article about Linguistic 10

Linguistic diversity Linguists have always been concerned with linguistic diversity. But, depending
on the theoretical approach and research interest of the scholars involved, the
goals and methods for looking at differences across languages have varied considerably.
Generative grammarians like Noam Chomsky and his students have
devoted their professional lives to explaining phonological, morphological, and
syntactic differences across languages by means of a few general principles. They
developed a theory of Universal Grammar, a set of rules and conditions on rules
that should allow us to describe the grammar of any language and could hence be
used to hypothesize the innate interpretive strategies that allow children to
acquire any human language. In their endeavor to describe and account for differences
between languages, formal grammarians have tended to ignore differences
within the same language. Their research strategy has been to assume
homogeneity rather than diversity within the same speech community. Sociolinguists
have criticized this strategy and chosen the opposite route. They have
started from the empirical observation that there is a considerable amount of
differentiation within any given speech community in terms of how people pronounce
words, construct and interpret utterances, and produce more complex
discourse units across social contexts. On the basis of this observation, sociolinguists
have devised methodologies for the systematic study of linguistic variation
and its relation to contextual factors (including social class, gender, age, setting,
style). This research dealt with a number of issues usually ignored by formal
grammarians, like, for instance, the challenging goal of defining the boundaries
of speech communities and the type of knowledge that is necessary for being
a competent member of any such community. Linguistic anthropologists have
been concerned with similar issues, but they have also faced the complex question
of the relation between language and thought or what has been known as
the “linguistic relativity hypothesis.” More recently, language diversity has been
recast as one of the dimensions of what has been called “language ideology.”
This chapter will introduce linguistic diversity by drawing from these various