3 - Linguistic diversity

Summary

Linguists have always been concerned with linguistic diversity. But, depending on the theoretical approach and research interest of the scholars involved, the goals and methods for looking at differences across languages have varied considerably. Generative grammarians like Noam Chomsky and his students have devoted their professional lives to explaining phonological, morphological, and syntactic differences across languages by means of a few general principles. They developed a theory of Universal Grammar, a set of rules and conditions on rules that should allow us to describe the grammar of any language and could hence be used to hypothesize the innate interpretive strategies that allow children to acquire any human language. In their endeavor to describe and account for differences between languages, formal grammarians have tended to ignore differences within the same language. Their research strategy has been to assume homogeneity rather than diversity within the same speech community. Sociolinguists have criticized this strategy and chosen the opposite route. They have started from the empirical observation that there is a considerable amount of differentiation within any given speech community in terms of how people pronounce words, construct and interpret utterances, and produce more complex discourse units across social contexts. On the basis of this observation, sociolinguists have devised methodologies for the systematic study of linguistic variation and its relation to contextual factors (including social class, gender, age, setting, style).