Interspeaker variation and intraspeaker variation
Dialect variation, because it is semi-permanent, is language variation which helps to distinguish one person, or group of people from others. But all of us are also involved in another kind of language variation, which is much more rapid. We vary our language from one situation to another many times in the same day. Typically, the English we use when we write is different from the English we use when we speak, the language students use to write literature essays is different from the language used to write linguistics or biology essays, and the English we use in formal situations like lectures and seminars is different from the English we use when chatting to friends in the coffee bar. Therefore one should be aware of the difference between interspeaker variation,i.e. that is variation between individual speakers, and of the intraspeaker variation, i.e. variation within individual speakers. The example of the former can be the difference between the way some words are pronounced in London (UK) and in the Fens (a naturally marshy region in eastern England). The same words strut, price, night, tide will be realized in two phonetic variants: as [strΛt] [prais] [nait] [taid] in London and as [strut] [preis] [neit] [teid] in the Fens. The following situation can be an example of intraspeaker variation when the same person will sometimes use one variant and sometimes the other variant or even alternate in different sentences. A woman on Bequia (the largest island in the Grenadines the native population being primarily a mixture of people of African, Scottish and Carib Indian descent) was heard calling to her grandson at dusk one evening. The exchange went like this: Jed! Come here! [heə] (silence from Jed) Jed!! Come here!! [hiər] The first time she said here she pronounced it with the open variant, and the second time she pronounced it with the more close variant (the appearance of the ‘r’ sound at the end is a separate phenomenon in Bequian; what is of interest is the realisation of the vowel). Another way of referring to intra- and interspeaker variation is variation according to use and variation according to user.
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