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The course deals with regional variation in English around the world, extending material covered in the lecture in Module 4. The first part of the course gives a detailed overview of the most important general issues in the study of dialects, including (i) the relation between regional varieties and extralinguistic phenomena such as social class and gender, (ii) the notions of standard and non-standard varieties, (iii) the question of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in language, (iv) the historical sources of variation between dialects and the factors which encourage or hinder the spread of new linguistic features to other areas. In answering these questions, we will cover most of the most important examples of differences between English varieties. The second half of the course will be devoted to a study of selected specific varieties of English. These will be selected partly on the basis of suggestions by students. |
