CHAPTER 5 REGIONAL VARIATION, THE LINGUSITIC
F. The Process of Language Change
2. Structural linguistic
Structuralism is a critical theory theoretical paradigm that holds that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. It works by revealing the structures that underpin everything humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Structuralism, as defined by philosopher Simon Blackburn, is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelationships." These relationships form a structure, and the laws of abstract culture are constant behind local variations in surface phenomena.
Master of structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). He wrote the book Course de Linguistique Genérale. The following is the book's concept:
137 a. Diachronic language
Diachronic literally translates to "History calling." It is concerned with five major issues: to describe and account for observed changes in specific languages; -to reconstruct the prehistory of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families; -to develop general theories about how and why language changes; -to describe the history of speech communities;
-to study the history of words b. Synchronous
Synchronic language study is the study of a language during a specific time period. While the diachronic study of language is the study of the language that has been used by speakers for a long time.
c. La Langue and La Parole
The distinction between parole or speech and langue or language is the final Saussurean concept to be considered. Speech is how people communicate in the interaction order. Langue is a formalized or idealized version of how people speak, with standardized semantics, idealized syntax, and a purified set of linguistic rules. Language is a simplified and more approachable version of speech from an academic standpoint. In this regard, it resembles Weber's ideal types, which attempted to elucidate the underlying meaning and tendencies of historical realities. On the surface, inner speech appears to exist only in the form of speech and cannot be rendered into the form of language. Everyone speaks in a smoothed-over and idealized manner. And inner speech is too wispy and hazy to be identified as a parole, let alone a langue (Wiley, 2006, p.13).
Historical linguistics is the study of how languages change or maintain their structure over time. While descriptive linguistics investigates and assigns a uniform status of linguistic simultaneity to linguistic data without regard for time factor.
Language change begins with the birth of a new generation. As the younger generation interacts and discovers their identity, their language evolves to include constructions, phrases, and words that are distinct from those of the older generation. Sapir noted the problems of language change and its impact on cooperation between the older and younger generations in his work "Language," published in 1921. The study emphasized the concept
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of drift, in which language and its content slowly shift over centuries, changing its typology. The change results in variants between today's language and a decade ago. It is unclear, however, how the drift occurs and how language users eventually notice it (Sapir, 1921).
Humans have transformative needs and desires as social beings; as their user needs change, their language changes to meet the demands. The literature review approach has provided a diverse range of historical linguistic materials demonstrating how language as a social identifier change as a result of social differentiation. Variations between generations are created as society differentiates. New words emerge to help describe the objects, actions, needs, and things in their immediate environment in order to sustain its demands, way of life, communication, and interaction. A new language emerges as a result of the process. Social groups evolve and adopt unique practices, norms, and lifestyles. During the revolution, their syntactic constructions, morphological processes, word choice, vocabulary, and pronunciation change.
CONCLUSION
Sociolinguistic studies have demonstrated that linguistic variation is structured rather than random, and that such research provides a methodology for the systematic study of individuals' linguistic behavior in various networks and communities. In other words, sociolinguistics can assist people in comprehending why certain varieties of English (whether associated with individuals or groups of individuals) exhibit the patterns that they do.
Regional variation is the aspect of variation in a language due to geographical divisions. Virtually all languages have regional variation and regional dialects, which is manifested in all subsystems of language: the pronunciation and sound system (phonetics and phonology), the grammar (morphology and syntax), and the vocabulary (lexicon and semantics).
Regional variation has traditionally been studied by dialectologists, who record their findings in dialect atlases. Social variation in language is the aspect of variation in a language due to social characteristics (called social variables) such as age, gender, education, and/or social class (and in some cases others, such as race, religion, etc.), whereas stylistic variation is the aspect of variation along the formal vs. informal continuum. Research into both of these aspects has to follow fairly strict methodology regarding the selection of subjects (sampling) as well as the elicitation of data.
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When we studied language and regional variation, we focused on variation in language use found in different geographical areas. However, not everyone in a single geographical area speaks in the same way in every situation. We recognize that certain uses of language are more likely to be used by some people in society and not by others. We are also aware that people who live in the same region but differ in terms of education and economic status frequently speak in very different ways. Indeed, these distinctions may be used as indicators of membership in various social groups or speech communities, either implicitly or explicitly.
Language is always changing and evolving, whether internally or externally. They can investigate both historically and sociolinguistically.
Contact between speakers of different languages or dialects, rather than variation within a single speech community, is frequently responsible for language change. External causes are attributed to such changes. Internal language change occurs when speakers adjust to each other in their daily lives, and is followed by a tendency to innovate in groups of people who are already familiar, and is then followed by other changes in sequence, which ultimately makes a language different from each other, despite being derived from a single language family. Grammar, phonology, phrase sequences, and sentences with a gender function are all included. The language change is from speaker in their life every day.
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