Language in Use
141-142
THEME F: LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
F11 How writers exploit regional speech
The units in this theme consider the ways in which an individual acquires values and attitudes in the process of learning a language, because language embodies the wisdom of the community which speaks it, and transmits that wisdom to the next generation through its form and usage. The first two units explore this fundamental proposition about language and culture by showing how the formal structure of the language carries the basic values of a culture. 'Nice/nasty' looks at the way in which pairs of words like nice and nasty, short and tall, work and play, embody a whole range of feelings and attitudes, and considers how readily an individual believes that what he understands by the words has some kind of absolute validity for all times and places. 'Man's job/woman's work' takes one crucial area of our culture and looks at the attitudes towards men and women which are embedded in the language that we use to describe them.
'Tags for people' considers how the words that we use to label the people about us can radically affect our judgement of them, while 'National characteristics' looks at the way in which certain assumptions can determine an individual's response to people of other nations, because those assumptions are embedded in the derogatory labels that lie uses to describe them.
The next three units all deal with areas of common experience in which an individual is likely to be quite unaware of the values being expressed through the language he uses. 'Attitudes from fiction' looks at the way in which our unexamined assumptions about such broad topics as war, adventure or romance are expressed in the language which we use to talk about them, and the degree to which this language is derived from the fiction that we read. 'The language of religion' is concerned with the way in which a range of assumptions about a specific area of human experience comes to be attached to a comparatively small number of characteristic linguistic features. 'Weather forecasting' looks at the degree to which we derive very firm notions about climate or season from the language and then considers how the conventions for reporting the weather exploit the fact.
The last four units are all concerned with the fact that an individual's use of language is shaped by the community in which he grows up. 'How we use slang' gives the opportunity for a dispassionate examination of everyday usage. Its aim is to show that what is slang to one man is common usage to another. 'Speaking "correctly" ' considers the degree to which our judgement of the 'correctness' of a person's way of talking is determined by its closeness or otherwise to our own, while 'Regional speech' explores the basis for our response to some well known varieties of spoken English. The last unit, 'How writers exploit regional speech', considers what sort of response readers make to a writer's use of dialect, and where the assumptions come from that they read into it.