Language Varieties and Linguistic Diversity
Text Types and Discourse Genres
Text Types:
- Narrative: Account; Narrator: Omniscient, objective.
- Descriptive: Scientific or literary description.
- Expository: Divulgative or specialized.
- Argumentative: Argument, thesis, topic, exposition, conclusion; persuasive argument.
Discourse Genres:
- Humanistic texts
- Newspaper articles
- Technical-scientific texts
- Legal texts
- Literary texts
Matching
- Transmitter / receiver: Universal (book) / collective (newspaper)
- Channel
- Textual Polyphony
- Language Functions:
- Appellative
- Expressive
- Metalinguistic
- Poetic
- Phatic
- Representative
- Register: Standard, vulgar, cultured, colloquial
Consistency
- Subject
- Structure:
- Sequential
- Enumerative
- Inductive
- Deductive
- Comparisons
- Parallelistic (as set/response, cause/effect)
Language and Language Diversity
Language is a human power used to communicate through words. It is accepted in different forms, preferentially by place (languages).
Linguistic Family, Language, and Dialect:
All languages precede another mother language. Those that precede from the same mother language and have affinities form linguistic families. For example, Spanish and Latin have affinities with French and Italian.
Language: A system of verbal communication and expression of a community of speakers. It is characterized by having established norms that govern its use among people, and education and diffusion through the media.
Dialect: A language variant with precise regional limits. The connotation of ‘dialect’ has no pejorative meaning. There is no hierarchical relationship.
Variety in Europe
- Indo-European:
- Celtic: Welsh, Irish Gaelic
- Germanic: English, German
- Slavic: Polish, Russian
- Romance: Castilian, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Galician, Sardinian, Provençal
Multilingualism, Bilingualism, Diglossia:
- Countries with more than one language.
- Balanced Bilingualism: Two languages with the same cultural, economic, and social importance.
- Diglossia: One language has more importance than the other (international organizations promote bilingual education).
Spain’s Linguistic Reality
The Constitution recognizes four official languages: Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque.
Dialects and Limbs:
- Murcian, Canarian: Southern evolutions of Castilian.
- Valencian: Related to Catalan.
- Asturian (or Bable) and Aragonese: Historical dialects.
Origin and Dialects of the Languages:
Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, was spoken in Spain until the arrival of the Arabs in the 8th century. The Reconquista was not a unified effort, so distinct kingdoms appeared where Latin evolved differently.
Variety of Language Use
Factors that act on language:
- Tendency towards unity through education, books, and the media. This gives a model of common or standard language.
- Others highlight the diversity of uses, grouped as follows:
- Historical Varieties: Castilian evolved through time.
- Spatial Varieties: According to dialects and different areas, there are different ways of speaking.
- Social Varieties: Within the same region, causes such as varying degrees of age, sex, instruction, habitat, etc., provide vertical or different sociolects. Each person has their idiolect or way of using the language.
- Register Varieties: Register is the way of using the language in a determined situation. The speaker and the receiver will choose the register according to certain circumstances:
- Relationship between the speaker and receiver (e.g., talking with a family member vs. at work).
- Social and spatial context (different in a work environment vs. leisure areas).
- Written or spoken channel.
- Topic and intention (different in a scientific exposition vs. a political rally).