multilingual speech communities
- Domains: domains of language use, a
term popularised by an American sociolinguist, Joshua Fishman. A domain of
language involves typical interactions between typical participants in typical
settings about a typical topic. Examples of these domains are family,
friendship, religion, education and employment.
- Setting: the physical situation or
the typical place where speech interactions occur (code choice), settings such
as home, church, mosque, school, office, etc.
- Diglossia: communities rather in which two languages or
language varieties are used with one being a high variety for formal situations
and prestige, and a low variety for informal situations (everyday conversation).
Diglossia has three crucial features; two distinct varieties of the same language
are used in the community, with one regarded as high (H) variety and the other
as low (L) variety. Each variety is used for quite distinct functions; H &
L complement each other. No one uses the H variety in everyday conversation.
Example: the standard classical Arabic language is the high
variety in Arab countries, and it is used for writing and for formal functions,
but vernacular (colloquial) Arabic is the low variety used for informal speech
situations.
- Polyglossia: basically polyglossia situations involve two
contrasting varieties (high and low) but in general it refers to communities
that regularly use more than two languages.
- Code-switching:
it is to move
from one code (language, dialect, or style) to another during speech for a
number of reasons such, to signal solidarity, to reflect one's ethnic identity,
to show off, to hide some information from a third party, to achieve better
explanation of a certain concept, to converge or reduce social distance with
the hearer, to diverge or increase social distance or to impress and persuade
the audience (metaphorical code-switching)
- Lexical
borrowing: it results from the lack of vocabulary and it involves borrowing
single words – mainly nouns. When speaking a second language, people will often
use a term from their first language because they don't know the appropriate
word in their second language. They also my borrow words from another language
to express a concept or describe an object for which there is no obvious word
available in the language they are using.
