Greetings and Goodbyes

Every language has some range of ways to greet a person and say goodbye. Linguists call these:

Entry = greeting

Exit = Farewell

The linguist Irving Goffman believes that whenever you meet and have a social interaction with a person your “face” may be affected by the meeting and your level of solidarity or power may change.

Greetings: He suggests the reason for a greeting is that it is needed to show that the relationship which existed at the end of the last time you met is the same and unchanged, despite the separation.

Farewells: The reason for a farewell is to sum-up the effect of the time two people have spent together so that they know what to expect the next time they meet.

This is why saying hello and goodbye are so important in every society. Without a greeting and a farewell you do not know where you stand socially with the person you are about to speak with and with the person you are about to say goodbye to.

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Lecture 5: The relationship between language and society, part 2: interesting variations in the English language and what they mean

Today we will be talking about:

• Class and social dialects
• Common variations: G-dropping, H-dropping, R-based variations.

· Class based social dialects: Cockney and R-less New York

• Ethnic based social dialect: African American Vernacular English.
• Slang

SOCIAL DIALECT: A social dialect is a linguistic variation based upon membership in a long-standing socially isolated group.

LINGUISTIC VARIABLE: A variable is a linguistic item that has identifiable variants. When a certain way of saying something becomes a set way of expressing it, phonetically, grammatically, or with expressions, etc, it is called a linguistic variable. The different ways a linguistic variable is expressed are called variants.

VARIABLES:

G-dropping: G-dropping is when the final “ng” sound of a word ending in –ing is NOT pronounced.

H-dropping or underlying /h/: H-dropping is when the “h” sound in words is not voiced.

Rhoticity: Rhoticity is when the “r” sound in English is fully pronounced.

R-lessness (“R-dropping”): R-lessness is not completely pronouncing the “r” sound in some words.

Intrusive R: Intrusive “r”—is inserting an “r” sound in the pronunciation of a word where there is no “r” in the standard spelling of the word.

AAVE: African American Vernacular English, or Black English Vernacular, or Ebonics as it is sometimes called, or its older and derogatory name, “jive.” We will refer to it simply as AAVE.