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Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...
This is a list of British English words that have different American English spellings, for example, colour (British English) and color (American English). Word pairs are listed with the British English version first, in italics, followed by the American English version: spelt, spelled; Derived words often, but not always, follow their root.
We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom. Teachers College Press Multicultural Education Series. [27] Charity Hudley, Anne H. and Christine Mallinson. (2010.) Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools. Teachers College Press Multicultural Education Series. [28]
The way words are often used together. For example, “do the dishes” and “do homework”, but “make the bed” and “make noise”. Colloquialism A word or phrase used in conversation – usually in small regions of the English-speaking world – but not in formal speech or writing: “Like, this dude came onto her real bad.”
In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal ...
Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For example, "hound" (Old English hund) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only a particular type of dog. On the other hand, the word ...
Dialects can be defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible." [1] English speakers from different countries and regions use a variety of different accents (systems of pronunciation) as well as various localized words and grammatical constructions.
This "basic" style has the least variation, and provides the most general account of the style of a given group. "Any systematic observation of a speaker defines a formal context where more than the minimum attention is paid to speech." In other words, even formal face-to-face interviews severely limit a speaker's use of their vernacular style.