Individual differences: Deviance

My today’s post is based on  David Crystal "Encyclopedia of the English Language". I am going to talk about individual differences and deviances.

Individuality in language is a complex matter as each person has his own way of speaking. These differences arise depending on the variations in sex, physique, personality, background interest, and experience. Physical condition is important particularly in the terms of voice quality, as it is connected with the structure of our body and physique.

Another factors that influence our speech are educational history, occupational experience, and personal skills or tastes. They have impact on the use of habitual words and turn of phrases or certain kind of grammatical constructions. In my previous post I was talking about occupational varieties, where I mentioned that one’s occupation or profession has a great role on the way one speaks. Meaning that during your work, you involve some professional words into your lexicon, which, subsequently, become the part of the word stock you use while talking.

Personality also is observed in conversation, as some people are considered as very good conversationalists, while others are not very good at conversations. Some people are good at storytelling, letter writing, good speech making. While there are people who lack of these abilities. But in my opinion, not all of these factors are important in our everyday conversations, for example it is not important to be a good orator in order to interact with people, as the aim of our everyday speech is to share meanings and ideas.

Talking about individual differences in conversation, I would like to mention gender differences in conversation. I have written a literature review on this topic, so I can say that one’s gender also has a great role on the way one speaks, as men and women interpret the same thing differently (Tannen,1990).

i would like to share a short video, in order to make my post more interesting. This is a one minute video about individual differences in language learning.

Now I would like to talk about deviance. The notion of individual difference, which doesn’t conform to a rule or norm, is an aspect of what is commonly referred to as deviance.

Deviance produces instances which are totally unacceptable. For example please thanks, cat the etc.

There are different levels of deviance - degrees of departure from the norms which identify the various varieties of English, and from the structures they have in common. Slight degrees of deviance will be hard to identify.

In my opinion deviancy is hard to identify in our oral speech, as some people talk very fast and you should be very attentive in order to notice them, but in written language, they are noticed easier.