In everyday life people co-operate and interact with each other in a number of ways: with immediate members of the family in their homes, with friends and neighbours in their local community, with colleagues at work and with complete strangers in meetings further afield. It is in this web of inter-relationships that language is used to forge and maintain friendships, to communicate, to instruct, to enthrall and to carry out all the other functions necessary in any social inter action using the medium of speech.
Language behaviour itself is extremely complex. When viewed in use in society, it is marked by two apparently contradicting characteristics. To participate fully in the activities of a society and to interact naturally with its other members, a speaker must be able to practise the communication code recognised by that society. The use of this communication code, or language, demands mastery of and adherence to the accepted forms of the particular structural patterning the relational framework - pertaining to that one language, otherwise effective understanding between people will prove difficult if not impossible. A speaker must learn the speech sounds of the language, their arrangement in 'words', the construction of sentences and the meanings associated with these 'words' and constructions, if he is to communicate effectively with other speakers in his community.1 Yet any observation of linguistic behaviour in society reveals diversity. Speakers do not all speak in the same way. The dialectologist is interested in aspects of this diversity; in particular as to how the variant patterns of the language are ordered and how the variations relate to each other territorially.
Differences of language are not all of the same order. Indeed some arise from extra-linguistic factors. Two main types of variation need to be distinguished:
- variation within the speech of the individual;
- variation within the community.
'Stylistic variations' occur because no one speaker will speak in the same manner in all situations. The totality of his speech forms -his 'idiolect,2 -will consist. of a range of styles which he deems appropriate to the varying social situations in which he may find himself. This appropriateness is dependent on factors present in the situation, such as 'place of interaction, topic of discourse, the person or people with whom the speaker is interacting, and of course, the degree of attention he is paying to his own speech'.3
Such styles are reflected in the way the language is spoken, in the choice of vocabulary and sentence constructions. They include also the attitude of the speaker at the time; whether he is polite, serious, patronising, etc. O'Connor, for example, commenting on such differences of pronunciation says that they 'can be graded by almost imperceptible degrees from stylised declamation at one end of the scale to the meaningful grunts of the family conversation at the other. 4' For the purposes of his particular transcriptions of spoken English he distinguishes between four styles: declamatory, formal colloquial, colloquial and familiar.
In certain cases the choice between stylistic variants may be determined by the occupation of speaker or listener. A lawyer in practising would naturally use the vocabulary and phraseology common to his profession, and the style appropriate to the formality of the occasion. Such variation is conditioned and is often given the special name of 'register variation'.
Within a speech-community variation occurs along three dimensions: social, temporal and geographical.
Any social differentiation which sets up 'barriers' in society between its members can create linguistic variation. Social distance resulting from class-ordering of its members, or education, may mean greater recognition and prestige being given to certain varieties of speech. In many societies the speech of men and women differs whilst in others race and religion can form barriers as well. This kind of variation is often studied by sociolinguists.
Language itself is never static and linguistic variation may be correlated with the ages of speakers. Several studies have shown incipient differences. In a well-known study of a community in Switzerland which looked at the language of three age-groups 'drift by generations' was observed. The changes 'are more or less latent in the first generation, appear irregularly in the second, and expand in triumph in the third'.5
Linguistic changes, however gradual, over a long period of time result in different sound patterns, in different grammatical forms and in differences of vocabulary. But these changes are not uniform over all areas where the language is spoken, hence geographical variations arise. In some areas older forms are retained, in others innovations have been accepted and the changes permeate through the whole language structure of a speaker. In many areas, for example, speech sounds exist which are not found in the speech of other areas. Such sounds, participating in the patterning of the sound system of that area, establish it as a particular kind and thus set it apart from areas where these sounds do not occur at all. Other speech sounds, although in common use over a wide territorial area, may be found in particular combinations in some examples of speech and in different combinations in other examples. These patternings again can be set apart and identified as separate 'varieties,.6 Grammatical and syntactical forms, and items of vocabulary, may be isolated also in this way and can be related to known geographical areas. It is these areal varieties and their structural patterning and relationship to each other that are studied by dialectologists.
Areal differences arise because the speakers of a language through the long stages of its history, in their various communities, cannot possibly maintain close and frequent contact with each other. Certain areas -out of the way valleys for example -find themselves isolated from the mainstream of communications. A range of mountains can create a distinct barrier between communities. Political domination and religious boundaries have kept people in close contact whilst at the same time separating them from other areas. At a more local level, centres of influence for marketing produce, shopping, etc. -have drawn people from a particular hinterland and have spread their influence in certain directions whilst having little or no effect on other communities. Factors such as these have influenced the language patterns and a number of linguists have 'pointed out from different points of view that the closer the identifications of speakers the greater the range of shared interests and the more probable that tile speech will take a specific form. The range of syntactic alternation is likely to be reduced and the lexis to be drawn from a narrow range ... In these relationships the intent of the other person can be taken for granted as the speech is played out against a back-drop of common assumptions, common history, common interests. 7