Preface: About the Book

Chapter outline

1. The scope of the book
2. Intro classes
3. This book's structure
4. Exercises
5. Englishes and other languages
6. The limits of this book
   1. Analogies for language
7. A prescriptive guide for social trends
8. A path to education: confusion
9. For instructors
10. Note

The Scope of the Book

This book explores the nature of language primarily through an explanation of English, drawing on examples from other languages to illustrate similarity and diversity in human language.

As a result of the expansion of the British Empire, English is now a global language. With all the people who have learned English over the last 200 years, the language is in a different state than it used to be. We might be able to imagine a possible universe where language does not change, but as we will explore in this book, humans have a natural instinct to understand and produce language variation. A product of that daily variation is language change. Over time, our natural ability for variation has created many varieties of English.

At times, I refer to these different varieties as Englishes. It is more concise than dialects of English. Plus, the term dialect carries with it a great deal of social baggage, which will be explained throughout the book. Although speakers of many different Englishes can understand each other, the social differences and language characteristics of these varieties of English are widely recognized. As we talk about the qualities of language throughout this book, the examples will come from Englishes around the world.

Intro Classes

A note is needed on the general approach to teaching about language in this textbook.

The world would be a better place if everyone were required to take (and pass) two linguistics courses. People would be more likely to demand rational arguments and empirical evidence, and we would be better able to provide those things. The field of linguistics, important to both academia and industry, would also benefit from the increased interest. The reality is that a graduate degree in linguistics is not an easy task, and few people become professional linguists. Yet everyone should know about language. It is one of our most important human qualities, and something all of us talk about. If people learned about the basic qualities of human language, we would better understand ourselves.

The training to become a linguist is specialized in the same way that the training to become an ornithologist (bird scientist) is specialized: A lot has to be learned about the material, and the methods for analysis are particular to the kinds of data under study. Yet, for nonspecialists to learn about birds, they do not have to learn genetics. For nonspecialists to learn about how wonderful language is, they do not have to train to be linguists and learn about acoustic phonetics. Most other introduction-to-language books adopt the same model, the same chapter set-up, as do books for linguistic majors. This book does not. With this difference between linguists and normal people in mind, the traditional book divisions, which mirror the traditional subfields in linguistics, were modified in this book. Instead, we move from small parts to larger parts.

In writing this book, I have attempted to maintain the distinction between a textbook working as an introduction to linguistics and this textbook, which is an introduction to language. Although this book will not teach you how to do the science of language, known as linguistics, it will use knowledge from linguistics to explain language. For a comparison, biology is the study of life, and an introduction to life would use knowledge from biology. An introduction to biology itself, as a field of academic study, would be a different book than an introduction-to-life textbook. In many ways, an introduction-to-life textbook would work in a biology class for nonbiology majors. This textbook is an introduction to language for nonlinguistic majors.

Just like human biology or human society, language is more complex than most people realize and more complex than any one book can explain. This particular book introduces modern ideas about language. I sincerely hope you continue to study language after reading this book, but certainly not all readers will analyze language in scientific ways. With those expectations in mind, this book maintains different goals than books which introduce the academic field of linguistics. It relies on your knowledge as language users to help you discover the wondrous skills you already have. The book does not, however, train you to be a linguist, and it keeps at reasonable levels the linguistic jargon borrowed from that professional training.1

Throughout your life as language users, you will have debates about the meaning of words, the history of phrases, and how appropriate certain bits of language might be for certain situations. Eventually, some readers become parents, and they will want to know how their children develop language as babies and why they sound so different as teenagers. Debates about language are regular events in religion, government, and legal systems all over the world. When all these people talk about language, it is extremely helpful for them to understand how language actually works (in contrast to the many myths about language that float through the world). In this book, I attempt to lead you to an understanding of what language is and why it is both beautiful and essential to who we are.

This Book's Structure

This book has numerous, digestible subdivisions for every chapter. Understanding language is not a simple task, and a subdivided structure allows students to focus on the important information bit by bit. All chapters have the following sections plus chapter specific topics:

1. Chapter overview:  This section provides a clear and concise description of each topic in the chapter. It is intended to orient the student to the area of language study.
2. Textboxes with Words to the Wise and Word Play: These sidebars provide interesting topics related to the main focus of the chapter. These side topics can provide ideas for undergraduate research studies.
3. Chapter summary:  This section reiterates the main topics to offer the student another opportunity to step back and consider the entire area of study.
4. Key concepts:  These keywords and concepts, which serve as the foundational vocabulary for each chapter, should be the primary focus for the students.
5. Further reading:  Featuring both popular and academic titles, the further reading sections provide suggestions for the most accessible language research. These suggestions are accompanied by summaries of each work.
6. Exercises:  These questions, instructions, and sample data will help the student actively engage and work with the concepts in the chapters.
7. Study questions:  Although not exhaustive, these questions provide the basics for the concepts in the chapters. If the students can answer these questions fully and provide detailed examples with each one, they should be on their way to performing well in the class.

Most chapters will also address the following themes:

1. Meaning
2. Structure
3. English and other languages
4. Variation through time
5. Variation today

These topics bring together many different areas of research and translate them into larger pools of interest. Throughout the chapters, certain themes are more prominent than others. In some chapters, meaning will be a larger theme of focus; in other chapters, structure will require more explanation. For example, Chapter 3, on the patterns of sounds, contains more stories about variation today than does Chapter 8, which is about building sentences. Since the nature of human language restricts variation for building sentences but allows abundant variation with sounds, there are simply fewer examples of variation for building sentences within English at the present time.

The discussions of language variation bring a grand opportunity to this book. Language is an important part of our personal and social identity, and the construction of these identities is carried out by our innate ability to play with and produce language variation. Since language variation is a natural vehicle for expressing social qualities, discussion of sociolinguistic topics will not be segregated from linguistic topics. Instead, social qualities of language variation are integrated with linguistic qualities. In many books of this type, one chapter would talk about how suffixes are added to words, such as -ing added to the verb in I am walking, and a different chapter would talk about how people use variation in language to mark social differences: To use -in' rather than -ing is more informal. This book discusses the social and linguistic qualities of variation together to illustrate the rich texture of language for students.

Exercises

The exercises in this book are designed to help students engage the concepts presented in each chapter. Some of the main points in this book are abstracted away from many observations of language, and to make those points real, students must play with language to observe its patterns. The exercises help students discover their own language, its basic qualities, its social nuances, and its inherent variation. The exercises are divided into two...