Following Best Practice in the High Art of - (Приволжский ...

linguistic competence. This choice will depend on the relation
between speaker and addressee, the circumstances of the
conversation as well as the intended effect, but also to a considerable
degree on the social background of each speaker. Commonly, most
of these codes will be grouped together under the heading of one
language, where words have formal or colloquial connotations, etc.
However, in some languages, the differences between the high and
low varieties are so striking (in Arabic, for example) that linguists
prefer to speak of diglossia, defined as a stable language state in
which more than one language occur side by side, each prevailing in
its domain of usage. As most speakers are competent in using and
understanding both language varieties, the diglossic situation
highlights another weakness of the definition of language as a set of
mutually intelligible codes. A further problem with this definition is
the inherent dependency on a listener's willingness to understand
another speaker, which will be influenced by different perceived
social backgrounds associated with each variety of a language. These
circumstances, again, blur the sociolinguistic validity of the
definition of language as a set of mutually intelligible varieties.
The study of bilingual individuals takes the complications involved
in defining 'language' one step further by insisting that languages that
had previously been treated as distinct now be seen as one code for
purposes of communication among a set of speakers (immigrants,
say, or a family headed by bilingual parents). If immigrants to one
country develop a variety of their mother tongue which differs
widely in word borrowing and accent, say, at which point should it
be given language status, rather than being somewhere in-between
the two original languages? And, in bilingual education, speakers
may develop different patterns of using each language, resembling a
diglossic situation insofar as each language is associated with
particular domains of usage. But should this state of diglossia be
treated as a language itself, when the criteria that different speakers
apply in selecting the appropriate code are shared by several
speakers, especially in contrast to other groups of speakers who, in
comparable circumstances, may have developed a different usage? A
similar issue is exhibited by the creation of Pidgins and Creoles:
what exactly constitutes the difference between the case of two
speakers of different languages who barely manage to communicate
by using a limited set of words from either language, and that of a
final emergence of a common code, different from either of the
original languages, and shared by a sizeable group of speakers?
These questions highlight the awkwardness of any of the definitions
that have so far been given for 'language'.
I would like to illustrate my opinion on the apparent schism between
the core-linguistic notion of 'homogeneous' language systems and the
continuum of variations posited by sociolinguistics. It may sound
quite outlandish to compare languages to vegetables, but many of the
difficulties encountered in defining 'language' are paralleled in the
realm of vegetables. To define 'vegetable', is it essential to know how
to tell apart a turnip from a swede? These two beets are closely
related, and in the same way as a speaker of one language might
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(4)разговорные
коннотации (побочные
оттенки значения);
(5)владение двумя
подъязыками одного
языка;
(6)вескость/надежность;
(7) владеющий двумя
языками;
(8)гибриды/гибридные
языки;
(9)креольцы;
(10)раскол/секта;
(11)иностранный/
необычный;