Prof. Gerald Murray Dept. of Anthropology (emeritus) University of Florida

 Original criterion : social prestige.  Modern definition: mutual intelligibility  “Your dirty spoon fell on my clean rug.”  Elimination of judgmental dynamics  Recognition of ambiguous borderline cases  A language is a collection of dialects. Everybody speaks a dialect whenever talking.

 Dialects are generally defined territorially.  Migration produces ethnic and social dialects.  Dialect different from register.  “He’s not going to want to give me the day off.”

 The 方言 is by definition territorial: “local”  Are 普通话 and 四川话 different languages?  Linguistically 普通话 is a dialect of 汉语.  There is still a political element.  粤语 was recently “elevated” from 方言 to 语言.

 Phonology: High importance.  Morphology and syntax: Low importance  Lexicon: Medium importance

 Vocabulary differences  Differences in vowels.  I don’t know when I’ll go home.  Stop the clock.  A stupid new tune.

 Variants of the /t/ phoneme  Top  Stop  Water and butter.  Latin  Wait!  The glottalization of /t/ in Cockney  You’d better get a bottle of bitter butter.

 “Boston English”  “Southern English”  AAVE -- “Black English”

 The silent /r/.  “The apartment on the corner”  The word final /r/ with high vowels.  “It’s near the square”  The epenthetic /r/  “I saw Alice at your party”  “China isn’t far from Japan” “Law and order”.

 The apartment on the corner.  The concert lasted half an hour.  Law and order.  China always wins at ping pong.  I saw Alice at your party.  A bottle of tonic.

 Y’all  Neutralization of final unstressed /i/, /o/  Apocopation of /y/ in /ay/ diphthong  Your  Allophonic merger of front vowels.  Pen / pin  I’m fixin’ to marry merry Mary.  Examples of Mandarin dialectical merger  4=4, 14=14, 44 = 44.  老奶奶喝牛奶

 Be descriptive, not prescriptive.  Realize that dialects follow complex rules.  Which “dialect” of English should Chinese students learn?