that munanga linguist

The high rate of language loss and endangerment across the world is becoming more widely known. In the sociolinguistics course I am teaching, we discuss this as a follow on from topics such as multilingualism and looking at what happens when languages come into contact with each other. Sometimes you get stable multilingual societies. Sometimes pidgins and creoles arise. Sometimes you see code-switching phenomena. And sometimes, languages become weaker, become threatened, endangered and may cease to be spoken and known at all. (None of these are mutually exclusive, by the way). When we consider language loss, we talk about why we should care (and whether we should care it all). When I asked students to think of reasons to care, the more immediate responses seem to relate to knowledge systems: that each language represents something valuable to humanity in terms of knowledge systems encoded in that language, and that that knowledge is of great value to the speech community too.  ...

Part three of my examples linking sociolinguistics to popular culture kinda follows up on Part 1 which showed (via drag queens) how no two speakers are identical . (Part 2 skipped over to communities of practice in Mean Girls ). I have to confess, this episode is less about my own creativity and more about finding a pretty perfect video on YouTube that did the job of linking sociolinguistics to the real world for me. Worth sharing all the same... Key concept : Variability in language (which exists everywhere) is caused by geographic and social factors. Concept in more detail: The subfield of sociolinguistics makes no bones about the fact that language varies everywhere, all the time. No two individuals speak exactly the same way and no individual speaks the same way all the time either. Many sociolinguists are concerned with not just describing this ubiquitous variability but figuring out the causes of variation. For a long time, where someone is from (i.e. geography) was in...