About this deck
The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich's quip — recorded by him in 1945 from an audience member at a YIVO lecture — is the field's epigram. There is no purely linguistic distinction between a language and a dialect. The distinction is political. Key sections include: Dia · lects.; Opening A language is a dialect with an army.; Chapter I Before sociolinguistics.; Chapter II William Labov.; Chapter III The linguistic variable.; Chapter IV The class stratification of speech.; Chapter V The Northern Cities Shift.; Chapter VI Peter Trudgill and the Norwich study.; Chapter VII African American Vernacular English.; Chapter VIII The history and politics of AAVE..