Mustansiriyah University

College of Arts
Translation Department

Speech Community
A Mid-term Paper as Partial requirement of the Course of

General Linguistics

Submitted by:

Umnia Jamal Lateef

Omniatransma18@uomustansiriyah.edu.iq

Course Tutor

Prof. Mehdi AlGazalli (Ph. D)

2018
 Abstract

This research paper, will be dealing with some of the most important types of speech
communities, where it occurred, how it functions with people, what is the speech community in
general, what types of differences, how to understand it, and how it developed, why did it appear
at the first place, who made the change of language and what was the main and first reason of
language, let’s say, ‘deviance’, the way people use their ‘deviance’, when it is used and how it
affects our social communication and switching our identity to concord the situation, event or
belonging to a specific group.

Many of the used languages around the world are basically descended from one language.
So it is noticeable how language change can affect its usage, people and the geographical are of
people speaking a particular language.

Language in fact contributes in politics, as it endures the ability to re-unit a nation ar split
them up. Language is a heavy tool in every aspect of the life of the human race since the first
creation of human beings anf until the present moment so, it is as the purity of the drinking
water, that is how any change or development affects its speakers and the area where its speakers
live.

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 1.1 Speech Communities

As long as life goes on, life continues to change and so as the language we use. All

languages change, every language that earth witnessed so far have changed. One of the main

features of language is to communicate with others around us. thus, we are using language

because we need a particular thing to be done in certain way or another, such as asking for a

favor, need for a specific work to be done or merely communicating for the sake of creating

social bonds which is almost mandatory for human beings to live, so we are using language in

almost every aspect of our lives, as long as life changes then our needs do change as well, and

that will certainly lead to the change of our language.

What Paul Roberts describes is how the people of the community do change the language

they are speaking without realizing it and how the change of language can never be stopped as

the time goes by ..It changes to the extent that if the people who lived in the previous centuries

will not have the ability to recognize the new language in use that took place instead of theirs.

Language can be both possessed by individuals or possessed by society as there might be

specific individuals using the same linguistic terms who will be using the same dialect, variety or

code, which is considered in the same speech community.

Sociolinguistics deals with the study of the use of language among a group of persons.

And to define the word ‘group’, it is a number of persons who use and share the same religious

beliefs, activities and social rank .The least number consisting a group is two persons and there is

actually no maximum limit that borders the group. The group can be temporary or permanent and

the goal of a group may change. Here we are concerning with the type of groups that were

studied by the sociolinguists which they called ‘speech community’. (Patrick, 2002)

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 Yule (2006) identified the speech community as a group of people who share the same

expectations and norms in the use of language.

The group organization may be firm or weak and the significance of group membership

may vary among these members within the group, being either highly important or to low extent

to others.

According to Chomsky the ideal speech community is ‘‘completely homogeneous speech

community’’.therefore, there is no existence for speech community so that will not be our

concern in this research.

On the other hand Lyons defined real speech community as it is ‘all the people who use a

given language (or dialect)’.

The speech community is classified merely by its linguistic characteristics which is not

enough as these linguistic characteristics used among a group of people to be distinguished from

others because people do not need to feel the direct connection between the linguistic

characteristics A, B and C and the speech community as they are aware of the linguistic

characteristics they use to identify the group such as ethnic, social and cultural ones.

What Gumperz do is that he prefers using the term linguistic community instead of

speech community. In his opinion, the social group might be either multilingual or monolingual

bound together by the frequency of the patterns of the social interaction and separated from the

areas surrounding it by the lack of communication.

We can have an idea of how each person speaks from the geographical area where he

lives. For instance, the people who live in New York or London etc. each differ from the other

but the difference here cannot be considered in terms of linguistic mapping but in terms of the

multilingual mixture used by each residential community. Any person may belong to more than

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one group at the same time for example at (work, home and public centers). The speech

community is very flexible because the speakers can easily switch their identity. The ways in

which people can classify themselves is unlimited and it relies on the situation. English is the

language which is spoken across many regions of the world thus, we need to analyze it in its both

written and spoken forms as English varies greatly in these forms where it is used across the

globe especially in areas that are isolated entirely from one another such as New Zealand, South

Africa and other remote areas in China.

1.2 Repertoires and networks

Network is the relation between two individuals in the society for instance; what

is the network that connects person A with person B ? In what occasion they interact? And how

intense are these relationships.

Social-class networks are those which promote intense social cohesion that leads to

production of solidarity feelings and motivate persons to socialize with other persons in the

network. On the other hand the middle-class networks are the loose ones which result in

reduction of social-class cohesion, therefore the feelings of its individuals is weaker in identity

and solidarity.

There are two kinds of networks, multiplex network and uniplex network. The first is

when a person is connected to others in multiple ways, environments, events or situations, for

example, they are together at work or a game or may be married which creates intense

relationships. While the second is when a person is connected to others in only one way, they

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might be connected at work or in a game (one situation only). That person may be connected to a

number of uniplex networks also networks like these are loose and diffuse. Simple network

relationships are shown in the figure below.

It is quite obvious that there is no duplication in the linguistic capabilities between any

two individuals as well as there is no match in two social situations. Individuals are differentiated

by the gradations of their social class, profession and their regional origin by factors as gender,

religion, ethnicity and nationality or by psychological differences like they types of their

linguistic skills such as verbality, personality features or literacy. There are merely few apparent

distinctions that affect the variation in the speech of an individual.

Speech repertoire is defined as the individual management of multiple language varieties

or more than one language so, any individual must have speech repertoire. This concept of

speech repertoire is more useful to be applied to individuals rather than to gathering of

individuals or a category. Platt and Platt (1975, p. 35 ) drew a distinction of the possessed speech

repertoire between individuals and groups that states each person has his unique speech

repertoire and every speech community which that person participates has its distinctive speech

repertoire which makes it confusing to deal with speech repertoire as a classifying feature.

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 2 Language and Communities

2.1 Language variation

The fact that we all know is that language can vary in many aspects. One way of

identifying certain variation is that speakers of specific a language often speak different dialects

of their language. Although it is difficult to define the term dialect, it is still useful to use it and

to stretch its use from analyses of regional variation to social variation.

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 Regional variation and social variation can be distinguished as the first marks group of

people live in one region from others who do not, while the latter is a variety liked to certain

social class or a group that are marked than other groups of of other social classes.

The variation and change of a language is analyzed by using the speech community as a

tool. The speech communities differ in their stylistic features, those speech communities that are

based on the interests in common, the formality level that is expected among the group, the

socioeconomic rank and the general society.

If we clarify with an example, doctors will speak in a formal way with their colleagues at

conferences which differ than with a group of fans for a particular actor or singer or a group of

college students. This type of difference which is represented by specific activity or profession is

known as register in linguistics. There are other analysis that states the speakers of a specific

register which is called discourse community while the term speech community refers to

language variation or dialects that the speaker inherits by adoption or birth.

Variation is one of the characteristics of a language, people can say the same thing in

more than one way also the pronunciation may vary which will be called accent that is defined as

the choice of words in the lexicon, syntax and morphology which is referred to as grammar. But

despite these variations which may apply to the same word, there are still boundaries that limit

these variations. The speaker cannot use a sound that is totally different from his language or

make completely different word order than what is used by other speakers in his community.

Here we will be dealing with one of the subdivisions of language variations that have a

significant effect in our modern life and society and which contributed in shaping many aspects

of our lives whether in social, behavioral or educational field. That is the regional variation in

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this model of dialect differentiation and language change, it should be possible to associate any

variation that occurs in a language to factors that distinguish between them which are stated as

the factor of time and the factor distance. For example if we take the American and British

varieties, or the dialects, of English they are divided by the Atlantic Ocean and by more than two

centuries of political independence; cockney English and Northumbrian are almost 300 miles

apart in addition to many centuries. In this case the linguists try to discriminate them by means of

models known to historical linguist models that resemble such concepts like the ‘family tree’.

One example of this subject is the ‘branching’ of Latin language into Spanish, Italian and French

as well as the phonemic division in English / v / and / f / as those were once a phonetic variants,

or allophones, rather than distinctive phonemes.

The geographers of dialect tried to represent their findings on the maps with what they

call dialect atlas. They attempted to draw the geographical boundaries where particular linguistic

feature is distributed by lining it on the map. These lines are called isogloss. An instance of the

pronunciation of the word bath shows the distinction between the areas on the two sides of an

isogloss, bath is pronounced as the first vowel of the word father on one side while the other side

people pronounce it as the vowel in the word cat. The reproduction of these linguistic features

boundaries often show a significant counts of criss-crossings, often several coincides. It is

mentioned that there are bundle of isoglosses which are believed to mark a dialect boundary.

One bundle may cross southern France to west with words such chanter, chandelle and

chaud. Begins with a sh sound in the north and a sound of k to the south. This dialect boundary

synchronized with political factor or some geographical features, like a river, a mountain ridge or

old principality boundary. These isoglosses represent the stretch of word used be individuals

from one focal region to the neighboring areas.

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 The study of dialect-atlas attempted to link between the language variation to the history

of people settlement and more likely to ignore the social rank factor. However we still can make

some observations about that. For instance, people from the middle to the south lands of The

United States the usage of the form you-all is found among all social ranks, while the forms of I

might could or a apple are found among the middle and high classes, and the forms of I seed and

postes, fistes and costs (as plurals of post, fist and cost) are found to be used only among the

speakers of the low class.

Now that we all know that not only the place one is raised in can form a dialect but the

social ranks are contributed to that as well, such as the cultural background and social one

including gender, age, occupation and the group loyalty too. Now the geographic origin solely

tend to be more a serious weakness, therefore, speakers of various regions definitely have

interaction between each other which leads to breaking the dialect boundaries or the boundaries

to be called not a ‘clean’ ones.

For a long time linguists have studied the variation happens in a certain language. A

person may speak in a way in specific event and speak in a different way in other events or

occasions. This type of variation or difference may occur even in the most centralized groups.

Such variation is ascribed to the dialect mixture for example, the dialects (one or more) that

exists in one locality allow the speakers of that region to use one dialect in a particular situation

and then switch to the other in different situation

This kind of variation that some individuals deal with is due to the fact that human brain

has the ability to collect and analyze huge quantities of linguistic data at the same time.

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 2.2 Pidgin and Creole.

Pidgin is defined in linguistics as the speech that is taken from one or more languages

that are existed that used as lingua franca by people who do not have any languages in common

and has another definition which is auxiliary language.

Pidgins in English include Chinese pidgin English, Queensland Kanaka English Nigerian

pidgin English, Hawaiian Pidgin English, Bislama which is one of the official languages used in

the Pacific island.

Another example is the language used in Papua New Guinea which called Tok Pisin,

used by more than million people

In pidgin language, words may not actually represent the same meaning as in the original

one for instance if we take the English word ‘grass’ it will denote different meaning in Tok

Pisin, it refers to the hair of a mustache or of a beard .

Here is an example: the Tok Pisin words (Baimbai, hed bilongyu, i-arrait, gain) refer to (

by and by, head, belong you, i- he alright) Respectively that means (your head will soon get

well) in English .

Pidgin known to R.L. Trask and Peter Stockwell as it is not a real language or the mother

tongue of anyone it cannot convey much and has no grammar and can be spoken differently by

different people but it can still work for minor purposes and can be handled by those who

encounter it .

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 (an introduction to sociolinguistics,2012) according to Ronald Wardhaugh, he deals with

pidgin as the language that has no native speakers whom disagrees with Trask and Stockwell

opinion that pidgion is not classified as a real language at all .

There is a chance of transformation in the term pidgin to creole that is when it becomes

the native language of its speech community which will be called creolization.

The etymology of the word pidgin might be derived from the pronunciation of the

English business in Chinese, as said by Grover Hudson

The pidgin language had no native speakers at first, it was used only for dealing with

others whom possess no common languages to share in business correspondence. Gradually.

most of the pidgin languages vanished and its community prospered, as one of its original

languages became well known and took over as the lingua franca or the language used in

communicating between individuals that have no mutual language to share.

The definition of lingua franca definition is greatly significant in studying the language

varieties across the world as it has developed to be that mother tongue for some speakers, its

speakers are forced into it for communicating in terms of trading transactions. UNESCO

described it as the language that is used as a habit by individuals whose mother tongues are

different.

Samarin (1968, p. 661) classifies lingua franca into four types which are: triangle

language, contact language, international language and auxiliary language. The first is

resembled by Swahili in East Africa and the second is Greek Koine in ancient world while the

third is English used in our modern world and last but not least is the basic English.

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 Lingua franca is caused either by migration or for trading purposes .There is also another

division of lingua franca that is a mixed language. Bakker (1997) which is a mixture of French

and Cree mainly spoken in Canada by individual who descend from French origin .Michif as

called by Bakker, says that it is described as the language that employs verbs from Cree and

nouns from French, in other words, that language uses grammar of Cree and Vocabulary of

French. It is used as a plain marker for identifying a group who use it to explain new ethnic

identity by means of that mixed language. That was the easiest way to form a new language by

mixing two languages including new communities.

Lingua franca may be practiced in different ways not only to be spoken in variety of ways

in varying places but persons differ greatly in the ability of using the language. English language

is used lingua franca in several parts of the world as it is a native language for some speakers

whereas it is the second language for others while it is still a foreign language to other

individuals.

Other fact that need to be taken seriously is that the last two features of abilities in

acquiring language can also vary greatly from basic knowledge to a native speaker which is seen

in the daily life of Indians even if its known that their official language is Hindi but there are

areas where English serves as lingua franca. Other example is Swahili which is employed as

lingua Franca of east Africa while it is a native language spoken on the coast for a long time.

These lingua francas may encounter changes as well, as it can spread to the neighboring

areas, that spread is accompanied with simplification or alteration to that language which

certainly leads function reduction. This simplified language can not be spoken in the same

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variety for numerous purposes as that of the main language. The simplified form is called a

pidginized language.

The pidginized form of a language is the result of simplifying the lingua franca until it

becomes unintelligible to the speakers of its original form (its lingua franca), which is like areas

today that use English in its simplified form (a pidginized English). It takes at least three

languages to form a pidgin one otherwise if only two languages participated, then there will be a

struggle about which will be the dominant one in forming the pidgin.

There are many territories where pidgin language is still alive like the territories that

previously belonged to the colonial nations of Europe and rule as lingua franca like the West

African Pidgin English which is used among the ethnic groups along the coast of west Africa.

There are still more than 100 pidgin languages in use and most of them are simple in

structure in spite of the long usage over generation they survive (Aitchison, 1983; Sankoff &

Laberge, 1973).

There is an example of the the hawai’i pidgin English that people used in the 19th century

in Honolulu:

“What for Miss Willis laugh all time? Before Fraulein cry all time."Why does
Miss Willis often laugh? Fraulein used to always cry."

(cited by Jeff Siegel in The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole. Oxford University
Press, 2008)

How can the language change from being pidgin to creole? When pidgin language

continues being in use in a particular region it will witness the developments and changes happen

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to the speakers lives which include the births of new human beings, those children will acquire

the first language they are exposed to and will take place as their native language which will

make them native speakers of pidgin language and thus it changes from being pidgin to creole.

(Mark Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)

Pidgin and creoles are two sequenced stages of the same language process , pidgin starts

with the community I which large number of individuals use the same language for

communicating . The creole or (creolization) happen when the children of pidgin speakers

acquire their pidgin language which will create native speakers for pidgin and significant change

in the style, vocabulary and grammar of that language to cope with their everyday needs .

Pidgin is an auxiliary language used with vernacular languages while creole is a

vernacular language by its own which will force to competition with other languages.

Creole language speakers are unlike speakers of other language in the ability of

employing multi-status feature of language because their language lacks those features like

(education, social prestige, and wealth) therefore they find it difficult to deviate their speech

from the standard one due to the fact that the origin of this language shifts back to subservience

and slavery.

The word Creole comes from crioulo in Portuguese that originally meant a European

descent people who were born and raised in colonial territory.

Nowadays creoles are classified as either French or English based.

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 2.3 Dialectology:

The word dialectology is derived from the greek word dialektos which mean to talk and

the word dialect is formed from logia which refers to the scientific study the linguistic dialect , it

is a sub-field of sociolinguistics . it concerns with studying the language varieties based on the

geographical distribution and the features associated with it .

The phonological and grammatical features are what extremely concerns the

dialectologists those of regional areas .it deals with migrants who bring their native language in

use at their new region and with populations that crossed generation

Mutual intelligibility and situation of diglossia are the most commonly concepts that been

studies dialectology.

The history of dialects goes back to the second half of the 19th century when George

Wenked sent postals that includes questionnaires to whole Nothern Germany .the questionnaires

were a list of sentences in standard German. These sentences were reproduced as the local dialect

showing differences in dialects . from this point many searches occurred and the year after it it

spread all over the world

2.3.1 American Dialects :

The television mainstream in America influenced the people as the regional variation is

sort of decreasing according to some some people believes, but it is still alive and expanding as

pointed out by Lavov and Scott and urban areas witness intense regional variation. For instance,

the term that refers to the sweetened carbonated beverages, people in the south are using the term

coke regardless if the beverage was actually produced by Coca Cola company or not. As

illustrated in the map below.

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 On the other hand, people in the East and West coast tend to use the word soda by that

including the cities of costal Florida which includes large population of New Yorkers in addition

to people of Green Bay, Milwaukee, St Louis and Hawaii. While the rest prefer to use the term

pop in reference to beverages.

There is subtle variation in meaning between the new interloping terms and the

traditional regional ones for instance, in Boston they relegated the use of the term grinder to hot

subs, while in fact sub is used to refer to cold ones. Whereas, in Northeast Kingdom the term

grinder is employed when referring to a large (12 inches) subs, and hoagie for the smaller

version (6 inches), adding that people in Philadelphia region use hoagie for the cold subs and

steak sandwich for the hot subs.

Another example for the American dialects is the word fountain, if the one was to live

among the people of Wisconsin then he must pronounce it as bubbler just as they do, whereas in

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the southeastern part of the U.S it is pronounced as water fountain, as well as the people in the

northeastern half it is commonly used as drinking fountain.

In many cases the dialect divisions come from the differences in the areas which settlers

came from which is England that’s the features of their dialects stretches back to the seventeenth

century where the letter [r] is pronounced only before vowels in addition to the letter insertion

between certain vowel sequence as in the case of draw[r]ing. Not to mention the [a] lengthening

of people live in New England as in the word aunt and bath pronounced as ahnt and bahth that

was also imported from the British dialect. Noting that the original English-speaking citizens of

New England came formerly from East Anglia in the southeast of England.

There are also other examples that are worthy to be mentioned as the merger of pin-pin in

the southern areas, the letters (I,e)are identically pronounced before the letters they are followed

by. And that is not all, they use y’all to refer to a number of individuals, the word naked is also

produced as nekkid and the lexical word commode for indicating to toilet.

2.3.2 Multi-intelligibility

There were multiple attempts to distinguish dialect from language by mentioning that

dialects can be understood by the speakers of the same language however, in the case of Spanish

and Italian languages, their speakers can only enjoy specific mutual understanding these two

languages cannot be classified as dialects of one language due to the significant differences that

each have in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon .

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 2.3.3 Diglossia (Cajun English)

The best example describes diglossia is the following life situation ,when two friends

went to a library where the librarian raised a question for them (Mais, just put dat over dere,

cher) which was a simple sentence that means (where do you want me to put this?) here our

reaction to that question differed between me and my friend , I put down what was holding for

the librarian in the proper place while my friend was surprised , once we went out he asked about

what the librarian asked for and which language it was. This can draw attention to the difference

between Cajun English (the spoken language in South Louisiana and other dialects.

The person who understood the librarian request was born and raised in South Louisiana

while the confused one was born in Texas and raised in Alaska.

Here will be listed few significan examples for the sxpressions used by these peoples:

- The usage of (by ) instead of ( in, at )He ate by my house / its standard

English equivalent ; he ate in my house which is supposed to be based on the French

expression (chez, moi)

- Producing the phrase make dodo relying on Cajun French source fais do

do which means (to sleep ).

- To do grocery shopping they say make shopping based on Cajun French

faire le marché.

it is the co-existence of two closely related language , one of a high rank that is used

among government members or in formal documents and the other is lower rank which is

represented in speaking the vernacular tongue .Sanskrit is an example , which was the general

spoken language.

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 Cajun English was marked for years as the dialect of uneducated , poor and limited-

minded persons in film and popular culture (Stanford, 2016).while (Dubois & Horvath, 1998b)

defined it as the spoken English variety of individuals living in South Louisiana.

Cajun English appeared after long sociopolitical history that involved French speakers in

South Louisiana which led to the merge of English and French languages (Cajun French).french

language was forcedly applied in Louisiana therefore the government at that time forbid the use

of Cajun French in schools as it was cool at first to use Cajun until Louisiana fell under the

United States (Dubois & Horvath, 1998a).

There are no explicit features of Cajun English but Eble (1993) defines some as dialect

typical features:

 Dental stops [t,d] which are the the Interdental fricatives /θ,ð/

 Failure of correctly pronouncing the stops /p,t,k/

 The occurrence of the trilled /r/

 The dropping of /h/ in the initial position word.

Sylvie Dubois conducted a study about Cajun French/English and studied

the language practiced in Cajun communities. the participants were all bilingual speakers

of both Cajun French and English language , therefore they were considered as Cajun

English speakers.

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 2.3.4 The English of African Americans

The sociolinguists started to describe the African American English be explaining

its logic and cohesion to the rules of morphosyntax that is parallel to the rules of ‘standard’

English (Labov, 1969; Wolfram, 1969).That made the sociolinguists able to obtain great

knowledge in eliminate the common belief that the AAE is deficient and illogical way of

communicating.

In this research there will be an examination of the African American English and testing

the previous beliefs that are commonly known about it. We can assume that AAE dedicated a

negligence of the phonological systems done by its speakers.

As discussed by Wolfram (2007), these studies led to a major finding that there was an

essence feature that African American speakers share despite the geographic area in which their

language is in use.in other words, the scholars found that there is a common feature shared

between African American considered as the main engine for shaping their way of

communication in areas such Washington D.C. , New York City and Detroit. These features are

represented by the habitual be, absence of copula and lessens of /r/ while in studying the white

speakers speech in different regions did not show distinctive features alike. Bottom-line, scholars

found that African American speech was greatly homogenous while the white speakers, their

speech was correlated strongly with the geographic area and race seemed to be dominated the

region for African American speakers.

The ‘black English vernacular’ means the traditional spoken dialect by the majority of the

black individuals in many regions of the United States, the closer to the city center the higher

their numbers as in Chicago, Washington, Cleavland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Francisco, Boston

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and other cities. (Labov, 1972a, p. xiii).the regional variation of African American is neglected

by the essencial feature they share across the geographical boundaries. Almost every research

about this dialect relies on this belief in explaining their communication. Lisa Green (2002)

explains in her statement that “there are regional differences that will distinguish varieties of

AAE spoken in the United States” which means that there are varieties of English spoken by

African Americans. In other words, even if their English used in, for instance, Louisiana and

Texas is similar in syntactic patterns but it still differs in their vowels systems.

AA speakers of Pennsylvania and Louisiana also share the same syntactic patterns as of

AA speakers in Texas. However, AA speakers of Pennsylvania may not share some of the

patterns that AA speakers of Louisiana and Texas share with southern regions. This is an

important distinction demonstrated by Green between vowel system and syntactic characteristics.

In other words, Carmen Fought (2006) drew an important point in saying that we may expect

that English variety to be bound to vocalic variation more than the morphosyntactic level.

The majority if researches concerning this matter of bound to the morphosyntax, because

as Green says that AAE is more similar in syntactic structures than phonological features.

What is worthy noticing that the early studies of AAE grammar were degrading the

theory that links AAE to deficiency in their intelligence culture, and thet their children

perfomance at school was under the required normal level due to the excessive verbal shortage.

On the contrary, Labov (1969), demonstrated the way that AAE is managed by the same rules

that govern the ‘standard’ English. Labov demonstrates that wherever the copula is found in

‘standard’ English, it subjects to omission when occurs in AAE like (She is clever / she’s clever)

is omitted in AAE ( she smart). Noting that, in cases where in ‘standard’ English a reduction in

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the final position of a sentence is not possible ( I don’t know where Kevin’s) it is not possible in

AAE either .

This study shows that their grammatical patterns found in the variety do not indicate a

deficiency in culture or intelligence but reflects a logical and rule governed system that is

parallel to the ‘standard’ English one. It is merely a matter of difference between the rules that

govern the two systems.

Sociolinguist have shown that the difficulty encountered by children in acquiring literacy

skills is bound the absence of the copula that is demonstrated in their phonological system rule

and not bound to their cognitive degree or deprivation or verbs.

These features are as shown by Fought (2002) either stable variables (reduction of

consonant cluster) or stigmatized variants (post-vocalic /r/ absence).

2.3.4.1 AAE selected features

There are two features of AAE illustrated as follows:

a. Morphosyntactic features are:

‘She blonde’ copula absence,. ’Can’t nobody talk to him’, negative inversion. ‘Tim don’t

work here’ the s- 3rd person singular absence, ‘they had gone to the school’ had past tense. ‘this

house be cold’ habitual be.‘They been married’ been- remote past to stress.

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 b. Phonological features are:

Reduction of final consonant cluster as [tɛs] of test, [dɛs] of desk, dentalization as /θ/ and

/ð/ [tuf] of tooth, [dɪs] of this, post-vocalic /r/ absence as [sto] of store, metathesis as [æks] of

ask, glide deletion in /ai/ as [tɑ:m] of time and [hɑ:] of high. Merging of /I/ and /ɛ/ as fin = fen.

As pointed out by Labov (2001b, p. 506), that no matter how long AAE speakers are

exposed to local vernacular of new regions they keep their vowel system stable and no changes

occur so they are not affected by the local communities they reside.

“In the case of European-American vernaculars, for every instance of a regional structure

like He might could do it or The car needs washed, there are numerous subtle vowel differences

that distinguish, e.g., speakers from Atlanta, Georgia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Therefore,

all other things being equal, we would expect AAVE varieties across the country to have

relatively few morphosyntactic differences, especially in comparison with the number of

phonological ones” (Fought, 2006, p. 59).

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 Conclusion

Here we can conclude that language is not a basic aspect of our live although it is static

from the beginning of the creation. Many changes that force language to change or in other

words, force its speakers to shift from using specific terms of their language until the language

fades. As the aforementioned types of speech community, it is concluded that language change is

not controllable, therefore it is bound to change so as human being. Just the same way that

politics or regional variation is uncontrollable, these are bound to the human activities, needs and

social interactions which are in a continuous change.

The persistence of language change is a true fact just as the change of human demands.

This research paper has shown some of the variations that split language in many aspects.

On top of that, languages in general still have some basic features i.e.; language

universals, which makes it a fact that all languages are originally descended from one basic

language.

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