Reddit reviews Linguistics: An Introduction

What do you think interests you most about language? Someone might be able to recommend something more specific then. Anyway, I'd recommend familiarising yourself with the IPA system first. It's a fun way to start just by transcribing your own speech and becoming aware of the huge number of sounds we're able to produce.

If you'd like a book recommendation, I used this one in a foundations course at Uni. I found it really useful and the concepts were easy to grasp. It'll also give you a good, general idea of the areas within linguistics.

There are plenty of good introductory books around. From the top of my head:

• William B. McGregor - Linguistics: An Introduction
  
• Grover Hudson - Introductory Linguistics
  
  I would probably go with the McGregor book. It's newer, better (IMO) and is largely theory neutral.

Linguistics Intro by Akmajian et al.

another Linguistics intro that you can apparently rent (?) McGregor

a really in depth and expensive one but new, by Lobeck and Denham

Janet Holmes very good intro to sociolinguistics

Also, for regional/class dialect variation including lexicon, William Labov is brilliant and this book about American diversity is quite good. He has very well known and respected for a colossal body of work.

For a linguist or a sociolinguist, the word 'determine' means something like 'create', except it's more than that. It's creation and definition, it's putting it in its contextual paradigm. People who use the word first determine the very beginning of its evolution. I don't know if anyone's done a case study on twerking's origins, but what often happens is that it changes a bit on its way to common usage, and then it changes some more. The word 'villain', for example, originally meant something like a feudal/indentured person (usually male), who lived on someone's land and helped farm it in return for a small farm of his own. But then it evolves. Class distinctions become more and more important as a middle class struggles to differentiate itself from the working classes. (I'm being general here, and this covers many years.) Soon, the people who use the word villain start to sling it as an insult - they determine that it no longer means 'honourable but poor dude', its contextual paradigm now includes 'you disgusting peasant who is very obviously below me on the social ladder.'

A dictionary written at this time might include both definitions. But the dictionary itself HAS NOT DETERMINED meaning or context. The people who use the word in general usage have determined it. Now, if you are called a villain on the street, can read, and are confused, you could look it up. The dictionary isn't determining usage/definition, because that's not the job it does. It describes. What if, now, you see someone calling a hanged murderer a villain 100 years later? You think, WTF? That guy owned his own shop! He may have schemed to murder his wife, but he clearly wasn't poor!

So now you go to the updated dictionary. Voila! Now it has evolved into something like modern usage - a really bad guy who does really diabolical shit. The speakers of the language have, through time and changing circumstances, re-determined what 'villain' means in context. Now, if you have NO idea what that word means and you look it up, the dictionary tells you - noun, bad guy. Now you have added a word to your lexicon, and when you try it out you find out if the dictionary was correct. It's still possible, though, that it's not correct. That's because the dictionary doesn't 'determine' meaning and usage. Speakers do. So let's say you move to, idk, Boston. You notice that really scraggly looking hookers are often referred to as 'villains' by native Bostonians. WTF is going on here?! They've 'determined' what villain means to them. The usage and context (icky hooker) may spread, and then the dictionary gets updated again. Or perhaps not, because it stays regional. Either way, language users determine its meaning. If you were in this fictional Boston and you called a short-shifting bartender a 'villain', they might get a lot more pissed off at you than, say, a New Yorker who doesn't use that specific meaning. Either way, the dictionary was only partial helpful and didn't determine much of anything. Bostonians did.

So, you see, dictionaries aren't the end all and be all of a language. They're one tool. They're useful, but as anyone who's learned to speak another language can tell you, the dictionary definition doesn't determine meaning. It can only describe what the dictionary writers find as common at any given moment.

Another short example would be the Spanish word 'puta', which to many Spanish speakers means 'bitch' and isn't a nice word. However, there is a region in Spain where it's considered quite normal for older ladies to refer to younger ones as 'puta', as in 'Come on in, I'm so happy to see you, my little puta!' Now, the dictionary didn't determine that. The speakers did. You might get really offended because the dictionary says puta means bitch and it's a curse word and curse words are 'bad'. But those regional speakers have determined another meaning. Not the dictionary. And it's a term of affection, not an insult, and they'd be hurt if you got all huffy and angry. So the regional variations or meaning are determined by the speakers in the region. Not the dictionary.

Shit, I'm sorry this is so long. And my Outlaws are here for the weekend (yay) so I won't have any computer time for a while. Please do look at some of the books and if you have university access, borrow them! And I don't have anything against hookers, regardless of origin.