockney, you don't pronounce /h/ at all.

A highly distinctive feature of Cockney is its use of rhyming words to communicate meanings. For example:

• Adam and Eve - "Would you it?" (believe)

• (phone) dog and bone - "He's on the phone"

Scouse English (or Liverpool English) is an accent and dialect closely associated with the city of Liverpool.

SOCIAL DIALECTS, speaker is from Socially, have which tells you where the

But we can also OCCUPATIONAL DIALECTS,

The sortand which are varieties of the language which tells youof job a person does (if he/she speaks or writes like a lawyer or a scientist).

ACCENTA accent is the part of your voice which tells the listener which country you come from, and sometimes it can tell you something about how a person was educated.

RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (RP) (domanda d'esame)

• It's an accent which doesn't give you any geographical information at all.
• It's associated with royalty, governement, the church of England, public schools..
• it's called received because it has been passed down (tramandato) by the elite groups in Britain, and it has always been the accent favoured by the court and the upper class.
• Less than 3 percent of the population in Britain uses RP, and some replaced it with a mixed Appunti ingleseUniversità di MacerataV. Nicole accent, a mix of RP and a regional dialect, called MODIFIED RP.

ESTUARY ENGLISH (domanda d'esame)

• Spoken by a

A large and growing number of people in the South of England.

It's not Cockney nor RP, but somewhere in between.

It's called Estuary because it's spoken around the river Thames (il Tamigi).

Estuary is tipped to dominate general British pronunciation within 50 years.

A feature of people speaking Estuary English is that they use a Glottal Stop instead of a /t/ in words like "Little" (controllate la pronuncia su internet sennò il prof vi rompe le scatolee!!). They also replace /l/ with /u/ at the end of words like "minimal" = "minimu" (controllate sempre la pronuncia).

AmE vs BrE (domanda d'esame)

1 Difference: Vocabulary

While Americans go on VACATION, Brits go on HOLIDAY; Americans live in APARTMENTS, Brits live in FLATS.

2 Difference: Collective nouns (used to refer to a group of individuals)

AmE collective nouns are SINGULAR: "staff": group of employees, "Band": group of musicians, as in

“the band IS good”.BrE collective nouns can be SINGULAR or PLURAL : “The team are playing tonight” or “Theteam is playing tonight”

Difference: Auxilary Verbs3 (also known as helping verbs, they help the main verb by adding information about time and modality.)

“SHALL” :

• Brits use it to express the future “I shall go home now”; Americans instead, won't use it cause it seems very formal. They would probably say “I will go home now”.
• In question form, Brits would say “Shall we go now?” while Americans would probably say “Should we go now?”

Difference: 4th Past tense :

1. AmE past tense of “learn” is LEARNED
2. BrE has 2 options: LEARNED or LEARNT, so AmE tend to use the -ed ending, BrE tend to use the -t ending

Past Participle :

1. AmE uses the -en ending for some irregular verbs. An American might say “I have never gotten caught”, while Britains would say “I

Regional Variation in American English

Many of the distinctive features of American English can be established by comparing it with the other major model of English language use. The scientific study of US regional dialects is over a century old, having begun with the formation of the American Dialect Society in 1889. These studies have established the existence of 3 broad dialect areas:

1. Northern: an area not to be confused with the political "north" of the Civil War period. Historically it's the area of New England, but now it extends west in a narrow northern strip from western Vermont through New York and across all the northern states to the Pacific coast. Dialect

5 Differences in Spelling:

American English	British English
Color	Colour
Behavior	Behaviour
Traveled	Travelled

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Studies show that there is an important boundary separating western and eastern New England. There is a distinctive accent, a major feature of which is the loss of the final -r.

Southern: the coastal and piedmont areas of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, the Gulf States and extending into the eastern of Texas. In this area there is a frequent loss of final -r.

Midland: a very large area extending across almost the whole country, from southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania and northern Delaware and the remaining states. Northern and southern dialect subregions can be identified. One of the northern features is a merger of pronunciation between /ɒ/ and /ɔ:/, so that such pairs as don/dawn sound the same.

SOCIAL VARIATION

When people don't speak or write according to the rules of standard English, you can say that they're using language in a nonstandard way and it's called nonstandard English, or sometimes it's also called Slang.

Non-standard English is not worse than

Standard English, it depends on social contests. In England, one accent has traditionally stood out above all others, and it's known as RP, which, as we already saw, is associated with the south-east, where most RP speakers live or work, but it can be found anywhere in the country.

LANGUAGE STANDARDIZATION

It's a process by which conventional forms of a language are established and maintained. It can occur as a natural development or as an effort by members of a community to impose one dialect or variety as a standard. This concept is associated with re-standardization, which refers to the ways in which a language may be reshaped by its speaker/writer, which is the case of Estuary English.

DOES STANDARD MEAN SUPERIOR?

PRESCRIPTIVISM

According to certain varieties of languages, are superior to others, it's, in fact, the belief that one variety of a language is superior to others and should be promoted as such. "Prescriptivism" is a term used for approaches to language that set out

rules for what is regarded as “good” or “correct” usage.

DESCRIPTIVISM

Its opposite is which its main aim is to describe and explain the patterns of usage which are found in all varieties of the language, whether they are socially prestigious or not. So, it describes how language is being used.

Appunti inglese Università di Macerata V. Nicole GENDER NEUTRALITY

In certain cases, such as job description, the use of sexually neutral language has become a legal requirement. Gender Neutral language is a language that minimizes assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to other Indo-European languages, English doesn't have a grammatical gender, and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific.

JOBS

Gender neutral job titles don't specify the gender of the person referred to, particularly when the gender is not known or not specified: we then use

“Firefighter” instead of “Fireman” or “Bartender” instead of “Barman” or “Barmaid”.

GENERIC WORDS FOR HUMANS

These words are used to refer to a person of unspecified sex or to persons of both sexes. The word “man” originally referred to both male and female, but now it's better if we used “Human” or “people” rather than “man” and “Mankind” can be then replaced by “Humankind” or “Humanity”.

PRONOUNS

Usually when we refer to indeterminate gender we use the masculine pronoun “he” and its derived forms. Instead of using the latter, we could use alternatives like: “he/him – his – himself” or “she” (or “she/he”, or the use of singular “they” or “he”).

HONORIFICS

Regardless of marital status, a woman's title is used for men and the titles

indicate Mr, Miss, Mrs marital status, and therefore it signal her sexual availability (disponibilità) in a way that men's titles doesn't!! So, Ms can be used for women regardless of marital status. The gender neutral honorific Mx can be used to provide gender neutrality. SOCIAL VARIETIES OF ENGLISH 1. OCCUPATIONAL ENGLISH The linguistic features of occupational varieties of a language may be just as distinctive as regional features, but they are only for temporary use since they are part of the job, they are taken up as we begin work and, as we stop working, we stop using the language of work. The more specialised the occupation, the more