that munanga linguist

If a government body wants to tell a community of 1000 people to boil water before drinking it because of health concerns, and pretty much everyone in the community speaks the same Language Other Than English (LOTE), why would you issue the alert only in bureaucratic/dense/formal English? The community being alerted here is chock full of Kriol speakers. If you want to communicate with them, doing it only in formal English is only going to get you so far. While NT Health and Power and Water are serving the community well in terms of their warning, the language it is communicated in is lacking. It's kinda like a cinema screening a movie onto the curtains, instead of projecting it onto a flat screen. To be fair, translation services for Indigenous languages are really lacking in the NT. There is no government agency to go to. Getting a quick turn around on translations is probably near-impossible. (See also last year's Kriol signage debacle I discussed here ). But governmen

Part three of my examples linking sociolinguistics to popular culture kinda follows up on Part 1 which showed (via drag queens) how no two speakers are identical . (Part 2 skipped over to communities of practice in Mean Girls ). I have to confess, this episode is less about my own creativity and more about finding a pretty perfect video on YouTube that did the job of linking sociolinguistics to the real world for me. Worth sharing all the same... Key concept : Variability in language (which exists everywhere) is caused by geographic and social factors. Concept in more detail: The subfield of sociolinguistics makes no bones about the fact that language varies everywhere, all the time. No two individuals speak exactly the same way and no individual speaks the same way all the time either. Many sociolinguists are concerned with not just describing this ubiquitous variability but figuring out the causes of variation. For a long time, where someone is from (i.e. geography) was in