Place and language: Links between speech, region, and connection to place

The relationship to place and language has been central to linguistic research since the beginning. Several distinctive eras of investigation into place and language have taken place, from focusing on relatively nonmobile elderly speakers to deep investigations of how different speakers relate to a particular place. Place impacts language in a variety of ways, from large differences between national varieties to ecological and social distinctions in varieties associated with a small local area or neighborhood. Further, place interacts with other social factors and contributes to linguistic variation in an additive (or perhaps even multiplicative) fashion. As the investigation into the impact of place has developed and evolved, researchers have noted that it is not merely place itself that is the most important, rather the speaker's relationship to place that is perhaps the most crucial aspect. In fact, a speaker with a close connection to place might use features that are associated with a particular place even if those features are stigmatized, because those features represent the speaker's connection to place. Without consideration of how a speaker orients-whether toward or away-any investigation into place or regionality and language will be incomplete. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Psychology > Language.