Ch 6. Regional and social dialects

Which features of speech CANNOT be used to differentiate one regional dialect from another?

• vocabulary

• pronunciation

• word meaning

• grammatical patterns

Which of the following variations may NOT be affected by the speaker’s social background?

• pronounce bag as [bɛg]

• use multiple negation like I don’t know nothing

• drop the initial [h] in words like house or home

• replace past tense with past participle like I done it last week

What is the main factor that causes there is less regional variation in a country?

• long history

• large territory

• a variety of races

• high level of intra-national communication

What does ‘isogloss’ mean?

• Features of language used by one gender but not by other genders in a community.

• The particular and often technical language used by a group of specialists to talk about their specialty.

• Where two language varieties exist side by side, with additional high and low varieties within each variety.

• Boundary which distinguishes an area where a certain linguistic feature is found from areas in which it is absent.

Which set of dialects does not belong to the correct dialect chain?

• Dutch and Flemish -> the chain of German

• Spanish, Catalan, French -> the chain of Latin

• English, Irish, and Icelandic -> the chain of Anglo-Saxons

• Norwegian, Swedish and Danish -> the Scandinavian chain

Which factor could be the primary reason to decide if two linguistic entities are ‘separated languages’ or ‘dialects of one language’?

• Intelligibility

• ethnic identity

• linguistic features

• social economic power

Which statement about the relationship between social variation and regional variation is correct?

• The lower the social class is, the larger the regional variation gets.

• The higher the social class is, the larger the regional variation gets.

• The smaller the distance between two areas is, the larger the social variation gets.

• The wider the distance between two areas is, the smaller the social variation gets.

Which occasion could proper for well-educated speakers to use their social dialect, i.e., standard English?

• hanging out with close friends in a pub

• buying groceries in a traditional market

• watching a game with family in a stadium

• teaching professional subjects in a school

Which statement about 'standard English' is correct?

• There is only one standard English around the world.

• Standard English is linguistically superior to non-standard forms.

• Standard English is the first to be codified among the dialects of English.

• Standard English does not allow for any variation within its boundaries.

Which statement about social class dialect is correct?

• People from different social classes speak differently in their vocabulary only.

• People from higher class speak more [in] for affixes -ing than those from lower class.

• There is a sharp distinction between the upper-class groups and the middle-class groups.

• Children from lower-class families have a higher frequency to replace a past tense with a past participle.