English Linguistics — LET Practice Questions

A dialect is a variety of a language linked to a specific *region* or *social group*. Cebuano, Tagalog, Bicolano, Ilocano—these are regional dialects of Filipino. Londoners and Yorkshiremen speak English dialects. A dialect includes differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Register, by contrast, refers to formality level (formal/informal/slang) used in different situations, not tied to where you're from. Idiolect is one person's unique speech patterns. Jargon is specialized vocabulary of a profession. For ESL teachers, understanding dialects matters because students bring their regional L1 features into English.

Pragmatics analyzes how context shapes what an utterance means. The sentence 'Can you pass the salt?' is literally a yes-or-no question about ability, but in a dinner context, everyone understands it as a polite request for the salt to be passed. 'It's cold in here' said by a guest might pragmatically mean 'Close the window' or 'Turn up the heat.' Pragmatics studies speech acts, implicature, and how listeners infer the speaker's intended meaning beyond literal word meanings. It is crucial for understanding irony, sarcasm, indirect requests, and cultural politeness conventions—all of which require reading the context, not just the words.

Diglossia (Greek for 'two tongues') is a sociolinguistic situation where a community uses two distinct languages or varieties for clearly different functions. One variety is called the high (H) form — used in formal domains like school, government, and religious settings — and the other is called the low (L) form — used at home and in casual conversation. The labels 'high' and 'low' describe the SOCIAL STATUS each variety carries, not the quality of the language itself. In the Philippines, English is often the H variety in formal settings and Tagalog or another local language is the L variety at home, even though both are equally rich linguistically. This is different from bilingualism, where a speaker uses both languages freely across all contexts.