Talk:Variety (linguistics)

Lect

I merged "Lect" here. It was a stub about an apparent synonym for "language variety".

"Lect" is also a neologism.

• It is not used in the recent introductory textbook on linguistics that I read (Edward Finegan, Language: Its Structure and Use third edition, 1999).
• It is not in the reasonably good English dictionary that I have at hand (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 9th edition).
• There are no independent results for Google search "define:lect".

However, I don't have any sources in sociolinguistics. If anyone finds out that in fact a "lect" is not the same as a "language variety", please revert this merge. In that case, please add information to differentiate the terms from each other. --Hoziron 09:08, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Use of Conditional Mood

"For instance English journalists or lawyers often use grammatical moods such as subjunctive mood or conditional mood, which are no longer used frequently by other speakers." Subjunctive is fairly rare, but is that really true for conditional? Ardric47 04:34, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Were you to ask, I'm not sure most English speakers could identify the conditional mood. Cnilep (talk) 15:29, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Name change

Variety (linguistics) → Lect

The word "Variety" is very ambiguous, and is often used interchangeably in linguistic circles for a dialect. While it would still be benefitial to mention that a lect may also be termed as a "variety", it is best to clarify, and use the most accurate description. Mingeyqla (talk) 13:45, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

External link

There is currently an external link to http://www.pojkfilmsklubben.org/cgi-bin/langtools/whichVariety.cgi which is a web widget that attempts to estimate whether a text is written in British or American English. I removed this link on 23 June, since it doesn't contain any discussion of language varieties or other information relevant to this page. It was restored by IP User:83.42.6.168 on 16 July using WP:Undo, but the user offered no explanation as to why. Can we reach consensus as to whether or not the external link belongs here? Thanks, Cnilep (talk) 22:23, 16 July 2009 (UTC)