Vivek Moorjani

The Language and Linguistics Club meet in upper school French teacher Galina Tchourilova’s room on Feb. 27. The presentation focused on sociolinguistics and the diversity of dialects.

Language and Linguistics Club held a meeting on Feb. 27 discussing sociolinguistics and how it connects to modern day life after school from 3:15 to 3:45 p.m. in upper school French teacher Galina Tchourilova’s room. 

Co-president Ritu Belani (12) led the presentation and opened with a warm-up in which the audience considered the prompt,“How many dialects of English can you name?” The audience responded with examples of English vernaculars, which highlighted one of the goals of the presentation to help students recognize that many forms of a language exist. 

Ritu then transitioned into the concept of prescriptivism, which focuses on what people think is the right way to speak. On the other hand, descriptivism explores how people speak a language. Ritu started to focus on language ideologies and brought up research from sources such as the Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Ritu covered topics such as dialects and how languages have different ways of communicating the same message with different grammatical structures, such as African American Vernacular English as well as Chicano English.  

“African American Vernacular English is known for its construction of verb tenses,” Ritu said during the presentation. “In an English class, if someone wrote their paper like this, it doesn’t sound like standard English, right? But there are very specific things that they’re communicating, and it’s very systematic. It has rules that work just like Standard American English.”

Timothy Deng (10), who attended the meeting, reflected on his takeaways from the presentation. He also feels as though he had some instinctive knowledge of these topics prior to the meeting.

“The technical stuff about language and ideology is interesting,” Timothy said. “I had thought of it along similar terms except not with the exact words. The thought in terms of language in its place in society is interesting.” 

Timothy also discussed how he feels that sociolinguistics can impact communication, ranging from conversations he has with family members to those within the larger community.

“I’m bilingual in Mandarin and English, and at home, we often could switch between those two,” Timothy said. “But I think I’m fluent in this standard English. As someone who is interested in politics, I’ve thought about the sort of language among different communities, especially minorities, a lot.”

Juliana Li (11), who also attended the meeting, felt the presentation added to her knowledge about sociolinguistics. She thought that the Ritu talked objectively and avoided anything that could be taken as offensive when talking about the various dialects. 

“I thought the two sides of descriptive and prescriptive were interesting,” Juliana said. “It was really interesting how prescriptive was about people talking about what language should be and how descriptive was describing the different ways that people speak language.”