How idiolect changes through an individual's life

Introduction

Since many years, there have been too many researches about language in a lot of different ways and categories as its acquisition, function, differences, etc.  But just few linguists have studied language in its very simple way: the language of an individual. All of us have our own way to communicate with others; it means that each individual has a different style than the others at the moment to express their ideas or feelings. This individual pattern of language is called idiolect.

Phenomena

We are going to see how the pattern of language of a simple individual starts to change through his age and the main factors that produce these changes (social class, community, socio-economic level, etc.) and why.

Hypothesis

Social class can be an important factor that we can use to determine how a person is going to use the language.  But we can’t forget that most of the people in all social contexts have the capacity to talk in a formal way when it is needed, so the more it is needed the more is going to be talked.

            According to that information it can be supposed that people who live, develop and interact in an environment who requires a formal way to speak are going to speak in that way most of time and some of the expressions or words are going to be part of their idiolect.  And the people who don’t need to use a formal language; because of their job, level of education, or simply because it is not needed in their everyday lives, have a language more informal that the other people.  So, if we supposed that middle and high class people have jobs in which is needed to talk in a formal way or that they receive an education where they had to learn it and use it, we can say that middle class people has a formal way to speak that people of a low socio-economic level that used the formal language very few because they don’t need it and because they hardly listen it.

Objectives

We are going to see this part of language that we listen and produce everyday in all our life and that we almost never pay it attention.

This work is going to explain, first at all, what is this thing called idiolect and how the society with all its elements, the social class and we as members of a community affect it and see if it is the age or the social class what determines the idiolect.

Contextual Framework

Different social groups use different linguistic varieties, and as experienced members of a speech community we have learnt to classify speakers accordingly” (Trudgill, 21).

So, we can distinguish some “barriers” that can help us to know the background of the person who is talking to us (Trudgill, 23-24).

These barriers can be sex, age, social class, ethnicity, style, etc. 

This informality is used in different level depending on the circumstances in which the participants are, like their social class; sex; age; if they are in the school, at home, with friends in a party; etc.  It means that when the formal or the informal use of language changes in a certain social context it changes also in all the others (Romaine, 96-97).

We can add other factor that is known as the social continuum intersection.  It means that when a pattern of speak is adopted by the lower class, it is, at the same time, adopted by all the population in general but only in their informal speech (Romaine, 96).

Theoretical Framework

Idiolect, according to the Merriam’s Webster dictionary, is the language or speech pattern of one individual at a particular period of life (616).

It could be in a very summarized way because there are more factors that can modify this “pattern” of language.  One of them can be the social environment in which the individual lives or in which the individual is in a specific moment.  For example, we do not talk as the same way when we talk with our friends as when we talk in a job’s interview.  Another is the social class, because is the way in which people speak what defines the social role and also, in many cases, the economic situation of the person who is speaking (Stubbs, 23).

So, we can say that an idiolect is the way in which one person speak by himself and that shows his or her own capabilities of language.  The ways of speech or the idiolect of a group of persons that live in the same community is called common languages.  These common languages are not made of a single idiolect, but at the relation and fusion of the idiolects of all the people of the community.  This is more explained by Noam Chomsky, who distinguishes two kinds of language: the E-language and the I-language.  The E-language was about the grammatical rules, sounds and the structure of the language in a functional way; and the I-language was a group of symbols and rules that generate an E-language (http://frege.brown.edu/heck/pdf/published/Idiolects.pdf). 

We can suppose from here that an idiolect is the simplest form of the language that at the same time helps to generate it.  In this chapter we are going to see deepest the factors that affect the idiolect of a person.

Conclusions

We can conclude that idiolect is the individual way in which a person speaks.  It is influenced by the environment in which the person is developing and it fits to the situation that the person is living at the moment.

Both, age and social environment are the two main factors that build the idiolect of each one of use, but is the last one what has the main role.  In spite of this, idiolect is more than a way of speaking, is the personal way that a person uses to communicate with all the people and it shows the personal style which that individual has and forms part of his or her personality, something that can tell us a little bit more about someone and that can help us to tell to the others who we are.