Examples Of Dialectalization

It is recently estimated that there are more than 7,000 living languages in the world and along with that number, above ten thousand of dialects are already being spoken (Simons & Fennig, 2017). Language of a community is usually united yet including in itself the diversity feature. Its diversity can be witnessed through the variation of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation from place to place within a language-area. To have those variations, a language has to go through dialectalization process. This essay will attemp to investigate how dialectalization happens.

First, what is dialect? According to the Oxford Dictionary, dialect is explained as “A particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.” (n.d).

To explain for this, let us consider the “Wave Theory” introduced by Johannes Schmidt in 1872. In his work, he used the metaphor of pebbles and water pond to represent language changes and a language community, respectively. When pebbles are tossed into a water pond, they will create waves on the surface. Waves may start at various locations (depends on where pebbles are thrown) with different strength (depends on the size of pebbles). The result is that different areas of the pond are affected by different combination of waves. One conclusion can also be drawn from his theory is that the farther the waves spread, the weaker they become, leading to the fact that there are faraway places where some waves are too weak to reach

On the one hand, parochialism, which emphasizing the communality, keeps members of a group faithful to its own tradition, narrowly restricts them in outlook. Parochialism happens the same way with language. Our speech habits are largely acquired in childhood, when our circle of acquaintance is limited; we naturally adopted language features such as vocabulary and pronunciation of the local area in which we lived. Dialect then can serve as a distinct feature, an identifying mark. It is parochialism which encourages dialectalization process. On the other hand, “pressure of communication” forces people to interact and adapt. For example, members of a community seek contacts with outsiders (and vice versa) for work, commerce, education or even relationships. In this case, a dialect with distinct features belonging to merely a locality is not effective enough to gain mutual understanding. Hence, pressure of communication reduces the impacts of parochialism, prevents original language from separating into languages with their own dialects, and enables neighbouring groups within a language-area to understand each