1. Individual Groups and Identities Unit 4 Outcome 2

2. Identity We will continue to focus on identity. Specifically: How language works to reflect and construct both individuals and group identities through subconscious and conscious language variation. Age, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, interests, aspirations and education. We also look at online identities. So rather than just ethnicity and culture we look at individual factors that play just as an important role on how we use language. We will learn to understand that a group or individuals linguistic features are essentially a trademark. Just as your linguistic variations TEENSPEAK indicate your age, likes and dislikes!

3. Terms to know: Sociolinguistics: The study of the relationship between language and society. Dialect: a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially. Sociolect: a variety of a language used by a particular social group; a social dialect. Speech Repertoire: A range of linguistic varieties that speakers have available to them and that they draw on to perform social roles.

4. Key terms to know Sociolect continuum: a chain of sociolects in which develop over time variant on age, socio economic status, region, education. The age gap between yourself and your parents and then your grandfather/mother may impact on each others ability to understand certain terms or expressions. E.g. courting > going around> dating > hooking up A dialect continuum is a chain of dialects, let us say dialects 1– 10, with the following property: Speakers of dialect 1 understand dialect 2 extremely well. Speakers of dialect 1 and dialect 3 understand each other rather less well, and speakers of dialect 1 and dialect 4 less well again. There comes to a point, however, say at dialect 5, where dialect 1 is no longer intelligible to the local people and vice versa.

5. SAC outcomes YES you will continue to write essays for this unit as you will need to get used to this for the exam. Each SAC is worth 25 marks. We will be watch another video that will require you to respond in essay format. The final SAC will use a culmination of quotes from linguists and an article (you will get before the SAC). Using your knowledge of this outcome and identity you will respond in….wait for it…an essay! We should finish this unit by the end of term and that leaves 4 weeks for exam preparation. In that time: You will complete 1 exam a week that will help you to scaffold your responses appropriately. YOU SHOULD: create an ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOLDER that recaps everything we have learnt for your study purposes.